fatesfolly | Confessions of a domestic goddess

My mother was a stay-at-home-mom before there was ever the hyphenated term for it.

She met my dad in college and after they graduated and married, she taught English while my dad finished his post graduate degrees. They settled here in Kinston and they both worked until 1962 when my brother was born.

Soon after he was weaned, I imagine, she returned to teaching. I'm not sure why they waited seven years to have me or if I was a surprise (oh, the joys of not knowing all the details of one's past) but I came along in 1969. After that, she was done with working outside the home. As an aside, I STILL have her former students approach me and tell me that my mom was their best teacher.

So, from birth until I was 20, I knew my mom as the domestic workhorse. She got us up in the morning... I didn't have an alarm clock until college. She cooked our breakfast. She washed our clothes. She made our dinner most every night. And she kept the house spotless. She paid the bills. She took care of maintenance issues. She even cut and manicured the grass.

I don't know if I knew how fortunate I was, but I do remember thinking how boring my life was. I wished for something extraordinary to happen. I never knew that extraordinary thing would be a cerebral hemorrhage.

Fast forward ten years. My father dies, I marry, and my childhood home is either going on the market or we could buy my brother's half. We chose the latter. In 2002, we gutted most of it, making it our home. We repainted the master bedroom and bath, the hall, the foyer, den, dining room and kitchen. We made the old formal dining room an office/library with built in book shelves and cabinets and the old formal living room a den. With the old combination great room/kitchen, we made a huge kitchen and dining room. We got all new appliances and fixtures. We removed the standard ranch eat-in bar in the kitchen and replaced it with a storage island. We tore up the linoleum in the kitchen and put down black and white checkerboard tile. We bought new furniture to replace the hand-me-downs and college furniture. We refinished the hardwood floors and put down plush carpet in the bedroom. It was a bitch living here during the renovations, but when it was finally done, it was our house. During the process, the contractors found water damage in two separate places and we filed insurance claims on both. One, a small spot near the washer, was paid. The other larger spot, worth an estimated $15,000, was denied. We plowed on, paying what we had to to get the job done. (As a result of the 2 claims, the cocksucking insurance companies in this state will not insure us on any other property until January 2005.)

Maybe because of my early pampering, I've never been a great housekeeper. It's clean, but not Betty Zene Clean. It's messy, mostly. Mail and clothes and other various things are not in their proper place. The bed is not made. There is laundry that needs folding. Lee's lazy, too, so we get a week's worth of shoes in the den where we kicked them off.

With both of us working full time and both driving 1.5+ hours each a day to our jobs, we never felt like cleaning when we were home. And because we never saw each other during the week, it was easy just to jet off to somewhere for the weekend. The idea of a maid was brought up, and we had one for a while, but when she retired, it was too much hassle to find someone else. Plus, did I really want someone to rifle through my junk?

Now that I'm home, it's been my pledge to get things straight and keep them that way. I'm NOT my mom and I see that when I clean. I do have some of her qualities, like using the ammonia and vinegar to clean and thinking of washing the walls in my "clean sweep," but I don't get in the nooks and crannies like she would have.

I've finished three rooms in four days. Not a lot when you first think about it, especially when you consider that two of the rooms, the master and guest baths, are the smallest rooms in the house. But I'm determined. I see progress. And I see my mom smiling down on me. :)