The Big Clean

You should have seen my offspring scurry when I informed them that the Easter Bunny only visits houses which are entirely picked up.  Never before were little children so very motivated to place toys on a shelf — any shelf — just so long as everything could be considered clean.

Honestly I couldn’t have cared less what the Easter Bunny thought of the house’s pick-uppedness.  My concern came from a different quarter:  The little ones’ mother and her mother were set to visit us at the end of the day.  It was to be the first meeting between the grandmother and us; up to that point my only impression of her came from stories passed on by her daughter, none of which were very positive.

A few months before her first child was born (and only a mercifully few months after we were approved as adoptive parents), the agency sent along a packet of information about the woman who would become my babies’ mother.  Its purpose was to give us enough background details about the family that we’d be able to judge if we could parent a child grown under such conditions.  Only then would our history be passed on to the potential adoptive mother (along with histories from other candidate families) so that she could make a decision about where to place the child.

I tried to read through the information objectively, but it’s hard to be objective with the vision of an infant eclipsing every other thought.  At that point I felt capable of handling almost any deficit as long as it was accompanied by the squirmy, fragrant delight of a newborn.  Probably I should have been more worried than I was as I pored over the report.

Even remembering what I’ve long known about the family, I couldn’t help but fret as I wielded dust rag and vacuum.  Would they notice the hand prints at child-height, I wondered?  The hard water scaling caked on the refrigerator’s water dispenser, which they’ve just learned to manage alone?  Would they judge me if the boy’s shirt was stained?  Or the girl’s shoes on the wrong feet?  Would they worry about thin shins covered in bruises? Or sheets pulled asunder from beds?  Would they conclude that the number of crumbs on the floor was proportional to my inadequacy as a mother?

“Your house looks like children live there,” my main squeeze told me over the phone, and while I knew he was right I went right on eradicating more patches of filth.  I eradicated until the very minute when the call came that misleading directions, bad temper and a late start were forcing them to cancel the visit.

All that cleaning turned out to be for nothing.  Not that it would have mattered anyhow.  I’m almost certain that they were at least as intimidated as I was, and a super-clean house would only have given them more reason to abhor me.
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