Hi there! My name is Tori and, as of right now, I'm a 45 year old wife and mother. I've been married for almost six years and our daughter is about to turn 16 years old. No, I'm not confused. I'm the third wife to my second husband and he, being the amazing human being he is, adopted my daughter from my first marriage. My husband is a pastry chef/baker and currently works offshore for a catering company. My daughter is a sophomore in high school. I am currently unemployed... stay at home Tori sounds so much better, though. I used to be able to say I was a college student, but since I ran out of financial aid money, I had to drop out until we win the lottery or something. We live in a two bedroom rental house with a huge back yard and a nice sized front yard. Our living quarters are shared with two dogs (a chocolate lab mix and a chihuahua), a black cat, three red-eared slider turtles, a very large rabbit we suspect is a Flemish Giant, and (outside) a Belgian D'Uccle rooster and hen.
So what's all this insane housewife thing about? Well... long ago, when not everyone had a computer and social media wasn't a term bandied around the way it is now, I used to have a LiveJournal account where I made these long (private, friends only, where that actually meant something) posts about all kinds of things, but often, about what I was cooking for dinner, interesting things that my daughter had done (yeah, I realize they were only interesting to me), what I was learning at the technical college or my new job after I graduated, and often, a running tab of my housecleaning. Yes... details updated as they happened about me cleaning my house. This continued, in shorter form, when I left LiveJournal for Facebook.
Why do I do this? I have got to be the most boring friend to have on a friends list ever, right? Well, it started out as a way to keep myself motivated. If I said publicly that I was going to do something, then I had to live up to that. But then my boyfriend, now husband, moved in with me and my reason for posting this mundane information changed from keeping me motivated to proving to him that I actually did stuff. If he didn't see me doing it, even though the evidence was right there, I didn't do it. One of the few things about him that drives me completely bonkers. It's like he thought that elves were coming over while he was at work or asleep and cleaned up whatever mess had been made. Posting about it made it seem more real to him. He's like this with other things, too. Like if I just say I don't feel well/I'm sick, he ignores that because I'm not whining or complaining. That is apparently the true hallmark of an actual sick person, they bitch and moan about it.
So after doing this for several years, particularly once I started doing it on Facebook and my audience got significantly larger, I started noticing something interesting. People started referring to me as Superwoman or saying I had boundless energy or believing I never stop doing things. This is false. I also noticed that because people thought I was constantly cleaning the house that people whose houses probably look no dirtier or cluttered than mine... people whose houses may actually look cleaner that mine... felt guilty about their own housecleaning. So not my intention at all.
The fact is, much like the Catholic Church guilts the parishioners into behaving, I was guilted into keeping my house clean because I am female and Southern and therefore it is my job (thank you to the misogynistic patriarchal society I grew up in) to keep the house clean and it's my fault if it isn't done or isn't done well enough. This is not something I want to perpetuate.
The truth is, I clean for several reasons. First and foremost is guilt and gender stereotypes pushed on me by the Southern patriarchal society I grew up in. Second is, well, obviously I want to live in a clean house because the other option is gross and I don't make enough money to hire someone to do it for me. Third, I have several family members on both sides of my family who were hoarders and I was completely freaked out by their homes and never wanted to live that way.
Honestly, there was a time when my house was spotless and I was compulsive about keeping it insanely clean. Emphasis on the insanity part. At the time, I wasn't working and lived with a man who was fairly neat and tidy, but who also believed it was my job to do all the housework, even if I was employed. But then I decided I wanted a pet cat. Cats are fairly clean animals, but they require litter boxes and they shed. They also are a bit messy, which is different than dirty. They knock things over, they move things around. I wanted them, so I had to make the mental change from "my house must be perfect and spotless" to "if I want a cat, I have to accept less than perfection in the house."
I eventually moved on from that boyfriend and wound up with two cats. I lived alone and my house was always clean. And then I met my first husband, who was a bit of a pack rat and grew up in a minor hoarding situation. He made nests in the areas he spent most of his time in. I wanted him around, so I had to accept his messiness. We discussed it and he agreed to try to keep the nest neat if I would allow him to have the nest.
Then I decided that I wanted a child. You can certainly train children to be neat, but your house will look like a child lives there... and it should look like a child lives there. I can't imagine what life as a child would be like if I could not be a normal child. Much like her father, my child was messy and disorganized and not interested in cleaning up after herself. But I wanted to be a parent, so I had to accept that her room would often look like a tornado hit it (and it still does). I'm much more relaxed about the state of my house now... and I have a lot less tchotchkes (quite a few gone because either the kid or the cats broke them)... but I do still want it clean.
Another truth is, although I post about how much cleaning I'm doing, I don't spend all day cleaning. Ever. Unless I have to do it all in one day for some reason and possibly if I'm doing spring cleaning, but that is rare. Today, for example, I spent most of the day in bed, online, watching television shows I missed last night, talking to my husband on messenger, reading facebook, checking the news, and setting up this blog. I also fed all nine animals, walked the dogs (in the backyard, which doesn't require much supervision or effort on my part), let the chickens into the run and then back into the coop when it started raining, went outside and tried to fix the gate in the backyard so the chihuahua can't escape and get hit by a car, washed the dishes, cleaned the bathroom, and mopped the bathroom and hall floor. Sounds like a lot, right? It really wasn't. And maybe by explaining all of this stuff on here, I can make people look at housekeeping as less time consuming and requiring of a cape.
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