Two bloggers. Two different hemispheres. One vision (largely impaired by too much clutter, dirt and booze). Exposed for all the world to see as Housekeepers Of Ill-Repute, Proprietresses of Dubious Maternal Instinct and Woefully Neglectful Wives.
Here they are, flashing their dirty bits in the first of three simultaneous postings. Click here to read the sister post.
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A lot of people say to me “How exactly did the idea for this ‘simulpost’ with the Bearded Iris come about?”. Well, I reply, it all started with Iris writing to me about a photo she’d taken of a “booger” one of her children had thoughtfully placed upon one of her walls, out of harm’s reach or perhaps as a snack for later. I thought to myself: I like the cut of this lady’s gib. Most people would have just wiped the booger off but no, ol’ Iris had to take a photo of it. And it got me thinking about what kind of photos I could take around my own home…
In this age of open-plan living and antimicrobial hand wipes in a convenient purse-sized pack, there’s a lot of pressure on us housewives to live the Ikea Dream. And I’m sick and tired of pretending that I’m any good at this housekeeping lark and that having kitchen surfaces that I can see my reflection in is important to me. My home may be a pigsty but it’s a place full of love and laughter where nobody is ever told to stop busting a move in the loungeroom in case they scratch the new parquetry flooring or where scrubbing the bathtub is more important than sitting down with my children to read a book and have a hug.
So here Iris and I both are, chucking a Jamie Lee Curtis: doing the housekeeping equivalent of showing our flabby bits to the world to make a million women sigh with relief that their house is nowhere near as filthy as ours and maybe one or two others feel like they’re not alone in letting the housework get just a little bit on top of them. The subsequent photo essays are our gifts to the world on this day, the first day of the New Year, which is all about turning over new leaves and (perhaps) finding out once and for all what really lurks beneath the oven. If you’re that way inclined, that is – I personally am happy to leave it another year.
Some might call us brave. Most will call us slovenly. But here it is: the Awful Truth – in colour!
OUR EXTENDED FAMILY
In a recent school exercise, Mr Justice completed the sentence “The people in my family are…” with the following list:
MUM, DAD, [PIXIE], [TIDDLES], MY CAT, MY SPIDERS AND MY IGUANA.
And he then drew this little picture…
Exhibit A: Check out Mummy's club foot!
It doesn’t take a genius to deduct from Mr Justice’s family portrait that we have a small spider problem in our house, but here’s a photo just to underline the point:
Exhibit B: Web-tastic!
And for the record, I chose this particular spiderweb to photograph not because it was the biggest or the best but because I liked the perilously-placed skewers a-top of the cupboard so that anyone trying to clear those cobwebs might find themselves in a Raiders of the Lost Ark-style trap. Take that, spider slayers!
STORAGE CRISIS
Here’s a small example of how things get stored in our house:
Exhibit C: Ikea, eat your heart out!
I have often thought I’d be the perfect candidate for that TV show “My Life on the Lawn” except there ain’t no lawn big enough in these here parts to hold my junk. Not even the lawns of the White House could handle it. No, truly.
THE SMUDGE ZONE
Right through my house there is a designated “smudge zone” at toddler height where Jam Hands have left their Dreadful Mark over the last three years. As my children have grown taller, the height of the smudge zone has increased – hell, consider it a kind of organic growth chart…
Exhibit D: It's almost Monet-esque in its dappled beauty
And why restrict the smudge zone to just walls and doorways: check out this pane of glass on the door separating our kitchen from the front of the house…
Exhibit E: Looking at the world through smudge-covered glass
I should add that the freakiest thing about looking at this photo is that I have the added layer of smudge on my computer screen… and then the further layer of smudge on my glasses… not to mention the blear of sleeplessness over my eyes… Layer upon layer upon layer, just like a Sara Lee danish, except not nearly half as edible.
WALL ART
Behold the wall next to Mr Justice’s bed!
Exhibit F: The Wall of Mysteries
It’s hard to tell from this distance, but I suspect a lot of those marks present a veritable smorgasbord of human excretia. But I wouldn’t get up too close if I were you – and I, as me, certainly haven’t. Quite clearly.
