“YOU know, if I had more time, I would like to do more cleaning in the house,” I tell my sister one night. My sister is quiet for a second. And then she tells me as gently as she can, “It’s not normal, you know, for anyone to love cleaning so much.”
“How do you know?” I retort.
“Well,” she asks, “do you know anyone who loves to clean as much as you do?”
I sit there thinking. After some time, my sister, trying hard not to laugh, says, “the fact that you have to think long and hard and yet can’t name anyone who loves to clean as much as you do should tell you something—this love for cleaning is not a normal thing.”
I remain unconvinced. “I may not know anyone personally but I’m sure there’s somehow out there like me.”
When my sister flies out to the west coast for a high school reunion, I tell her I have big plans for the weekend. Home alone in the East, I planned to chill—watch some movies and read some books.
“I’m sure you’ll be vacuuming as soon as I step out of the house,” she tells me.
Truth to tell, I wasn’t so sure what was going to happen. Remarkably though, I did get to watch some movies and read some books. After so many hours of doing so, however, I itched to do something physical.
I wanted to go running around the neighborhood but as I was home alone, I decide on a safer sport—house cleaning. I didn’t want to risk having some psycho follow me home. I decide to clean the yard and pull out all the weeds. The yard is fenced. I feel safe.
Some of the weeds are so stubborn, though—I am dying to buy a weed puller at Home Depot. Never happened. But I win the battle, anyway, with my bare hands.
When my sister gets home, she is impressed. “How did you pull them all out—especially the ones underneath the stairs? I tried but it was so hard,” she tells me.
“It was hard but all those bear crawls I had to do in the gym really helped.”
Growing up, I never saw my father idle. He was always busy doing something—if he was not pored over some paperwork, he would be hammering away on some DIY project. And in his spare time, he would be sweeping the garage.
This sweeping thing always irked me. I told him he was making the staff lazy. I told him to stop taking over their jobs. Of course, he didn’t listen to me. I didn’t understand then why he did what he did—until the day I realized I had metamorphosed into my father.
My father and I are the kind of people who have so much energy—we need to have a project or we will go mad. We do what we do because we don’t know how and when to stop. The physical act of housecleaning somehow clears my mind. Maybe, it’s the same for my father. So I do know someone, after all, who is just like me.
People call us obsessive. We call ourselves dedicated.
Happy Father’s Day to the man who makes me feel “normal” every day.