What is the opposite of a domestic goddess?

A slattern? A slob?

I don’t think I fit into either camp. I don’t actually like housework, but see it as a necessary evil.

My natural instinct is to put it off if I can, but when it gets to the stage when I look around and inwardly shudder and go “ugh”, I get on with it.

I don’t like having a messy house, as much as anything because it means I can’t find anything.

Unless we’re talking about my creative mess of course. Actually, scrub that. I can’t find anything amongst that, either.

I actively dislike having a dirty house. I shrink from encrusted toilets, hairy plugholes, greasy paintwork and sticky computer keyboards.

Don’t we all! I just don’t want to have to be the one to deal with them.

Yesterday I got to tipping point. I think it was the sunshine that did it. Suddenly the squalor of existence that we call home was revealed in all it’s grimy detail.

I removed the rotting vegetables from the kitchen cupboard and cleaned out the slime and flies they had left behind.

I hoovered. I wiped down the black fingermarks that had bloomed all over the walls and doors. And then I tackled the toilets.

Why is it that I am seemingly the only one who doesn’t wee on the floor and pebbledash the loo, and yet somehow it falls to me to rectify this?

Words will be have to be had.

Why, you may be asking, am I going on about housework?

Well, I just realised that, for the first time in some weeks, my usual motivation for cleaning the house, apart from to remove dirt I mean, hasn’t surfaced.

I haven’t been cleaning to keep myself from starting creative endeavours. Which is such a positive thing.

That I clean (yuck) when really, I want to sew (yum!), might seem daft to you. It certainly does to me, but it is true.

Sometimes I am itching to get stitching, and yet I pfaff about in the kitchen, wiping surfaces and washing pots and making cups of tea, for much of the day. Nobody makes me do this.

And I never understood why. Until a few days ago.

I heard a programme on the radio in which a writer, Rachel Johnson, went and talked to other writers about how to get on with her novel. It was obviously just a format device, I wasn’t sure Rachel was actually in the throes of writer’s block, but it meant she could interview writers she admired about their shared craft.

I heard A L Kennedy talking about how she pfaffs about, cleaning, to put off the evil moment at which she would have to begin to write.

So far so familiar.

Then, she explained why.

She said:

You have to make an agreement with yourself that what you’re doing, although you enjoy it and it’s for you and it feels nice, that you are allowed to do it. And it’s terrifying. Because you’re trying your best to make something beautiful, for someone you have never met. And it’s completely of you. And you go back to the age when you run up to an adult, and you’ve made something, and they’ve stopped indulging you just because you’re little, and they say it’s not very good. You’re going back to just before that moment, when your heart is first broken, and trusting that it will not be broken.

I’ve condensed her words a little bit.

And yes, she was talking about writing. Not sewing.

But still. ♥