And then there’s the burning question about what jolly japes an unattended toddler armed with a box of Crayolas might get up to. Well, my children have kindly answered that one for us:
Exhibit G: My budding Michaelangelos (as in the artist and not the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle)
I love this photo because you can see the line where the book shelves used to be before I got sick to death of picking up all the books off the floor every day. Ah, good times.
WHAT LIES BENEATH
Every now and then I get the washing up and the laundry done in time to do one of the “extra” cleaning chores, such as wiping down the cupboards or dusting the mantel piece or maybe even the vacuuming. And then once in a blue moon, I do something stupid like remove the “Dust Baffle” at the bottom of the fridge…
Exhibit H: Where fridge magnets crawl off to die...
Or think to finally hang up the sodden bathmat and find this on its underbelly:
Exhibit I: Leave all bathmats unturned...
Yes, that really is what was underneath my bathmat. Obviously my hope here is that eventually the bathmat will grow its own legs and turn itself in at the nearest washing machine. You see, there’s method in my slovenliness.
And on that lovely note, here ends the photo essay.
Of course, I’ve done this whole “flashing of our dirty bits” post with The Bearded Iris entirely on trust. I’m hoping that she’s not going to show me up by posting photos of neatly folded, freshly-laundered colour-coded towels in her linen cupboard claiming it’s a total mess because someone’s accidentally put one of the bath towels in with the beach towels. Or, worse still, this whole simultaneous post thing was part of some Department of Community Services international sting operation to get me to provide photographic evidence for their files. I wouldn’t put it past those tricksy DoCS officers.
So, just in case I’m going it alone here, I’m inviting everyone to send in photos of their secret housekeeping shames to notdrowningmother@gmail.com - all photographic material received will be treated with the strictest confidence and the anonymity of the sender preserved. Unless of course you cross me - in which case I’m going to expose your slipshod arse for All the World to see (if, that is, you consider “all the world” to be my readership-of-three, which I personally do). I’ll be waiting by my inbox, people…
In the meantime, I’d like to wish all three of you a Happy New Year – may 2009 be a good one for one and all.
and one more thing…
“Iris writing to me about a photo she’d taken of a “booger” one of her children had thoughtfully placed upon one of her walls, out of harm’s reach or perhaps as a snack for later. ” DUDE. You are HILARIOUS! Snack for later. Killing me!
darn, my first comment didn’t post!… too bad, because it was a GEM about how damn funny you are, woman. And brave too. I was totally afraid to show the underside of my bath mat (if you know what I mean) because DFACS would surely get involved with that kind of evidence.
The drawing with the spiders and the club foot?! And then the part about the Wall of Mysteries… I’m about to wet my pants over here.
Sadly, this is the most fun I’ve had in quite a while… at least since I baked that last batch of Vulva Candies.
Love you and your filthy home, you Aussie Uber Mom.
That was great. And I shall have to find the camera and take my own pictures as our office serves as a catch all and I don’t believe in picking up my husband’s clothes, who doesn’t believe in hampers or dresser drawers.
NDM you are a very inspirational woman; a role model for all mothers. You have transcended the house, you have liberated yourself from the shackles of a dust free, tidy, gleaming oasis. I admire women like you and Iris. You are revolutionaries, at the frontier of redefining what it means to be a housewife in the new millenia, just as long as the spiders aren’t huntsmen of course.
You’ve inspired and reassured me NDM! Finally I get to make a New Year’s Resolution I’ll be able to keep. I vow to do less housework and be proud of it. And also to make Temple of Doom style traps around the house.
Let hugs remain more important than cleaning the bath, let children bust their moves with confidence in their own homes, let the skewers and other dangerous items continue to be placed up on a ledge where little hands can’t reach them and nevermind how they look up there, let there be glorious cobwebs to inspire little people to consider them part of the family! Wonderful. You truly are an excellent homemaker.
i love your house, always have..it’s the tea, laughing & friendship that keeps me coming back…& maybe the odd cup cake!
