House Cleaning, Part 2: Good Enough

The good fairy at my cradle gave me a couple of gifts for which I’m grateful. But the bad fairy did me a terrible turn: she instilled in me the conviction that whatever skill I tried to develop, especially the domestic arts, the result was never quite good enough.

Apparently, I am not alone. If the messages from readers of my post about house cleaning are any indication, swarms of bad fairies hover above the cradles of baby girls, and a few baby boys, raining domestic performance anxieties on their innocent heads.

Fortunately, one of you reminded me of the brilliant concept of “good enough.” The term originated with Donald Winnicott, a child psychologist who worried about parents (mostly mothers) tormented by the anxiety that they were falling short of the parenting ideal. Children, Winnicott reminded them, did not evolve to require perfect parents. What they need in order to thrive is mostly reasonable, well-intentioned, usually kind, generally stable, “good enough” mothers and fathers. What they don’t need is parents driven to neurosis by the compulsion to be perfect.

In light of Winnicott, Saint Benedict’s instruction to treat all utensils as if they were the vessels of the altar can seem neurosis-provoking. I may be able to wipe one glass as if it were a consecrated chalice, but a whole sinkful of dishes? Also in light of Winnicott, my compulsion to dust every single book and the shelf behind it was in fact counterproductive, since it led not to my having feelings of reverence towards those yellowing tomes, but to my wanting to throw them into the flames.

If you’re like me, the problem with never thinking that what you do is good enough is that, aside from making you crazy, it paralyzes you. Weary of aiming for, but never achieving, Martha Stewart-levels of domesticity, you may give up cleaning altogether and live in squalor.

The danger is especially critical for those of us who regularly take off our clothes in public—by which I mean paint, write, dance, play the tuba, or engage in any of those vulnerable-making practices known as THE ARTS. The road to the unwritten novel, the unpainted canvas, and the undanced dance is paved with visions of perfection. On the other hand, the road to any accomplishment is paved with that hard to achieve combination of humility and self acceptance that allows the artist, the would-be domestic goddess, and the parent to get something done.

As with everything else, it’s a matter of balance (and alas, balance is so not my style). “Good enough” doesn’t mean perfect, but it doesn’t mean sloppy, either. To me it means “good enough for me,” for who I am, for the moderate gifts that the good fairy bestowed on me at birth. And, as I oscillate on that endless tightrope between perfection and slovenliness, “good enough” also means forgiving myself when I occasionally (frequently) fall off.

Housework

When Saint Benedict wrote the Rule for his monastery fifteen centuries ago, he instructed the monk in charge of the kitchen to regard all utensils as if they were the sacred vessels of the altar. I have been trying to cultivate that attitude as I clean the house these days, but I’m not having much luck.

Every Tuesday, since housekeeping services were cancelled in our retirement community because of the virus, my husband and I clean the house. He vacuums; I dust. In our 50+ years of marriage, we have only done this a handful of times. Even in our graduate school years, when we ate “dark steaks” (meat sold cheaply because it was well past its prime), and mixed whole milk with the powdered kind to make it go farther, we always scraped enough  money to pay for a housekeeper.

It’s not that we didn’t know how to clean. My husband learned to vacuum before he learned to drive. During high school and college I spent every Saturday morning cleaning my parents’ house. I dusted the trophies that my mother had brought from Ecuador: the eight-foot-long blow gun with its quiver of curare-tipped arrows, and the ceremonial apron and bib made of softened tree bark and decorated with crumbling, once-colorful feathers. I had to time the vacuuming to whenever my father wasn’t practicing the violin, giving a private lesson, or composing at the piano. The worst was wiping the olive oil splatters off the stove and the kitchen’s linoleum floor, since I knew that by dinner time that evening, after yet another of my mother’s delicious sofregits, things would be as greasy as before.

Now, here I am again, dusting, polishing, scrubbing.  It’s not the same, of course. My teenage resentment is gone—it’s my own stuff I’m cleaning, and I can do the work when and how I like. At first, I even found a certain satisfaction in it. Finally, things were being done right. Take the bookcases. The typical cleaning lady dusts the spines of the books, pushes them towards the back, and dusts the exposed front part of the shelf. Instead, I removed each book, wiped its every surface, dusted the space behind it, and, when I was finished, aligned all the books precisely at the edge of the shelf.

This may be the sort of thing that Saint Benedict had in mind, but by the time it was over all I wanted was to build a fire in the front yard, and throw my books into it.

Things have gone downhill from there, as the novelty has worn off. Much as I try to treat every lampshade and every bowl as if it were a sacred object, my mind flits somewhere else, usually to the land of “how much longer is this going to take?” The same monkeys that during meditation hijack my focus away from the breath now whisper evilly in my ear, “It’s just a lampshade, just a bowl. Bo-ring!”

I wonder if Saint Benedict’s cellarer ever did manage to scour those piles of wooden bowls, those greasy cauldrons as worshipfully as if they were the vessels of the altar. If he did, he was a happier, more peaceful cellarer for it.

Yesterday I tried oiling the furniture as a meditation exercise. I rubbed every inch of the sideboard made by the ship’s carpenter on that long-ago Mississippi boat. I lubricated the elderly chests of drawers in the bedroom. Mostly I thought about my husband’s grandfather, who used to show up at our “married students apartment” in his enormous station wagon, with a gift of furniture from his attic. And I also thought about what Colette’s mother, Sido, used to say: “Whenever I spend a lot of time wiping my porcelain teacups, I can feel myself growing old.”

Next Tuesday, when it’s time to clean the kitchen, I’ll try to be more fully present in my work, to treat the sink and the microwave as if they were sacred vessels. I don’t expect to succeed right away, but then, I may well have months if not years to practice.