Come to think of it, when we were kids we never left on time either. My brother and I would sit in the fully packed car with a stack of Golden Books inbetween us, marking the border between his side and my side, waiting for what seemed like an eternity while our parents took care of whatever they were taking care of inside. As if the 8 hour drive to Mimi & Grandady's house wasn't enough to drive us into a crazed and agitated state, they had to make it an 8.5 hour trip by making us sit in a hot car that was parked in front of our house just waiting.
I also learned to do my own laundry at an early stage of life. It probably wasn't long after I was physically able to do my own laundry that I started getting annoyed by the fact that my dad was stealing all the good socks and grossed out by the idea that my brother and I were basically sharing tighty-whities. It's pretty gross to have skid-marks in your underwear. It's even grosser when they're someone else's skid marks.
I complained about the communal laundry idea, and of course my mother's natural reaction was "If you don't like it, do your own laundry." I don't think she realized how expensive of a proposition that would be, as I promptly turned all my clothes pink and grey and shrank everything at least two sizes. I've figured out how to keep things from shrinking, but I really can't say that I own any "white" socks or undershirts. You Want It Clean? You Clean It!
KENDRA LEE would not go so far as to call herself a neat freak, though her husband does consider her a nut. Let's just say she can't leave on vacation until her countertops are polished and her carpets are vacuumed. "The thought of coming back to an unkempt house would ruin my entire trip," said Ms. Lee, an event planner from Hill City, S.D. For this she blames her mother, who planted her seeds of neatness early, actually using a white glove to look for dust in little Kendra's bedroom.
Diane Dobry, on the other hand, would not go so far as to use the word slob, but she notes that her marriage broke up in part because she and her spouse had different views of cleanliness, and she does use capital letters when she sends an e-mail message to say "I HATE housework, and do everything to avoid it." Ms. Dobry, currently working toward her Ph.D. at Teachers College at Columbia University, also blames her mother, a woman so meticulous that she once got out of bed while recuperating from surgery to clean the guest bathroom. "If my mother had lower standards, and let me do things myself, I might have learned how," the daughter said. "But I never learned how to do anything because she always did it for me."
. . .
A common thread through so many of these stories, though, is that of men doing what they want (Mr. Thompson wanting the house clean and simultaneously wanting to leave his dishes in the sink; Mr. Gussman wanting to do chores in the dark because during the day he is a competitive cyclist) and women doing what is left, a thread that still makes this conversation all about women.
What men want to do, they say, is most often a domestic version of something macho. Mr. Chethik enjoys the laundry, he said, not only because he gets to watch television while he folds, but because "it's basically working with heavy machinery: picking up big loads of stuff, moving them from one place to another, setting buzzers and timers and then hitting the on button."
That's why Michael Peck loves to vacuum. For the first few months of their marriage, his wife, Lori, did almost all the cleaning of their apartment in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. ("He cooked while we were dating," Ms. Peck said. "He lured me in.") Back then, though, they had no dog and their vacuum was an ancient Hoover inherited from Ms. Peck's grandmother.
A year and a half ago they adopted a Jack Russell terrier, because they had been told the breed does not shed, and soon their apartment was covered with dog hair. Mr. Peck, a graphic designer, spent $400 on a bright yellow Dyson vacuum, and now a joy of his day is using it to suck their 700-square-foot apartment clean. "I'm not allowed to touch it," said Ms. Peck, who also works in advertising. "If I do, he comes home and looks so disappointed."
And does Mr. Peck vacuum properly? "However he does it, that's fine with me," she said.
That attitude — and the difficulty many women seem to have with it — is central to any conversation about housework. Yes, it is true that society still assumes this to be women's work. And yes, it is true that many men do all they can to avoid their share. But it is also true that many women are guilty of what sociologists call "gate keeping": building a fence around a territory, be it vacuuming or child care or grocery shopping, and defending it as theirs. They set the standards in that realm, and they set them high. Sometimes unrealistically so.
full article available at http://www.nytimes.com/2006/04/09/fashion/sundaystyles/09HOUSE.html?_r=1&oref=slogin
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