For years, I’ve kept a dirty little secret.
But this week, I was given the sort of absolution you get in a Catholic confessional. And it came from the most unlikely of sources – the Queen of Clean Marie Kondo.
You see, for the past two years we’ve employed a weekly cleaner, and even writing that brings a sense of shame.
Why shame? Perhaps it’s a female thing, or perhaps that’s a bit sexist. I work full-time, but with only two teenagers surely, I told myself, I should be able to find the time to clean my house?
Or wasn’t it a bit uppity to have a cleaner, as my mother used to tell me. Don’t I have bigger spending priorities, like paying off a mortgage or adding to my super?
Or the big question, which has been the real driver behind my little secret; what if the cleaner stumbled across a bra, stuffed under the bed, or a second empty bottle of wine, hidden at the bottom of the garbage bin? The bottle of pesto, with last year’s expiry date.
Wouldn’t they judge me? My facade would slip. I would no longer be ‘in control’ in the way I made out. I would be a failure, headlined by society’s expectations that a clean house was the door into an orderly mind.
Perhaps it’s me, but an intervention with friends this week would suggest it’s not. We all want to keep up appearances. Be perfect and do everything – a full-time job, be a good parent, and have a spotless house.
Remove one of those blocks, and the rest would come crashing down.
And that is what has had me up, at 5am each Thursday, for two years.
I wasn’t letting the cleaner in at that time; she was surely sensible enough to be in bed. I was cleaning my home. My husband would join in for some sport, failing absolutely to understand the ‘pre-clean’.
And to be honest, now I’m confessing, sometimes the night before we would stage a pre pre-clean – all dependent on the amount of work that was required before the cleaner arrived, with her mop and brushes and goods, that all apparently smelled like a hospital. To me, it was the fragrance of flowers.
I’m not sure why I’m writing this in past tense, because it’s Thursday, and the cleaner is in the next room scrubbing the shower … and, as always, I was up at 5am.
But I know, when she leaves, a calmness will envelop the house. I’ll smile at the teenagers as they crawl out of bed in time for lunch. The house will look like the home it should, every day. Squeaky clean. Shiny.
Perhaps, though, it’s time for a rethink. Certainly it will require the therapy of good friends and good wine, but perhaps it’s time I allowed the cleaners to see the real house; the real me.
No doubt it will be costly. But if it’s good enough for Marie Kondo, it should be good enough for the rest of us.
Marie Kondo. The Queen of Clean. The together woman, whose walk-in robes looked like they’d been delivered by Vogue.
Marie Kondo, whose career has had so many of us trawling storage shops to find the perfect container to showcase our tidiness.
Marie Kondo; the perfect woman, who wrote her own books and starred in Netflix productions, while ensuring nothing was out of place.
Until it seems, the birth of her third child. Now Marie Kondo has “kind of given up’’ on tidying.
And with that, we can all breathe a sigh of relief.
The news, revealed in an interview with the Washington Post, is akin to winning the lottery, in my mind.
“My home is messy,’’ she said. YES!
“Now I realise what is important to me is enjoying spending time with my children at home.” YES.
Permission granted. Clutter is apparently no longer bad. The odd pile of washing on the lounge room floor, simply means a good dinner and glass of wine took precedence.
Who knows what the cleaner will think of the bra under the bed?
Who cares? Next Thursday, my alarm will be muted. And I guess I’ll find out.
