Genetics are weird

We've already discovered how much I hate housecleaning. I believe I documented my aversion here, for all the internet to see. Even after that advert, I got no takers. Damn.

My father, with whom I lived after my parents' divorce, is not a neat-freak, but has an orderly soul. Things may not be dust-free, but they are arranged attractively and logically. My stepmother takes care of the dust and doesn't disturb the arrangement. They are a well-matched pair.

My mother, on the contrary, is quite tidy. She tried, in vain, to instill the values of "cleanliness is next to Godliness." I remain, to this day, a godless heathen. Quite proud of it, too. Mommie Dearest has my stepfather ruthlessly trained: he will start the laundry early so that it's finished, folded, and stowed before the first football game is on TV on Sunday. He calls himself the "Kitchen Bitch," as he's in charge of cleaning up the kitchen after Mom cooks. I quite like him. He takes the heat off me.

Even my mother's obsessive tidiness pales in comparison to my mother-in-law's obsessive-compulsive battle with grime. Before she broke her hip and had to be moved into a nursing home, my mother-in-law was hell on grime. The woman buffed skirting boards, shined the knobs on the stove, and attended to the shower grouting with a toothbrush. Weekly. She could tell if you had walked on the living-room carpet, because the hoover pattern was disrupted. The woman was downright scary. What's more, she enjoyed it. When, in the early days of our marriage, the WCM and I lived with her, she tried to "prepare me to be a wife" by teaching me how to clean.

Did I mention that by the end of the 2 years I lived with this woman, I was researching rare and untraceable poisons to put into her twice-daily Metamucil? This woman gives anal-retentive a new meaning!

Apparently, the clean gene skipped the WCM, too, as he's as much of a slob as I am. I have no problem with that.

Miss Peanut, though, LOVES to tidy and decorate. If you give her a new toy, the first thing she has to do is see where it will look best in her room. Then, she has to fuss with the packaging. After that, she'll play with it. She's not half particular about where her dolls are in her bed, either. She has them neatly lined up at the foot of her bed and leaning on the wall that her bed is pushed against. She maintains an internal rota of which dolly gets to sleep on the pillow with her, and never sleeps with the same one two days in a row. Scary, now that I think of it.

The part that really freaks me out, though, is the child's fondness for scrubbing toilets.

Even I clean the bathroom more-or-less daily. I scrub the tub every day, as Miss Peanut takes a bath, not a shower. Sometimes, if she's raring to go and I've not finished the tub, I'll squirt some cleaner in the toilet and hand her a brush.

The child has a blast. She sings and scrubs, swishes and warbles. She invents songs. She makes "Potty Soup," giving me a list of the invariably disgusting ingredients while vigorously stirring. The delight she experiences while cleanign the loo is something that I usually reserve for, well, shoe shopping or chocolate degustation. It's hard for me to believe that I could have birthed someone that likes cleaning. My mother, as you can guess, is tickled pink.

Genetics are weird, no getting around it.