There are a lot of traditional expectations of women to which I don’t match up with smoothly. For the most part, I don’t even care to bother meeting up to these expectations. Except for this one thing:

I wish I could be cleaner.

I don’t have a neat-freak bone anywhere in my body. I’m not convinced that I even want a neat-freak bone. But when I walk into some friends’ homes and everything is immaculately clean…it makes me wonder why I too can’t prioritize cleaning.

In order for me to clean, I really need to be expecting guests. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not DIRTY. I don’t leave food out, I do the dishes, take out the trash, blah blah. Oh, and I bathe. But I’m A-OK with leaving my shoes, jackets, purses, etc. all over the living room and I don’t mind if my roomies do, either. I don’t care if there’s makeup all over the counter and the bathroom floors aren’t spotless. Did I miss a memo somewhere?

It doesn’t even ‘run’ in my family. My family is actually very neat and they often argued with me over being somewhat of a slob growing up. I guess I just can’t see why cleaning is more important than sitting on the couch.

It’s not something I necessarily learned from my friends, either. In fact, my friends are kind of the people who make pay attention to the fact that I’m not like them. Take my good friend, Cara, for example. She mops her floors incessantly. When we get into her place from spending the evening out she literally - no f*cking joke - mops the floor. Am I crazy for thinking this is crazy?

But it’s not just her. I walked into another friend’s apartment the other day - a guy who lives with his girlfriend - and their place was flawless. And he is a guy! I walked in unannounced and yet, their entire place was as clean as a hotel suite. Not a single dirty dish or out of place shoe. And another; I was in the bathroom at a friend’s house and (I realize this is not normal) I started looking around. No dust. No toothpaste spots in the sink. The towels were folded and hanging perfectly (do they even use them?).

Sigh…

What is wrong with me? I don’t NEED to be cleaner, but I do wonder…why don’t I have this in me? I wish I had the motivation to keep my home tidy, but I can’t find it anywhere.

Any help?

[Photo courtesy of bbcleaning.com]