Queen of Clean

I spent the weekend cleaning. (There was dancing too -- see below-- but yo, mostly cleaning.)

Not like tidying cleaning, but like washing the window screens cleaning. Thankfully (for me), this happens maybe twice a year (maybe three times) and usually at the beginning of the school year and at the end. Mostly, it has to do with paper management.

When the school year starts, I get all Super Mom with my charts and my bins and my hooks and my extremely organized arts and crafts supplies. (The smell of new pencils, newly sharpened new pencils, fills me with the kind of nostalgic joy I reserve for little else besides new corduroy pants and cinnamon toast.) I clean out every clothes drawer with manic ecstasy, leaving heaps of piles to give away or to throw away or to give back to whomever they belong to. I clean out all the toys (an exercise that has gotten easier over the years, since our collection has shrunk to blocks and cars and board games with a few action figures thrown in). I clean out the mud room and move the worn out flips flops and useless, broken goggles to make way for sneakers and cleats and wind breakers. And those charts I mentioned? Oh, good Lord, have I made some decent charts in my life: picture-coded when they couldn't read, with words when they could, with all sorts of goals and rules and schedules for the morning and the after school and the bedtime.

It lasts maybe two weeks. Give or take, but two weeks is a decent estimate of how long I can handle my perfection.

Still, it's a ritual of wishful fantasy and a girl's gotta dream.

At the end of the school year, it's another kind of unload, another kind of fantasy clean. The backpacks come home clogged with a year's worth of papers and work books and projects to add to the year's worth we already have at home -- on bulletin boards, in files, on book shelves, shoved into Home Management Systems. The sneakers are beyond stink, the cleats are done for a few months, and all the sleds and snow goggles and ski helmets -- out and about though it hasn't snowed in months -- are taking up valuable space. There is too much stuff around here! And the car is a literal wasteland of waste! And I think my foot just stuck to the floor! And I can't see through the dusty window screens anymore and OH.MY.GOD! We need to clean this friggin' house! RIGHT! NOW!

My back hurts. My hair hurts. In an effort to vaccuum ever square inch, I flung the cord in a furious fury and smacked myself in the eye with the plug. I think it's swelling now, but I'm okay. Really.

I can report, however one-eyed, that the new tilty windows work when you want to clean them but that one also feels a little like Mrs. Cleaver when doing so. I can report that every piece of clothing that is not on a body is clean and folded (though not yet put away) and that the fridge has been cleared of any science experiments growing within. I also can report that that I have successfully culled worthwhile works of art and/or scholarly achievement from those destined for the recycling bin. (And I did this at a Roadrunner pace because God forbid anyone see me actually toss something they spent like what? nine minutes creating.)

But I did find this pinned to the cork beneath the certificates of award, A+ papers, invitations by Oprah to attend the next Brilliant and Amazing Kids show other stuff:




and hello? I think that's a fairy tale I can believe in.