Some of my kitchen cupboards

With the new organised look..pink, blue and white boxes! Containers for ( nearly) everything! I can find things....

I kinda, sheepishly, like housework, I love working, I am just bad at it.

I lead a semi organised life, you know?

And when you are working - like yesterday, six loads of washing, grocery shopping, cleaning the kitchen cupboards, cooking for a dinner guest , in between reading some of the letters of St Ignatius of Antioch, - the physical work allows one to create a mini cone of

silence. (Remember Get Smart?)

Quiet in which one can pray. Or think. Or compose sentences for your next writing or blogging attempt. While also having the cone of silence interrupted, interrupted in a nice, familiar, I-love-this-family way, by your kids talking to you, laughing at you, making their usual witty comments and asking their usual myriad of questions.

Part of the draw of housework is that it is a fantastic counterpoint to thinking work. One friend who works from home says: “If I am stuck on a work problem, I take out the ironing and watch old episodes of Dallas on cable. I think I am pretending I am my mother, and it is comforting.” The Joy of Housework

I play at being a good housewife, a 1950s televsion mother. Or Mrs Brady from the Brady Bunch. ( Greg pointed put - Did she wear a short black skirt and knee length bright pink and green striped Ramones socks to clean, as you do, Mum?..) My kids can be so sarcastic!

Heaven forbid that any of us take a moderate approach to cleaning. That is too boring. And with boring comes another kind of shame. Take my screen visits to Flylady: when I am reading her tips on the website and my husband or kids come into the room, I immediately switch screens as if I had been looking at porn, because I don’t want them to know that I have sunk to this sink-shining low. Reading about housework is my dirty little secret. It sure beats actually doing any. From that Times article above.