Motherhood and More: Housework slides down priority list

I’ll never be a domestic goddess.

I’ll also never enjoy the phrase “domestic goddess,” but that’s a whole other column.

But I’m not sure I was made for this type of work. I mean, I don’t necessarily care I’ve had stacks of magazines on the end table for months and every month the stack just keeps growing. I keep meaning to go through them and get rid of the ones I don’t need — probably all of them — but I don’t ever seem to have the time. Or the desire.

There always are toys strewn about almost every room in the house, including the bathroom for some reason. And there are Lego pieces pretty much everywhere you look but they’re small, and so, hide well. But I refuse to spend all day following my children around picking up all the toys they haphazardly drop just to drive me crazy. I’ll have to do it again in five minutes.

There’s dust where it shouldn’t be, there’s unorganized books on the bookshelf, there’s dirty dishes in my sink. And my bedroom has somehow become a catch-all area.

That’s life. Or it’s my life, I guess.

Still, it bugs me. I would love to be better at this sort of thing. I would love to have my house spotless first thing in the morning and last thing at night. And I mean the whole house, even the closets, not just the parts you see without opening any doors.

But I’ve never been that way. And I don’t think of myself as lazy, though some might disagree. But everything is even harder now. It’s like, I feel like I’m finally at a point in my life where I will clean when I need to instead of watching television or reading a book but it’s so difficult to sweep the kitchen floor without the 4-year-old running back and forth through the dirt or wash dishes without the 2-year-old thinking it’s time for her to play in the water.

I know it’s a little anti-girl power, whatever that means, but I do want to excel at this. I want to have a household schedule and stick to it, I want to be organized, I want to have meals planned for the entire month and I want to get rid of all the dust.

And I’m getting there, slowly.

But cleaning still is pushed to the side, mainly because I’m so much better at it when no one is around and someone always is around.

The other day I was doing laundry and washed our sheets, telling myself I had to remember to put them in the dryer and back on the bed before it was actually time for bed. But then I forgot about them. All day.

I remembered late, probably around 10 p.m., that they still needed to be dried.

And so there I was, at 11:30 p.m. with my one nice set of sheets and blankets still in the dryer, with myself and my husband exhausted and ready to sleep.

And all I could think was Martha Stewart would never be in this predicament.

*This column originally published in The News-Enterprise on October 24, 2012.