Housewife frustrations
from 
JoeUser Forums
JoeUser Forums
I'm cleaning the house. I just swept up Cheez-It & Goldfish cracker crumbs that were scattered all over the hardwood floor. While I was cleaning, I looked up to find my son jamming yet more Cheez-Its into the file cabinet. It takes me up to an hour to clean messes that take him 5 seconds to create. Scenes like this are pretty typical around here. How can I get any quality mothering done when I'm constantly cleaning, or else wallowing in filth, too miserable about it to do anything at all? Poor Michael eats food off the floor that I should have cleaned, while I'm trying to plan a decent meal for him to eat. A healthy meal. So I whip up something healthy and attractive to a 1-year old, and he watches me with delight. I go to the refrigerator to get an ingredient, and he reaches in there and grabs a Lunchable. It made me mad, because I'm trying so hard to feed him right, and he goes for the one thing I'm trying not to give him. Something easy that requires no effort from me, that he'll enjoy. Problem is, Lunchables are packed with sodium, and they cost a lot, and he never eats anything but the crackers anyway. Sigh. So I try hard to ignore the fact that he'd rather have that fast food than what I'm working so hard to prepare for him. And I set him down to eat a simple concoction of peas, carrots, and mashed potatoes (that's as gourmet as I'm willing to get for Michael because my efforts are not usually appreciated, and I hate cooking anyway). He plays with it, eats some of it, and I throw the rest away, because I know if I keep it ("It's still good! He hardly touched it!") then it will just rot along with all the other leftovers we weed out of the refrigerator on a monthly basis....
The house is a disaster. I'll clean it today and it will be sparkling clean, like a museum. Just like I clean it frequently. But all three of us inhabitants are slobs, and it will be back to ground zero within a day and a half or so. We don't even notice when we undress and throw our clothes on the floor. We don't even think about how messy that is. And then I've noticed a weird thing I do when there's food stuck to Michael, or I'm losing hair, or I've got trash in my hand, but I'm multi-tasking and my hands are too full to make a trip to the garbage, I just throw all these things on the floor, and forget about them...Of course it's hard to forget when we walk around barefoot and everything we've done in the last month is stuck to the bottom of our feet. I don't notice it until I have to clean it up, and I think, "What's wrong with me? Why am I such a slob?"
It's springtime, so I've decided to just make our messes outside. Let the birds eat Michael's food off the ground. Let's not throw food around the house, let's eat at an outdoor restaurant instead. Let's not mess up the playroom. We'll go to the park instead. But we still can't help throwing our clothes on the floor at the end of the day (or in Michael's case, four times a day; he goes through a lot of clothes), and we can't stop the cat from shedding his winter coat of fur. And we can't help the diapers that pile up on our balcony.
A household is such a high-maintenance beast.
Well, our house is still a mess. We can only spend so much time outside before we start messing up our own house again.
I want to throw away our disgusting, dirty, old, hand-me-down furniture and refurnish everything at Ethan Allen. But not only is that not realistic, we'd never be able to keep it clean anyway. "See why we can't have nice things?" haha
I want to bomb the whole place and start over. Or better yet, just run away.
The house is a disaster. I'll clean it today and it will be sparkling clean, like a museum. Just like I clean it frequently. But all three of us inhabitants are slobs, and it will be back to ground zero within a day and a half or so. We don't even notice when we undress and throw our clothes on the floor. We don't even think about how messy that is. And then I've noticed a weird thing I do when there's food stuck to Michael, or I'm losing hair, or I've got trash in my hand, but I'm multi-tasking and my hands are too full to make a trip to the garbage, I just throw all these things on the floor, and forget about them...Of course it's hard to forget when we walk around barefoot and everything we've done in the last month is stuck to the bottom of our feet. I don't notice it until I have to clean it up, and I think, "What's wrong with me? Why am I such a slob?"
It's springtime, so I've decided to just make our messes outside. Let the birds eat Michael's food off the ground. Let's not throw food around the house, let's eat at an outdoor restaurant instead. Let's not mess up the playroom. We'll go to the park instead. But we still can't help throwing our clothes on the floor at the end of the day (or in Michael's case, four times a day; he goes through a lot of clothes), and we can't stop the cat from shedding his winter coat of fur. And we can't help the diapers that pile up on our balcony.
A household is such a high-maintenance beast.
Well, our house is still a mess. We can only spend so much time outside before we start messing up our own house again.
I want to throw away our disgusting, dirty, old, hand-me-down furniture and refurnish everything at Ethan Allen. But not only is that not realistic, we'd never be able to keep it clean anyway. "See why we can't have nice things?" haha
I want to bomb the whole place and start over. Or better yet, just run away.
