The Perfect Home...?

We’ve been here 7 months now and I’m quite sure that I’m not yet a captain of industry because of the inordinate amount of time that housework seems to take up.  There’s the sweeping, rug shaking, dusting, composting, washing sinking as well as hovering and scrubbing.  I’m sure I never did this much in London, well, I didn’t cos I had a cleaner. But it took me about 25 years to realise that the skies would not fall in, volcanoes wouldn’t explode in the street and the entire Western civilisation would not collapse in a smouldering ruin if I didn’t wash the bathroom at least 3 times a week.  This is because ‘doing housework’ is genetically programmed into Swedes and the houses are generally immaculate and incredibly neat, if a little, errh, frou-frou (depending on the class).  Back in the 50s, my mother was learning how to clean a house properly, in sixth form college, in between her astrophysics and eugenic gene manipulation classes.  (Incidentally, if you do a lot of housework properly, quantum does begin to make sense).

The average Swedish woman (ASW) would love Martha Stewart’s website, if they could get over the complete insulting patronising implications of the word “homemaker”. Most houses I’ve been in in London would be used as a practice house for the ASW as a ‘before’ example.  They are what my grandmother’s was like when she couldn’t see and had her heart complaint.  My house is cleaner than most in London, but I feel hopelessly inadequate here.

I can’t help but feel that this obsession with ‘house-work’ is self-inflicted by women. When they weren’t allowed to work, the state of the home was the only way they had to display their marvellousness, together with handiwork and cooking.  My grandmother tells of a woman who was forgiven for only shaking her rugs once a week because her lace was so wonderful.  Forgiven? Forgiven by whom?  It was the women of course, who bought into the myth given them by men that it was the only thing they could do and so had to do it incredibly well to justify their existence.  Implied in this myth is that the family or the Man needs to have the house ‘looking good’.  Pah!  The average man wouldn’t know if something hadn’t been dusted for a day or a year.  And what of today, where we do have other things to do, like full time employment?  It comes down, of course, to doing what is comfortable for yourself, which also means not noticing what others do in their homes (oooh not so much fun there!). 

Here, I keep the dust bunnies from getting above adolescence and shake the rugs a couple of times a week, but I haven’t yet got back into the once a week major clean, which includes the attic or the twice a year wall washing etc or the daily dust.  So I have been corrupted by the UK, where the standards of housework are, quite frankly, slovenly, but there is so much more interesting stuff to do than dusting!

Just don’t get me started on the word “House wife”....