At last – I can now regard the downstairs bath (which has been a stand-in as a shed since we moved in 18 months ago and contains many disparate items including old toys, garden tools and – ahem – a bicycle) with pride. Photo to follow….. NDM and Iris – you rock ladies!! Happy New Year xxx
Hilarious! Love this! I did the same thing in 2008 and called it “Squalor Corner.” I even blogged the filling of a mason jar with the flotsam swept from my kitchen floor. Equal parts insipid and horrifying. Check it out: http://soupisnotafingerfood.wordpress.com/squalor-corner/
PS – don’t ever remove the dust baffle thingy from the bottom of your fridge. I did the same thing a few weeks ago and discovered I was much happier before.
That was the ballsiest thing I’ve read and viewed in years.
And you are my new idol. Because you know the name of the refrigerator plastic foot thingie, and that it comes off. Had no idea. Don’t want to know what lies beneath, for I’m not a clean floor kind of lady. Did it during the crawler months. Now I have better things to worry about.
I’m not sure why you and bearded iris count marker and crayon on the walls as evidence of lackidaisical housekeeping. I call it art and feel no remorse. The smudges are faux finishes. All the rage on HGTV, so my toddler helps out. The excretions…well, I can’t help you there. I used entire bottles of ineffective organic spray soap shit daily to get rid of that stuff. That’s why all the dishes in the house are in the sink, staining the sink with tomato-y and oily residue–I’m busy scraping human secretions off walls and can’t be bothered to clean the stuff we actually eat off.
Thank you for this post. It helped me add another layer of impossible dreams to my New Year’s dissolutions. Like that Sara Lee danish, only dissolving before my eyes. And so go my sanity and will to leave my house as horribly filthy as it now stands.
Thanks for the laugh and the kick in the pants. I must go now and clean. Or force Spouse to clean, and then ignore the fact that he never will.
Re the storage crisis – at least you have shelves (which I believe your husband constructed) and boxes – I don’t have these things, and often resort to wildly quoting Julia in the Ikea scene from Love My Way Series 1: “Storage systems, Charlie! I need storage systems!”
I’ve been too busy taking photographs of my own home to post a comment – you raised the bar pre-tty high there ladyee – anyway think I got some stuff to rival yours and will email it to you asap (will try to get over my procrasination problem and actually get round to that).
Let the Slut* Wars commence!
*I mean ‘slut’ here in the sense that my mother uses it in regard to housekeeping not sexual mores. Photo evidence might be more tricky for that one, although…..
THAT is TOO wonderful! Thank you for that! Thank you so much! I may have to copy you all on this just for giggles.
Love love LOVE it. That’s where all my fridge magnets went too. Well, I think they did. I’m too scared to check. Must admit that I usually have some help around the house but she went away for 2 weeks. In that time I discovered that I’m pretty tidy, but not at all clean. Keep finding bits of old pasta and corn wedged between the toe bits of my socks as I’m walking in the kitchen. Even found the peel of a tangerine in the lounge and it’s been a few weeks since one of those was eaten in that room. Thank goodness it’s winter here. In the summer I’d have found a dozen daddy long legs accompanying all the food scraps. I’ll take a photo and blog them when that happens! My question for you, Mrs Mop is … do any of your school mums read your blog and do you see them every day at the school gates and what do they say to you? Are you their hero? Much love and I’m LOVING your blogs! Am I one of your 3 readers??
Oooh, forgot to mention the tangle of hair that I find every time I move a bit of furniture or remove some clothes from the dryer. I had a ball the other night, picking up hair from my bathroom floor. Ended up with enough for a decent wig!
But no backwards “Redrum” on the mirror?
You two guys are the conjoined twins of fun. Brilliant, brilliant blogging.
When I was wee I was the last one out of the shared (between three) bath so was always getting the blame for what was left behind. Each week – yes in Scotland we only bathed once a week, they were hard times – I was accused of leaving nose pickings smeared on the tiles but each week I furiously denied it (“It wasnae me”). In the end I was dragged in and had my face shoved into a green slime mess. “Oh that. That’s not nose pickings it’s ear pickings.”
[...] her out and then vote for her, then let me explain. What other mom do you know is willing to post her dirtiest secrets of uncleanliness and godlessness? What other mom do you know will willing watch five children under six AND take them on an [...]
[...] Here they are, flashing their dirty bits in the first of three simultaneous postings. Click here to read the sister-post. [...]