A housewife who hates housework - that's me. No, I am not a housewife by choice, but by accidents of life. I would never have chosen this job. I'm looking at the kitchen walls and realize I should wash the tiles. After all, there is dust gathering on them. Yes, dust gathers on vertical surfaces in my house. But the day is gray and there isn't much light to see by. Turn on the kitchen lights? But then it feels like night and night is a time to wind down and do my own things. They don't include cleaning the kitchen tiles. If it were sunny and if the sun lighted up the kitchen then I would think about it. I would think about it because I would also want to go out and enjoy the sun. Most women in Spain have spotless houses. At my sister-in-law's house I think you could actually eat off the floor. There isn't a flyspeck anywhere on any glass surface. Not a drop of grease in the kitchen. Dust is as foreign an object in her house as desert sand is in the street. She spends most of her time at home cleaning. Privately, I think she's bored.

Is there a perfect time to do such non-immediate housework? Yes, when I wake up, come downstairs and feel the energy to tackle something extra. How often does that happen? We're not even talking about blue moons here. But I've always been this way. I was nine years old and my mother told me to make my bed by myself. We had always made it together and now I felt abandoned. No way was I going to do it by myself. "But Ma, I don't know how to do it by myself. You have to help me." I wasn't going to get out of it. My mother told me to make the bed because I was nine years old and perfectly capable of doing so. I set out to show my mother just how badly I knew how to make the bed by leaving the sheets hanging on to the floor on one side and the bedspread on the other. "See! I told you I couldn't do it by myself!" Nothing doing. She told me to go back and make it correctly and that I wasn't going to go play until the bed was perfect. I had no choice. With a face down to my feet I went back and made it correctly. Why was she doing this to me? I was only nine, I shouldn't be obliged to do any kind of housework.

I still feel like that now. 


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