Anyone who knows me well, knows I’m a pretty poor housekeeper. My house looks exactly like an unmarried man lives alone there. This contrasts with my personal appearance, which is carefully controlled and doesn’t permit unwanted creases in my long-sleeve button-down shirts. I’ve spent much of my adult life inventing justifications for my sloppy skills, most of which reflect that my parents used housecleaning as a punishment.
But if I pause my self-serving justifications momentarily, I know that’s confusing cause and effect. My parents used cleaning as a punishment because, if they didn’t, I’d never do it. I resisted cleaning because I considered it abjectly futile. The reward for vacuuming, dusting, and scrubbing the household porcelain, was the opportunity to repeat it next week. What meaningful task, I wondered, was never truly done? What a waste of time.
A few weeks ago, though, even I, the eternal housekeeping refusenik, realized I couldn’t stand these conditions anymore. I couldn’t afford to have company over, I couldn’t cook dinner for a date, I couldn’t even invite my sister around to feed my cats and water my plants if I needed to leave town. My parents’ old household techniques of vinegar and sponges weren’t working. So I bought myself a pack of Mr. Clean Magic Eraser.
Some household dirt was months or even (I blush to admit) years old. Sponges, vinegar, all-purpose cleaner, and scouring powder all failed to remove it. Yet a Magic Eraser and some elbow grease worked wonders; dirt, soap residue, and hard water stains just rolled off. I mean literally rolled off, as it formed convenient little pills which I rinsed with water and watched flush down the drain. Years of dirt, gone.
Without exaggeration, I’d forgotten that my bathtub was originally white, not ecru. I’d also forgotten that my shower spigot was shiny chrome, not dingy lime-scale. These scrubbers peeled off not only my dirt, but some that, I’m sure, lingered from my home’s previous tenants. But these scrubbers didn’t just uncover dirt, they uncovered something deeper: my sense of pride in keeping my own house.
Like many members of their class and generation, my parents didn’t see cleaning as just cleaning; they considered it a moral expression. People who didn’t maintain their houses were inherently bad people. “Nobody,” I recall my father saying while driving the family through a notoriously run-down neighborhood in a major city, “is ever too poor to clean their yards and wash their windows.” Slovenly people were clearly moral reprobates.
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| Spot which part of this faucet was cleaned with a Magic Eraser and dried overnight |
I was more conservative then, but even I realized this was, at some level, fallacious. Even if they’re married, poor couples often work three or more jobs between them to cover rent, groceries, childcare, and utilities. Telling overworked, underpaid people that further household busywork makes the difference between moral and immoral people, is a massive class-based imposition. My father’s unspoken message was: “Shut up and act White.”
What arrogance! In a world wracked by poverty, violence, and structural injustice, my father wanted poor people to abandon social solidarity, and instead organize their own lawns. I was too young, White, and conservative to explain it in those terms, but that encapsulates the underlying thought. White, middle-class demands for household cleanliness were, and are, demands for atomized individualism in the face of organized injustice.
In a society organized so unfairly that one in eight American children faces chronic hunger, housecleaning seemed like a retreat from the conflict. This tendency was compounded because, like many suburban White kids, very few people outside my family ever saw the inside of my house. As I became increasingly conscious of America’s ingrained injustices, cleaning seemed increasingly self-indulgent and luxurious.
Yet, watching old dirt form pills and rinse down the drain, I realized: keeping my own house is part of participating in the community. I cannot invite fellow reformists to my house to plan and organize, or even to share common meals and a beer, if I don’t have a bathroom I’m willing to let others see. Solidarity is always public-facing and vocal, yes, but true community solidarity starts at home.
This change is new. I’m still feverishly cleaning old, stained surfaces, wearing out Magic Erasers like there’s no tomorrow. Yet I do it because, for the first time in years, I’m starting to feel proud of my house. I’m starting to feel like I can invite people around and let them see the place where I live. I’m starting to see that housecleaning isn’t injustice or punishment, it’s home.
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