I’m Ashamed of My Dirty, Messy Home

On Rejecting the Expectation to Clean | 🧼 no. 008

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“Our Nest Is Blessed, So Pardon the Mess”

—A Doormat I Saw at Walmart

I. Please Pardon My Mess

If cleanliness is next to Godliness, as my dad was fond of saying, I’m not sure what that means for me and my dirty, messy home.

“I’m so sorry about the house—things have just been crazy lately!”

I hear myself apologizing to visitors, trying to casually contextualize the disorder of my household in a vain and futile effort to preempt their potential criticism and address any judgmental thoughts they may be thinking as I walk them through my shame: The smelly sofa (where my son often spits out his milk or abandons leaking sippy cups), the sticky floor, the finger-printed sliding glass doors, the dirty dishes, the cluttered counters, the scattered toys—the full kitchen trash can, the full diaper trash can, the full recycling trash can, the full bathroom trash cans—the dust, the crust, the endless crumbs, and other thrown and/or dropped food. Crunch squish splat as we walk through the living room.

But, look, things have been crazy lately, cliché or not.

I’ve been crazy lately—going crazy? Substitute “lately” with “for a long while,” and it’s less of a lie.

More often than not, I feel ashamed and embarrassed when we have visitors. I play defense, arms stretched out wide, guiding them through curated paths I’ve cleaned and made appropriate for guests, shoving all unsightly things into the margins or cupboards or closets.

This is hospitality.

I want to explain to them this is all temporary: I’m a messy person who refuses to believe he’s a dirty person aspiring to be a clean person—does that make sense?

I want to be forgiven for having this dirty, messy home, and for them to know I hate living in it as much as they hate looking at it, and for them to sincerely believe I’m the type of person who likes and believes in clean things and is responsible enough to clean his home—that, seriously, I swear one day they’ll be here wide-eyed with their jaws smacking against the floor going “Oooo” as the angels sing and the light from the heavens shines down through parted fluffy clouds to illuminate the cleanest house they’ve ever seen. Hospitals and museums won’t have anything on me: Mr. Clean 2.0, standing there arrogantly with arms crossed but hopefully with some of my thinning hair left to hide the baldness.

Given all this guilt, you might think I’d be motivated to do something about it, but the fact is I hate cleaning, and this is a sentiment that’s only partially explained by my laziness.

This dirty home is a willful rejection of the expectation to clean.

II. Protecting Dad

When I was growing up, we cleaned a lot because of my dad.

After his lung cancer diagnosis, losing most of his right lung, and learning he had a long-term condition called bronchiectasis¹ in what remained, there was an understandable emphasis on doing what we could to help dad recover and mitigate or prevent anything that would make his condition worse. He was always, always coughing.

And so we cleaned.

We cleaned throughout the week—dad is a clean freak by nature and also has a mean dust allergy—and we had dedicated chore days to keep the house pristine.

I used to play this game with my mom and sister called G.I. Joe where mom would assign us cleaning tasks with strict expectations and timelines. The militaristic name had nothing to do with the cleaning, really; it was just my favorite show as a little boy, and my beautiful mom was savvy enough to link cleaning with the virtues and heroism of the cartoon soldiers I watched combat the evils of Cobra Command every week. If Duke would pick up after himself and help dust the living room, then so would I: Knowing Is Half the Battle!

The top priority was trying to keep germs out of the house. If dad caught your standard cold or flu, the logic went, it could potentially snowball into something more serious like pneumonia and, given his weakened immune system and limited lung capacity, pose a serious risk to his health and even life. Hyperbolic as it sounds to me now, I spent much of my young life worrying I’d kill my dad if I gave him my cold.

To ensure this didn’t happen, I started homeschool at the end of second grade to minimize my exposure to germs (i.e., other children) and hopefully get sick less often as a result.

When we did get sick or think someone was coming down with something, we’d wear face masks inside the house and go around spraying Lysol in furious misty arcs, watching them gently cascade down to the ground, hoping they’d eradicate any lingering threats to dad’s safety.

These days, I still get queasy every time I smell Lysol. Its pungent, flowery synthetic scent reminds me of being stuck in the house, of recycling my stale breath inside those flimsy masks whenever I had a cold, of being afraid, of worrying about sickness and death.

This is why I’m a Febreze man.

