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Cleanliness Is Next To Impossible

Fact: You cannot simultaneously keep a clean house and be an attentive parent. Housekeeping while on baby duty is limited to things you can do with one hand while balancing a squirming 25 pounds with the other. You can't do the really tough cleaning jobs while caring for a baby since these jobs require you to be on your hands and knees in restricted spaces for extended periods of time. Any infant in his right mind will protest, and any parent who hates to scrub toilets will heed.

You'd have to neglect your child to keep your house really clean all the time, but of course I conform to a higher standard. I wouldn't dream of abandoning Emma for that length of time, and believe me it breaks my heart not to be able to spend hours scrubbing the grout between the shower tiles with a toothbrush dipped in bleach. It's just another personal sacrifice I must make.

The real goal of being a new parent is for the child to love you, and little kids don't give a rat's keister about a clean house. Remeber when you were a kid? Who were the most popular parents? Not the ones with slipcovers on the sofas, plastic runways bisecting all carpeted areas, and irrational rules about sitting on beds. No, the popular parents were the ones who allowed a nice comfy layer of clutter on everything. I am not saying that a messy house is a prerequisite to good parenting, but I am saying that a meticulously clean house will impress your baby about as much as C-SPAN.

Because I've made this decision of conscience to sacrifice the pleasures of sore knees, dishpan hands, and mystic visions from inhaling disinfectant fumes, we have a cleaning person come in every few weeks. Her impending visit always prompts a flurry of preliminary cleaning to get the surface clutter out of the way so she can get down to the nitty gritty. That's what we tell ourselves anyway. In reality we just don't want her to know what slobs we are.

She does a great job, really great. This is a person who is personally offended by dirt, dust, and mildew. It's not a job, it's a crusade. She doesn't simply clean house, she eradicates dirt. She's good alright, but there's a catch. She is a compulsive talker, and when I say this I am not exaggerating.

"Gabby" (not her real name) is what I would classify as a "chain talker," meaning that she has the ability to flow seamlessly from one topic to the next without the need for any logically unifying thread, and can continue in this fashion for upwards of twenty minutes without ever seeming to draw a breath. Furthermore, she is unencumbered by that special need which hinders the average talker; namely, the desire for another person to actually respond. Sometimes she does not even require another person to be on the premesis.

She loves to talk about house cleaning but is equally at ease suggesting the best stretches for lower back pain, a recipe for lime chutney, or why the toenail clippers they sell at KANT SPEL drugstore are an inferior design.

But the clincher is that she is unable to conclude any conversation. Because everything reminds her of something else, she has no linear sense of a conversation's beginning and end. To call her thought process stream of consciousness doesn't do it justice, since streams are generally limited to flowing one direction at a time. "Flood" would be more like it. Any efforts to bring closure only produce the sensation that one is sinking in quicksand: the harder you struggle the more you get pulled back down.

After experiencing spectacular failures with cheap conversational devices such as "Wow, look at the time," and "I think I left the baby in the car with the motor running," I progressed to the bluntly elegant "I'm leaving" which yielded only slight improvement. In the end, nothing works gracefully, and one must turn and walk out the door, taking deep breaths as her words fade out behind you: "That reminds me, I was talking to this guy in the market and he said that his nephew ..

Nowadays I have to make plans to be out of the house when Gabby works. I put up with it because she does a great job cleaning. Besides, I hope to steer her toward the help she needs to ovecome her challenge. I've told her about this new 12-step program for compulsive talkers ... it's called On and On Anon.

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© Todd Pinsky 1998-2002. All rights reserved.