I have a picture in my head of Mom. She’s wearing soft denim shorts to just above her knees. Her hair is in curlers, a red bandana tied around the curlers, a cigarette on her lip. Next to her, on the floor, is a flat metal ashtray, the kind that folds like tin when you bend it. We are both sitting on a rug in front of the TV. She’s watching Another World. Mom likes the plain-looking older woman, Ada, but not Rachel, Ada’s daughter. I’m not allowed to talk while the action is taking place; fortunately, commercials come on every few minutes.
Mom watches Another World every day at this hour, shortly before our nap and right after our lunch. She only superficially follows As the World Turns and General Hospital. General Hospital is the hottest thing going on in soap opera drama, but Mom has never been one to follow trends. It is Ada and Rachel she is faithful to.
This particular day Mom has a basket of clothing by her side, and like one of those chowders you buy nowadays that comes in a bowl made of bread, Mom’s basket of clothing never seems to get all the way down to the bottom. She folds, smokes, watches TV. Smokes, watches TV, folds again.
I have had this memory before, and in it Mom is sometimes watching something other than Another World. One time it is John F. Kennedy’s assassination or funeral, I’m not sure which, although I do know I would have been too young to remember either. Yet, the details of that memory are especially acute: the orange cotton jumper Mom is folding, the one she sewed herself for Janet. The white hard plastic of the laundry basket. The cold tiles on the floor where my hand rests. What it is about that spot? Did we sit there often?
I am always young in my memory of that place, as is Mom. We are both earnest, both willing to be the best we can be at our respective roles. Mom is still willing to take her laundry basket with her to wherever she goes to sit; she still folds the clothes into piles while smoking her cigarettes and watching her soap. She is still kind to me, making me lunch, trying to show me the ways of moms.
Later on, in a newer house, she will keep all the clothes in a basket underneath the ironing board perpetually set up, but rarely used, in the master bedroom. The basket will get so full of clean clothes that a second one will be employed. All my clothes and those of my sister and brother will be stuffed into those two baskets, shirts on top of socks, pants on top of shirts, occasionally a set of clean sheets or a bedspread thrown on top of the entire heap. By the time any of us pulls out an item to wear, it will be so wrinkled from the weight of every other item that no amount of ironing, not even with steam nor the spray of a water bottle, will take out the indentations that soon become the hallmark of our fashion.
By then I will be sassy and sarcastic towards Mom. I will snarl at her, call her names, become an unruly teenager. I will throw a bottle of nail polish at her when she makes a snide comment about my boyfriend. But in that one long-ago memory, the one where Mom and I sit on the floor together, I watch her with big eyes. I notice how well she maneuvers her many devices — the television, the clothes, her cigarettes, the ashtray. I love everything about her, especially her smell, which I now realize is exactly the scent of clean laundry.
I wonder what it is about folding clothes that repeats itself, like a little ballerina doing pirouettes in my mind. Why not washing dishes or dusting, or scrubbing floors on her hands and knees? Mom wasn’t the kind of housewife who wore an apron. She didn’t whistle while she worked, nor did she sing. Mom didn’t buy into brand names — Tide and Palmolive (“you’re soaking in it!”). She called all powder disinfectant cleaners “Ajax,” even when she bought Comet. (Comet…it makes you vomit…so buy Comet, and vomit, too-dayyy…)
When I think of Mom and cleaning, I think of conflict. I think of anger and resentment. She hated to clean. She was so impatient she wouldn’t even allow us to clean. “I’ll make your beds, just get out of my hair,” she told us. Mom was a nervous wreck (her words) when I was growing up. She had too many kids, and eventually things started to happen. Teen pregnancy, drugs, smoking, drinking.
She wasn’t a controlling woman; she only cared that things were “clean enough.” But cleaning was just one more chore she never really wanted to sign up for. Mom was happiest when she was sitting over coffee with Tomasita from across the street or playing poker with her friends or watching her soap opera.
Maybe that’s why this particular memory of folding clothes while watching TV comes to me again and again. And this, always this: She asks me to go get her a glass of water. I jump up and run to the kitchen. There on the counter is an open package of windmill cookies with almond slivers. I take a piece of a broken cookie, put it my mouth and let it melt while I fill up her glass. It is quiet in the house for once, just the sound of breathy voices coming from the television, and that stark sensation that daytime TV produces. While the the rest of the world is out doing what they do and Mom is here with me, doing what it is we do.
-Based on a ten-minute practice from Topic Post, Cleanliness.
