Chores S'mores

After my piano lesson yesterday morning, Ellie - my friend and piano teachers daughter, wanted to show me some of her writing that she has been doing while in home school. She had several short stories that she had written and a couple of poems. One of them entitled "Chores S'mores!" I wish I could remember all of it but the part that made me laugh the most was that "clean mommies are mean". It reminded me of my Grandmother (she asked me to call her that as opposed to grandma) on my dad's side, that my mom affectionately called "Granny Grunt". She would clean her house non-stop, and had one room that was officially off-limits to children, the living room and/or celestial room.

As girls we receive mixed messages. Should I listen to:

Quiet down cobwebs, dust go to sleep,

I’m rocking my baby and babies don’t keep.

or

“Organize yourselves; prepare every needful thing; and establish a house, even a house of prayer, a house of fasting, a house of faith, a house of learning, a house of glory, a house of order, a house of God;…”

For me, it’s a compromise. I happily put in two hours into housecleaning each week, but I refuse to do the eight hours it would take to keep this place perfectly organized. And I think some of Grandmother’s organizational skills are a genetic gift. A gift that I admire but don’t need to duplicate in my own life.


Still - what about kids that don't know how to do anything? It’s easy to blame a kid for when they are unable to tie a shoe or scramble an egg, but maybe the fault lies with the parents. How can a child learn to clean a toilet if a parent isn’t offering instruction? No one is born with the innate knowledge of bathroom disinfection.

DesNews–

Susan Maushart, a mother of three, says her teenage daughter “literally does not know how to use a can opener. Most cans come with pull-tops these days. I see her reaching for a can that requires a can opener, and her shoulders slump and she goes for something else."


Teenagers are so accustomed to either throwing their clothes on the floor or hanging them on hooks that Maushart says her “kids actually struggle with the mechanics of a clothes hanger.”

But I wonder if this article is just so much hype? Yes, we all know a parent that indulges their children with the newest video game, super phone or iPad, but the majority of parents I know are very picky about what they bring into their home. They set limits, make rules, require manners and finished chores.

My boys do chores. They mow the lawn and wash the dishes and vacuum the hallways. But I rarely check their work and a definitely don’t redo it as so many women do. And somehow, I feel like a better mother, a better person if they respect me enough to hang up their backpacks and to throw their socks in the hamper instead of on the bathroom floor (three boys, two socks every day, no way to distinguish them, no wonder I like them to pick them up!).

I just find this interesting, because to me, cleanliness has nothing to do with godliness. It is sort of like talking about our fingernails. Some of us like to paint them, some of us like to keep them short, some of us bite them to the quick … is there a wrong answer?

This is a culture question. There is a culture of judging women by their ability to keep a clean house and every person has different standards for what that means. If you want to “win” at being a homemaker, you have to play the how clean is my house game. How do I stop devoting brain cells to thinking about this? Don’t ever even think about what someone else’s house looks like dirty or clean?

And who said that you should use “a house of order” to talk about your actual house and its level of cleanliness? Frankly, I think that is misusing the scripture. We have to be more careful about using scriptures out of context or we end up with admonitions to regularly partake in Almond Joys because, you know men are that they might have joy.