That Time of The Year

I unlocked the door to find a house of full of things.

My mum has overturned everything in her bedroom & dumped into the living room. It’s amazing what you can squeeze inside her room. You want to learn space management? Don’t have to pay huge amounts of money at a university. Just come to my home.

Yes, it’s that time of the year. The time I dread & fearfully anticipate – The annual spring-cleaning.

My mum takes spring-cleaning to a whole new level.

And because there aren’t enough space in the living room, my room has also taken the brunt of it. Today, I will be sharing the room with her huge king-sized mattress that is also pretending to be wall. Over the next few weeks, I will find bamboo poles hanging precariously over my bed & many other things like plastic bags of unused, unwanted things slowly take temporary residence in my room that I don’t wish to know.

I resent cluttered spaces.

That’s why as much as I am not a clean freak, I keep my room as tidy as possible. And in future, when I have a house of my own, minimalist is definitely the way to go. I will build walls that doubles as storage spaces so I can hide stuff in it. Almost everything will be lifted off the floor.

But I can’t blame my mum for the mess. Because of her, our home has been moth-free, lizard-free, cockroach-free & beetle-free for years. The occasional visitor still does come once in a blue moon, but that has been kept to a rarity. The ants, however, refused to bid us farewell & chose to remain a part of our family, much to our chagrin.

Surely there must be some sort of an aptitude test for women like my mum before they become wives. We all know it’s a prerequisite to know how to cook & clean & make sure the house is dust-free. Think about it: Mums of our days are almost always clean freaks. I’ve known many mothers who are like that. I’ve even have friends who have adopted the system.

But this type of test seemed absent in the present scheme of things. Single women like me seemed clueless about the degree of cleanliness a house should be maintained. Ah, perhaps that is the reason why I’m still single.

No one would notice if I don’t wipe to the edge of that window sill. I mean after all, it would get dirty tomorrow. That ball of dirt by the corner surely won’t be significant? And if I don’t make sure that my cloth reach into the angle of the table leg, would my kids lick it & die? Or maybe the bugs will notice immediately & fetch their families here to live with us, thereby lowering my standard of cleanliness to become … ONE of them?

My future husband probably won’t scream yet if I don’t clean the house on a clockwork schedule. But what will happen to my future kids? I am fortunate to have my mother as an example. We complain & moan when they are fastidious to the rules. But what will happen to my child in future all because I wasn’t let in on the BIG BOOK of CLEANLINESS? Will the society degenerate because my kids didn’t learn how to keep their houses dust-free?!

Oh my goodness. I am fainting. Sign me up for that aptitude test now!

EDIT: Intended for humour. Any resemblance to persons living or dead is purely coincidental.

~ by fayea on December 11, 2007.