[…] Everything I Know About Cleaning I Learned From My Mother » Tuesday, August 28, 2007 Everything I Know About Cleaning I Learned From My Mother Aug 28th, […]
LikeLike
This is really wonderful. How it pulled on my heartstrings! All those tiny memories, of TV shows, the ashtray, the tiles, the windmill cookies…you recreated an era, a moment, a relationship, the motion of memory over time… I really loved this memoir.
LikeLike
I had forgotten about the long-suffering, plain Ada and her self-centered beautiful daughter, Rachel. I would love to watch an episode of Another World just to see Ada ironing in her kitchen again. It seemed like she was always around an ironing board.
It’s funny, isn’t it? We all grew up in such different places, but these little obscure threads run through all of our lives.
LikeLike
Wow! I’m putting the finishing touches on a collection of memories from my own preschool days. (I have only the cover left to finish before uploading the whole project to Lulu.) The first memory, on the first page, is of me outside on the front porch, sweeping my floor with my little broom while Mommy sweeps inside, listening to her soap opera. Wow! My mother is exactly one generation older than your mother, so mine listened to soaps on the radio.
I love your piece, and how it so precisely parallels mine, with only the slight generational things like radio/t.v. to differentiate. I loved my mommy (she became Mother at some point not long after school began) unconditionally in those early years just as you did yours. I lost much regard for awhile later, just as you did.
Projecting forward another generation, I’m pretty sure my daughter would accept your words as coming from her fingers, except her mommy didn’t smoke.
She now has daughters who are edging into that early awareness. But she won’t be teaching them anything like that. Daddy does the laundry and the cleaning lady does the cleaning.
I was going to say it’s so comforting that life continues in this respect from one generation to the next, but maybe it doesn’t. Hmm. Sarah and Anna will learn something different. Mommy will still be perfect for awhile. They’ll learn to cook! That’s what their mommy does the very best. Cook and entertain.
Yes, life does go on.
LikeLike
You mean moms can’t be perfect forever!? I was hoping to break the mold ; – ).
The good news is that I now have highest regard for my mother. It’s come full circle. Fortunately, our fighting days only lasted from about ages 15 to 25ish. And now that I have daughters, I realize how hard it really is. And she had five of us!
It is amazing how so many of these threads resonate. For me that’s always what draws me to memoir. I’ll read a memoir and think, Me, too!
LikeLike
That’s what I was going to say, Ybonesy, “Me, too!”
That was a universal moment caught in time.
My visual memory of Kennedy assassination is the insides of the kitchen windows being steamed up, and the smell of clothes being ironed, as my mother watched the news.
LikeLike
Reminds me of my mom… She’s always cleaning something…
LikeLike
Wow, Leslie, that’s so close it’s eerie.
My mom has embraced her inner cleaner. She seems to now love to clean. We don’t understand what happened. Is it an growing-old thing?
LikeLike
Yes.
LikeLike
All the more reason to not clean now, then.
LikeLike
Yes!
LikeLike
That’s funny. I was trying to be concise, and smartypants simultaneously, and the comment submitter told me I had already said “yes” before, so I had to add an exclmation mark to get it to “take”.
What’s happenin’ in San Jose? That pic DOES look era.
LikeLike
The way it reads, it looks like you’re saying Yes to one statement, then Yes (by golly!) to the second. Ha!
Work stuff in San Jose. A conference. Participants currently downstairs drinking, but I’m up here, about to hit the sack. I’m always one for calculating what time it is back home, and it’s 10:35 back home, plus I got up at 3:30 this morning in California time. Somehow I always make my sleep situation much worse than it is, but I kind of like it like that.
LikeLike
oops, I think I just got what you were saying. you meant to say Yes twice.
Sleep deprivation. I need oxygen….
LikeLike
Yes…
LikeLike
ybonesy, your post brings up a couple of things – that women did and still do most of the cleaning. And I wonder what that passes on to girls and boys growing up in those families?
The second thing it brings up is how our ideas of cleaning and what clean is change over time. I’ve seen this with my mother, too, as time has passed and all the kids are out of the house. And now, with me. I don’t find the same joy in cleaning that I used to. But I’ll save that for my cleaning post. 8)
LikeLike
Nice and usefull post, thanks, this is one for my bookmarks!
LikeLike
Cleaning Lady, thanks for stopping by. I checked out your site and it looks like you know how to clean anything – rust, mildew, odors, stains, on carpets, leather, material, you name it. ! Where, oh, where did you gain all that knowledge about cleaning?! 8)
LikeLike