Clean

I love a clean house.

I don’t necessarily love cleaning my house. It’s a lot of work and it can feel overwhelming when you have young kids underfoot who undo your hours of effort in 10 minutes.

But I do love shining floors and grease-free counters and sinks without toothpaste globs and – best of all – carpets with vacuum lines.

So I clean. For the past several years, my routine is to clean the house on Mondays. I don’t schedule any outside-of-the-home activities that day, which is a Sabbath in itself, and I focus on putting the house back in order. It makes my chart-loving, list-making melancholic heart sigh with satisfaction when I know that I have one day each week when my house will truly sparkle. (Having a scheduled day also helps keep that same melancholic in check, because I don’t allow myself to freak out when I see crumbs under the table and spots on the bathroom mirrors. “Oh well, I’ll get to it Monday,” is the mantra I use to keep a good habit from becoming an addiction.)

As you might imagine, this schedule works well until one morphs into a Heffalump. Then, vacuuming gets hard. Heck, walking across the kitchen gets hard. My husband, bless his heart, sensed my frustration. Last month, he started vacuuming for me on the weekends and generally attending to whatever tasks I knew I couldn’t complete in my current handicapped state.

But he’s already got a job – one that pays and everything. And he travels for work. I know he’d rather spend his precious free time playing with the kids or going for a run in the sunshine instead of vacuuming dog hair off the countless stairs of our home.

Enter stage right: the cleaning service. A few weeks ago, Corey and I discussed the idea of me hiring a cleaning service to deal with the house for the remainder of the pregnancy – and maybe for the first few weeks after the baby is born. Corey was fine with the cost. It’s a splurge, but our intent is that this will be a short-term luxury. Thus, I began the search. And last Thursday, a cleaning crew made its first appearance in our humble abode.

Here’s where you'd probably expect me to insert a thousand hallelujahs in a big, bright, bouncing font. And I’m thankful. Truly, I am.

But here’s the deal: They didn’t clean the house like me. They didn’t do as good of a job as I would have done. And so, I was disappointed.

I knew it was unrealistic to expect strangers to know they should empty the diaper genie and refill the Q-tip containers in the bathrooms and top off the flour and sugar canisters in the kitchen so they would look purty for a few hours.

But I couldn’t help it. I was disappointed and frustrated that I’d paid money for a job that was only half done, according to my standards.

I voiced my frustrations to Corey on the phone that night. (He was out of town, naturally.) And somewhere in the midst of my complaining about the half-filled Q-tip containers, I heard a voice in my head. It said: Control freak.

“CONTROL FREAK?!? Excuse me? I just want a clean home,” I argued with the voice. “Why should I pay money for someone to come into my house and make a few swipes with a dust cloth? I mean, if they aren’t going to do the job right, fine. I’ll just do it myself.”

At that point, Corey patiently interjected. (Poor man. Imagine having to interrupt a conversation between your wife and your wife.) “They might not do a perfect job, Kelly, but the whole point of hiring them is you can't vacuum or mop or dust or wipe down the fridge AT ALL right now, much less perfectly. Isn’t having some help better than no help at all?”

Humph. Maybe. Yes. No. I don’t know.

It’s easier for a camel to fit through the eye of a needle than it is for a control freak to admit she might have control issues.

“It’s not ME! It’s EVERYONE ELSE!”

I took Corey’s wise words and my mental anguish to bed that night. And I thought. And pondered. And even prayed.

And I think that voice in my head – the one that called me a control freak – might have been the Holy Spirit calling me out. He knows better than anyone that I hate, despise, abhor asking for help. I’m happy to give it. I don’t know how to receive it.

Today, the cleaning crew returned. They’ll show up every Thursday until the Lord returns or this baby arrives, whichever comes first. This week, I had them use my vacuum – a Dyson Animal – so the carpet sported vacuum lines. I made sure I emptied the diaper genie into the garbage before they arrived. And later this afternoon, I’ll go back through the house and return the pillows to the correct side of the couch and rearrange the knick-knacks to their rightful place and – yes – refill the Q-tip containers.

And I will do it with a humble heart. A grateful heart.

It’s healthy for a control freak to hand over the reigns every once in a while. It’s a good reminder that the world won’t come to an end if I’m not in charge. I am not God.

My house is clean enough. And that's enough for me.

(Also? I just noticed the end of the toilet paper is folded into those cute little triangles. That makes up for the Q-tips.)