Och, the bod aches. The other day, I went to visit my mother. I also wanted to spend some time cleaning her kitchen. (That discordant noise is the sound of Kevin processing the fact that I don't clean our own house, but I will drive 90 miles to clean my mother's kitchen.) She, of course, protested bc, well, that's just what she does. Various excuses and reasons why I shouldn't clean it. Now, if it were clean, I certainly wouldn't bother. I have no desire to engage in unnecessary and/or superfluous cleaning. But it's not clean.
Now, my parents never kept a neat and tidy home. It was basically clean, if not tidy. My mother keeps stuff. My father was the opposite; he was always throwing stuff out. And he did so insensitively, i.e., if my mother liked something, but he thought it was junk or useless to them, he'd find a way to toss it out. One time, my mother's co-worker went to Japan and brought her back a pair of chopsticks. My father came across them one day, didn't know what they were and so tossed them out. He may well have known what they were - who hasn't seen chopsticks at least on TV? - but figured they don't use chopsticks, so why keep them?
But it seems that as my parents got older, the house got less clean. Counters got dirty. There were spots on the dishes. Stuff piled up. I've long been tempted to be my father's daughter, go in there and toss out buckets of stuff, but I don't really want to be insensitive and indiscriminate.
Actually, I've long wanted to do lots of things for my parents/at their house, but didn't. Why not? Well, I think at least part of the reason is that I deferred to others. I deferred to my mom when she'd put me off. She'd always use my father's illness as a reason to not do something. I deferred to my oldest brother when he said he didn't need any assistance with the renovations. I deferred to both of them when they said there was nothing I could do to help wrt my father's care. As noted before, I (and my brother Greg - we both live at a distance from my parents' home) offered to pay for at least some home care, especially in the beginning when my father wasn't so sick. As he became sicker, he received state-mandated home care. But noooooo, my mother would not accept it and my brother discouraged me from pursuing the matter. I'm not sure why the latter was the case, but I do think that my mother and that particular brother share some persnality traits that result in common reactions.
It seems, now that my father died, that it's easier to do stuff around their house. Maybe my mom was truly overwhelmed by my father's care and she just didn't want to deal with anything else; that's certainly a possibility. I was thinking the other day that, even though the house wasn't as clean as I would have liked, my father's room, bedding, medical apparatus, clothing, etc. - basically, everything relating to my dad and his care - was well cleaned and organized. I'm sure that my father's care produced lots of laundry, required lots of things to be kept clean, required lots of maintenance (e.g., oxygen thingies, feeding tube machines, etc.), required organization (e.g., medications, ointments, etc.) and so on.
So anyway, I mosey on up there the other day and cleaned the kitchen from 2:00 to 5:00 PM. And I didn't even finish the kitchen. I spent at least 45 minutes, quite possibly a whole hour, trying to clean the grime from the range hood. There must be a product that would have made that easier; if so, somebody please tell me. I cleaned two counters and all the stuff on them (e.g., microwave, coffee pot, tea things, etc.) and the exteriors of their associated cabinets. I cleaned the table, tablecloth and place mats. I managed to get her down from 12 placemats to 4. Her table only seats 4 comfortably; you could squeeze in a couple of extra people, but it would be a squeeze.
She doesn't like to throw things away. I'll guess that she probably got these placemats from who knows where or maybe found them anew and thought, 'That's pretty. I'll put it out on the table.' And before you know it, she's got a dozen placemats there, placemats under placemats. Gah.
Again, if the placemats (and other things) were clean, I'd be much less interested in doing anything there. If they were clean, but just sitting there minding their own business, I'd probably ignore it. As noted above, I have no desire to engage in unnecessary cleaning, yet I have even less desire to organize someone else's stuff. You start doing that and it's like free diving; you just hope you make it back out alive.
So I cleaned. Although my mother initially protested, I noticed she found a few things to add to my bucket of things that were soaking to make it easier to clean them, so maybe she thought it wasn't such a bad idea after all. Maybe she feels she needs to protest at least a little bit. Next time I see her will be about two weeks after this cleaning session; I'm interested to see how it holds up. I don't care if it requires regular cleaning (either from me or someone Greg and/or I provide), but I don't want it to get to the point it reached before. Heck, she said that Bro
#4 #3 offered to clean the kitchen. He's no neat freak himself, so that's saying something if he's offering to clean the kitchen.
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