No. 135: Spring Cleaning for the Type B Woman

The mother-in-law moment that changed my life.

I’ve always admired extreme Type A women. When someone says they’re Type A, I think, “Ah. I see. Easy street.” I cannot imagine a life with the antidote to procrastination. A mind that leans towards organization rather than beauty, quickly, at the risk of disarray. OCD and perfectionism mixed with a highly creative, endlessly chaotic mind is quite the enigma. They’re the personality ingredients of a quirky, dangerously near zany, creative type. The Mom from The Princess Diaries. Lorelai. This woman is witty and charming to make up for the forgetfulness and general sense of unreliability.

That’s where household care can be a mixed bag for me. See, I’m clean. I don’t like germs and love for my spaces to look beautiful. That being said, my default nature is to do six thousand things at once, to make “piles” as a method of quickly tidying a space and my forgetfulness leads to me misplacing things, having a brilliant idea of where an item should go and forgetting the new system almost instantly. A blanket layer of disorganization is laid over the whole of my life, just to paint a perfect picture for you. I’m married to a man who lives by the statement, “a place for every thing and every thing in its place.” While I naturally prioritize cleanliness over everything but not necessarily organization, he prioritizes organization over everything but not necessarily cleanliness. A match for eternal sanctification through marriage, am I right?

I read this book when I found myself drowning many years ago. I had a two year old and a one year old, I’d been married for five years which meant we’d been living in the same five bedroom, five bathroom home for five years as well. I had just started my blog and was desperate to contribute financially to our home, determined that if I stayed up writing and editing photos until 2am in the wee hours of every morning that it would pay off one day. The big bucks. “One day” still hasn’t come on the big bucks front, but it has paid off in other ways.

The house, though, the million walls and were caving in on me more each day. It felt like I didn’t have a single spare minute in the day even to shower, let alone scrub the baseboards. On paper, my role was homemaker. Keeper of the home. I checked “Stay at Home Mom” on all the papers, wrote “N/A” under ‘Employer’ year after year. Had there been an option that said, Works distractedly yet endlessly as Wife, Mother, Chef, Baker, Teacher, Decorator, Sister Daughter, Friend, Housekeeper, Entertainer, Hostess, Writer, Photographer, Nurse—I would have checked it instead.

Despite my natural bend towards clutter, I wanted to honor my husband and mimic my own parents in making sure the main areas of the house were spotless every night before going to bed. We’d both put the kids down together, come downstairs and work to rewind the day, resetting it to exactly as it was at 4am that morning. Before the oatmeal and scrambled eggs, before the Play-Doh and train tracks. Before the dinner dishes and bubble machine, the ball pit and the flashcards. Each day, a magic wand was waved in the form of an hour of work and far too little sleep.

One day, after years of treading water, my mother-in-law changed my life in an instant.