III. Writing to Thrive and Not Just Survive

Given my life is full of work and debt and taking care of my precious young children—all of which I’m grateful for, by the way (sans the debt)—there is barely enough time for me and my wife to enjoy a date once a month (if we’re lucky), and there are always additional chores or obligations that need tending to; I’m also an academic administrator, and I teach, so there’s always grading and email waiting to steal a portion of my evening or weekend. So, if I have a rare window of unoccupied time that presents itself to me, I sure as heck don’t want to spend it cleaning my baseboards or dusting or vacuuming or breathing in Clorox while I scrub the toilets with that stupid plastic brush whose tough bristles always manage to fling something unpleasant into my eyes.

I know this may sound petulant, immature, and privileged; I own all of that along with my laziness and procrastination. After all, I don’t believe in giving myself breaks, and I never miss an opportunity to catalogue my faults. It’s one of my favorite pastimes, and I’m really good at it: I have a Ph.D. in eviscerating myself.

But my life is so full and I aspire to achieve so much that something has to give. In a marvelous chapter titled “The Limit-Embracing Life” from his superb anti-productivity book Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals, Oliver Burkeman provides the following “Icy Blast of Reality”:

In practical terms, a limit-embracing attitude to time means organizing your days with the understanding that you definitely won’t have time for everything you want to do, or that other people want you to do—and so, at the very least, you can stop beating yourself up for failing. Since hard choices are unavoidable, what matters is learning to make them consciously, deciding what to focus on and what to neglect, rather than letting them get made by default—or deceiving yourself that, with enough had work and the right time management tricks, you might not have to make them at all.

Hard, conscious choices, as Burkeman points out, are required: We must acknowledge our limits and choose what we will focus on and what we will neglect. And, seeing as I will never neglect my family, and I need my career to survive, what’s left?

Well, how about cleaning?

Because it can’t be the writing. Making art—making videos, writing essays, and starting this Substack—is not a hobby: It’s how I take care of myself.

Sometimes I go to a dark place, and I feel like my life doesn’t matter, and that I don’t matter, and my happiness gets swallowed up by my perceived insignificance. The daily routine of work and childcare often leaves me feeling like I exist for existence’s sake, and I’ll die having experienced or achieved nothing (excluding my children of course, but how unfair to burden and charge them both with furnishing me a sense of completeness—how unfair to whisper the confession to myself: I’m only alive for you and your mom).

Writing, meanwhile, cleanses me: It helps purge the darkness, filling me up and making me feel fully human. Sometimes I don’t understand how I feel or why I feel the way I do, and it’s the act of writing that allows me to see into myself and uncover what was previously hidden and obscured. I discover and invent and decode myself through writing. I spent too much of my life neglecting it, which means I spent too many years not understanding my own cryptic heart.

And, equally as important, writing helps fight against the loneliness. I just get so lonely, and writing is my cosmic message in a bottle I send out to the universe at regular intervals in hopes someone out there receives and is heartened by it, and sees me standing there in my averageness and vulnerability at the edge of my own mind, waving to them and, in doing so, we’re somehow connected if only for the time they spend reading my work—for one special moment the distance collapses and the loneliness subsides.

Besides, aren’t writers supposed to be dirty? The proverbial narcissistic pigs rolling around and reveling in their own filth? Who wants a clean writer? Isn’t me showing up covered in my own mess part of my charm?

IV. Cleaning and Breathing

Recently, I was building my two-year-old daughter’s new bed and cleaning her room—sweeping the floors, vacuuming the padded Ruggable, organizing the closet, throwing out the miscellaneous trash—when something strange happened: I inhaled and then exhaled a big, deep breath from way down in my belly, and I felt the tension leave my shoulders.

It felt good to be cleaning, to be building. It felt restorative.

Perhaps I’ve inadvertently created a false dichotomy: Clean and no art, or messy with art. Somewhere, I think the framework got twisted, and I’ve since misunderstood the purpose and value of cleaning.

I’m allowing myself to embrace the idea that nothing is ever truly clean or pristine or pure—there’s always a stain or a spot or a tear somewhere—and it isn’t about finally achieving some illusive, arbitrary goal of getting the house perfectly clean.

Instead, it’s about relishing the process of cleaning, of participating in some intimate, intentional act of cleansing, transforming something—albeit briefly—into a state unburdened by the elements of everyday life. It’s the act of cleaning that matters and the intention of leaving something a bit better than you found it.

So, please, pardon this mess: I’m working on it.

1. My dad’s condition might also be chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD). My dad has had so many health problems over the years that the specifics get murky; however, this is what I was told growing up, so it’s what I’m calling it here.