What I learned from a year of fiction

I hate cleaning the house. I just do. No one in our family is super neat, but I have a lower tolerance for clutter, so I end up doing a bit more than everyone else. Then I resent it. Then I feel like a big fraud because I’m supposed to be this superfeminist, but I don’t have that cleaning part figured out. I feel like this 1950s housewifey as I scurry around, wiping down cabinets.

I tried to pray and meditate during housekeeping, because I know people who do this. But they are a lot more spiritual than I am, because I just end up muttering imprecatory prayers of vengeance because I have to clean off the baked-on food from the pan and why wasn’t it done last night when it would have been a thousand times easier to get this done last night nasty and these socks who leaves their socks piled around like this and if I have to pick up another seltzer water can I will die they are all half full seriously doesn’t anyone know where the recycling is in this house why do these pets have to shed so much there is hair everywhere I rue the day when I introduced my daughter to the concept of the mud masks our sinks are disgusting…

See? Not very spiritual. I know people will argue that there is something spiritual in the mundane, but they’re not in my skin and don’t know the anxious irritation I feel by the time I’m done vacuuming. But somewhere along the way, I learned to listen to audio books while I clean. And while I still can’t say that I love doing it, I can say that I don’t hate it with a terrible venom any longer.