Rethinking My Housekeeping Priorities

When I married and moved into my own home, almost sixty years ago, my mother used to say proudly, "Such a balaboosta my daughter is. You could eat off her floors." Balaboosta is the Yiddish word meaning a perfect homemaker. So naturally, when my daughter married and moved into her own home, I tried to help her become one too. But I never could.

I tried to show her the right way to dust, to mop her floors. I gave her simple suggestions about folding her towels properly, about putting her dishes in the correct cabinets. I couldn't understand why my suggestions led to hurt feelings or silent treatments. 

Then one day, she said, "Mom, that's enough. If I wanted to hang up my broom and my mop, I would have. I'm just fine with them standing on the floor. And if I want to make my bed with a bedspread I could, but I don't want to. Just straightening my covers is fine with me. And if I want to keep my pots to the left of my sink and my dishes to the right ... " She sighed. "I don't want to hurt your feelings, but I am perfectly capable of making my own decisions."

I held back my tears. Where had I gone wrong? Wasn't my job, as a mother, to teach my daughter the right way to keep a house? Hurt, I stopped offering suggestions. I can laugh now as I remember those early years. I bit my tongue an awful lot when I visited, but as I learned to keep my opinions to myself, I also began to see what she was doing rather than what she wasn't. And I began to see the world through her eyes. I stopped trying to teach her and began to learn from her.

I had always served my company on an elegantly set table: using a linen tablecloth, fine china, crystal glassware. When my daughter married in the late nineties, she didn't want sterling silver or good china. Her bridal registry included dishwasher-safe dishes and glasses. Her cupboard held plastic and paper goods.

In my house, fast food meant reheating healthy leftovers. And company meals were another story. I carefully planned my menus and shopped for just the right ingredients. While on many nights, my daughter brought in take outs: pizza, Chinese food, chicken and rice from the Halal stand on the corner. For company she did the same.

Days when I was expecting company were spent giving the house an extra cleaning, polishing silver, setting the table, and then shopping and preparing an elegant dinner. My dishwasher would wear away the gold edges of my china so I hand-washed each piece after the company left. And my linen tablecloth needed to be soaked and washed the following morning so stains wouldn't set.

In my house everyone's bed needed to be made as soon as they got up. Clothes were hung up, put away in the drawers they belonged in, or placed in the hamper if they were dirty. In my daughter's house, each child is totally responsible for the state of their room. I peeked into my granddaughter's.

Clean clothes, retrieved from the dryer, remained in the laundry basket while clothes that had been worn, or just discarded in favor of some other outfit, lay strewn across the floor. Her bed was a tangle of sheets, pillows and stuffed animals. Vines hung from the walls and a red LED strip outlined the room casting a glow over the mess.  I had to admit that the room had sort of a jungle charm.

At one time, I would have been humiliated if friends came to visit and there was dust anywhere in my house. My daughter's attitude, "If friends come over, they are coming to see me, and if there is dust on the furniture, so what? Flippantly she said, "God put it there, he can take it away."

Then seriously, "Mom, look at the countless hours you've spent over the years, dusting, cleaning, and polishing furniture because someone might drop by. The dust in my house will always be there, but my kids won't always be little and I'd rather do a superficial cleaning and spend that extra time with them."

Who was this wise young woman? I wondered.

So what if she chose to purchase a sectional rather than a sofa and two matching chairs as I had done when I married years earlier. So what if her television was the size of a baby grand and the focal point of her living room? That was what she wanted. It took me a while to realize that her choosing differently didn't mean that one of us was wrong. It just meant we were different.

With my fingernail I scraped the remnants of a red crayon off the dining room table I'd given to my daughter when we downsized. I can still remember how proud I was of this same table. I kept it polished to a sheen, and used it only when company came for dinner, and then, only after protective pads had been placed on top of it.

I knew my daughter treasured the table but she was not about to put pads on it whenever she wanted to use it. And use it she did, all of the time: for family games, kids' craft projects, art projects. Around this table my daughter taught her kids to bake Mandel Bread, a family favorite. The scratches and blemishes on it attested to that fact that it was used.

The last time I visited, my older teenaged grandson and his friends were playing beer pong on it. I heard one of his friends say, "Your mom is great. My mom would never let us do this in her house."

I smiled, realizing that my daughter's comfortable home, had become the gathering place for my grandkids' friends.

My fifteen-year-old granddaughter sat beside me, one leg curled under her, one elbow on the table, and her eyes fastened to her cell phone as she poured maple syrup over her waffle. I watched drops of syrup land on the unprotected table. And I didn't jump up to go for a sponge to clean it off. I was glad she had chosen to sit with me while she had her breakfast.

Carren Strock 
Carren Strock has often been called a Renaissance woman. Equally at home with a paintbrush and canvas, a needle and thread, or a hammer and nails, she is as eclectic in her writing as she is in her other interests. The author of seven books, she is best known for her ground-breaking book Married Women Who Love Women, now in its third edition. Read More