- Share This Post
- Pin It
- 0
- 4
-
Sparkle (2)
Today, I'd like to delve into the origins of some of my main issues. See, the things I do, the way I am, all have very real origins. I have very real reasons for why I am a germaphobe, why I obsess, why I...compulse. I know that the very idea of sterilizing your kids or refusing to go to a mall play area is ridiculous to most of you, but hopefully this will shed a little light on how it all began.
My tales will take a lot of backstory. But story is what you're here for. Right? I mean, besides information on my upcoming seminar, "Tips 'n Trix on Maintaining a Gorgeous Homestead While Chemically Poisoning Your Loved Ones," or my upcoming book, OCD Like Me.
I grew up in a filthy, filthy house. Well, let me clarify. As a small child, our house was actually quite clean. Until I was two, my mom was married and she kept up a very nice home. After the divorce, she became an in-home daycare worker, and the house was always spotless. (With Polaroid Instamatic evidence to prove it!) I remember my mom washing and waxing the floor, I remember fresh shiny countertops, and I remember that we had a separate playroom just for toys, so everything was kept in its place. But somewhere, somehow...I don't know, with my mom being a single mom often working multiple jobs at once, life must have been kind of depressing. She has been an office worker, a janitor, a construction worker, hell she even sorted labels at one point to earn a few pennies. She often did many different things all at once. We were broke as a joke, and she did what she could, and that meant working, and being gone an awful lot. (And being gone an awful lot meant kids left to their own devices to create an awful lot of mess.) Later, she became a school bus driver, and often worked very late hours.
Point is, what single mom of two bratty, messy kids wants to come home at 11 pm and clean up the whole house (especially when you're getting up at 4:45 am the next morning for work)? The whole thing had to feel unbelievably overwhelming to her. And if she did have some kind of undiagnosed depression, well, do you really think she had the motivation to scrub down the shower every Saturday morning? And we kids were almost no help at all.
So our house got progressively messier. To the point where it could only be described as filthy. Not cluttered, not messy. Filthy. Disgusting. I have crystal-clear images in my head of the kitchen, where we would sometimes have 7 or 8 paper grocery bags brimming to the top with ancient, stinking garbage, even spilling over onto the floor, and cat bowls filled with crusted-on food, and the sink so full of dirty dishes that that the sink was unusable. The dirty dishes slowly encroached upon other surfaces too, until everything was covered with either old food, dirty dishes, or outright trash.
The rest of the house was full of crap, too, sometimes literally, since we had a billion pets. (At least the poop got picked up--it didn't sit around or get shellacked as though on a hot tin slide--but still, our carpets were grotesque.)
The laundry room was crammed full, piled up to my shoulders (this is not exaggeration), again, to the point where the laundry machine was unusable. So, like the dishes, it just kept piling up.
The bathroom was a health hazard. Truly. The tub & shower walls itself--I don't know why no one thought to just spray on some fucking BLEACH, which would have at least helped. But the shower & tub were coated in an inch of grime, dead skin, and massive amounts of mildew. The ledge where we kept the 10,000 bottles of shampoo and soaps and conditioners was covered in swamp water. The bathroom floor was covered in wet, used towels, since we only ever used towels once (instead of hanging them up) and then just chucked them right there on the floor, so you can imagine what dozens* of wet, mildewing towels covering the floor might have smelled like. Or maybe you can't. I hope you can't. The one chore I did have was the bathroom. It was always my job, when it came to that one day a year we might clean. I
