Recently, my daughter, Clementine, spent five hours cleaning one of the bathrooms in our house. This wasn’t by choice–it was one of her chores–and although, judging from the amount of time she spent cleaning it you might think that we possess what must either be the world’s biggest, or the world’s cleanest, bathroom, neither is true. The fact is, she spent five hours cleaning a four by five foot space and never even got around to sweeping the floor.
Oh, sure, she claimed to have swept it. Every one of the 75 times she marched out of the bathroom and announced she was done (in much the same tone Civil War surgeons must have announced they were done after amputating their 300th leg of the evening) she responded to my questions about the floor’s status with an exasperated, “”It’s swept, ok? There’s nothing on the floor.” But, alas, just as the doctors learned to their dismay at Gettysburg (and as I was to also learn to my dismay after a quick peek at the bathroom), she was not, in fact, done.
And how did I know this? Had I planted some tiny little scrap, some infinitesimally small object somewhere on the floor which I was now using as an evaluative guide? Not quite: it was more like the sight of a six inch long rubber bat being devoured by a mammoth grey dust bunny that tipped me off.
“Are you honestly telling me you don’t see that?” I asked the third time I had returned to the “finished” bathroom and gazed down upon the horrifying tableau.
“You never said I was supposed to clean that,” was the reply. In her defense I suppose I had only said “clean the floor,” and not “clean all the floor–especially the parts that look like they came straight out of Monty Python Meets Dracula.” Of course, it wasn’t like the rubber rodent population was her only obstacle, either: there was also the little matter of her having–perhaps in a bid for efficiency– “mopped” the floor (read: splashed a dirty mop around) before she had “swept”it (see Rubber Bat; above), thereby giving even more authenticity to the bat cave look by the addition of the long, grey “filthicles” hanging off of every vertical surface the mop had touched. (Which, judging from the vigorous thumping I had heard coming from the bathroom, and the evidence before me, was nearly all of them.)
And this was only in the first hour.
As we went back and forth over the next four hours–me with my uptight insistence that pieces of trash larger than a bread basket actually qualified as “trash,” and her with her equally insistent claims that wet, dirty wash-clothes don’t go in the hamper, but are rather shoved all the way to the back of the bottom drawer–I couldn’t help but wishing that I was paying her. Not because I would then be getting an incredibly hourly value out of whatever set price we had agreed on, but because if I had hired her, I would now be able to fire her. But just as you can’t break up with your children, you can’t fire them either, and so we continued, on and on, until, finally, five long hours later the bathroom floor, while still not clean enough to eat off of (or even, really, walk barefoot over), was clean enough to pass my (ever-lowering) standards. And although, in the time it took her to get to that point Buddhist monks could have collected all the dirt in the bathroom, separated it into individual grains and created a splendid sand painting in the middle of the room, at least it was done. And hopefully something was learned from the effort. Like, when Mom is checking, don’t forget to pick up the freaking bat–she’s funny about things like that.