Motherhood Monologues #22: Clearing Space (again...because things never stay clean)

For all that I like to pretend that my living room is the celestial room* of my home, the reality is that my mood matches the state of my kitchen.

I am not the sole ruler of the kitchen, and there was a time in our marriage when I only did the dishes a handful of times in a year. My husband, bless his heart, does what he can, and since graduate school  and his current job came into our lives I've had to pull more weight in the cleaning of the kitchen. Especially since he is super good at loading and unloading the dishwasher and washing the hand dishes but not so great at wiping off the counters (a pet peeve passed to me by my mother and her mother).

I suppose I could improve upon "routines to keep in place to keep the space cleared." Currently, if I don't get to the dishes within a day, my current routine is to leave them there until one of three things happens:

1. He wants to do something kind for me and does the dishes without me asking
2. My grumpy demeanor and cold shoulder alert him that perhaps he could win my affection by cleaning the pan from Tuesday's dinner on Thursday
3. Four days pass and I do the dishes by myself for sanitation purposes

Obviously, this routine is not great for my mood or my marriage. That's just the state of the family right now. I feel like if the kitchen is clean, the whole house is clean (even if we are a prime setting for a Febreze commercial). That's my ideal clean space.

My husband has a different definition of the most important space to keep clear in our home: the carpet. He feels like if the floor is vacuumed, then the whole house could be covered in cobwebs and it wouldn't matter. 

Case in point: one day last summer he came home and excitedly thanked me for vacuuming the stairs, commenting on how nice they looked. For a minute, I considered letting him think that, and then I came clean and admitted there were lines on the carpet because our baby had been practicing going down the stairs on his tummy all day.

So occasionally I pull out the vacuum for him, and more often he does the dishes for me, and instead of just clearing space in our home, we clear the space between us.

(*a sacred room in the LDS Temples)