Are you a slob? Just blame poor grandmom

The Boston Herald

Beverly Beckham

My mother-in-law makes her bed the minute she gets out of it. So does my friend, Anne. Pat keeps Windex and paper towels in the bathroom and wipes down the sink in the morning before she leaves for work. Caryn folds clothes when the dryer buzzes. A different Ann vacuums her garage once a week.

Each insists that what she does is easy. "If you make your bed right away, it's done for the day," my mother-in-law likes to say. "Plus it tidies up the room."

"If you empty the dryer when it buzzes, then you don't have to iron the clothes," Caryn continually tells me. "It only takes a second. And it saves so much time."

If you put the dishes directly into the dishwasher instead of piling them in the sink...

If you piled the newspapers after you read them instead of strewing them around...

If you put the cover on the toothpaste...

If you trained your children and disciplined the dog and didn't let anyone eat in the family room and insisted that wet towels be hung up and cleaned the heating ducts and scrubbed the stove every time you use it and put on a wash every morning...

If wishes were horses then beggars would ride, my grandmother used to say. I never really understood that expression, but I understood well the woman who said it. "Why don't you play in the bedroom," she would tell me when my mother and I would visit, "Don't worry about messing it up. The bed isn't made. It's airing."

Airing. How I loved that word. There was something magical about it, as if the sheets and blankets were like skin, imbibing the air around them. Airing. Why didn't my mother let our beds air?

"Make sure you wash out those cups before you pour the tea," my grandmother would say when the kettle boiled. She had a habit of storing things in tea cups: rubber bands and stamps and pennies she found on the street; old gum drops, even bobby pins. The cups had to be washed.

Maybe that's where I got my slob genes - from this grandmother who would scrub the steps leading to her apartment every day, even when she was old and shouldn't have been scrubbing at all; but who would never notice the dirt on her own kitchen floor or the cobwebs hanging from the ceiling.

In contrast, my mother was Mrs. Clean, out-out-damn-spotting her life away and teaching me to do the same. Under her tutelage I bloomed. I washed and starched doilies. I took the glass top off the coffee table every Saturday morning, scrubbed both sides, dusted the wood underneath and slid the glass back. I vacuumed what no one ever saw: underneath the bed, behind the couch; above the doors.

My mother's training lingered for years while my grandmother's genes lay dormant. When I was first married, the vacuum was my best friend. I vacuumed the living room rug so that all the power-nozzle lines were parallel and unbroken. I vacuumed the ceilings in every room. I even vacuumed the dog so that he wouldn't shed so much.

So what happened to me? Where is the neat person I used to be? When did heredity overtake environment?

I blame my kids for the transformation. I might have stayed neat, if not for them, might not have know the reckless delight of airing my own bed. But I got tired of picking up crayons and Weebles and Ring Ding wrappers, tired of saying "Make your bed or you can't go out." "Clean your room or you're grounded." "Who didn't flush the toilet?" "Whose turn is it to take out the rubbish?" I got tired of all the nagging. So I quit - nagging cleaning.

The result is a house full of newspapers, a sink full of dishes, dog hair on the floor, dog hair on the ceiling, books and tapes all over the place, laundry that needs to be washed, laundry that needs to be folded, and three children who don't even know that the glass comes out of the end table, and who all define a vacuum as an absence of matter.

The other night I walked into a neighbor's home and the place was so clean it echoed. Her floors glowed. Her couch was hairless. Her windows were transparent.

She has a dog. She has children. She has a life. So what am I doing wrong?

"What was your grandmother like?" I asked her.

"Huh?" she said, with a puzzled look. "My grandmother?"

"Never mind," I said, leaving, not needing the answer. It was obvious that she never had a grandmother who let the bed air.