Pamela Gordon

Tuesday, Feb 15, 2000 5:00 PM UTC

War of the dust-busters

Cheryl Mendelson may have written "Home Comforts," but my grandmothers could out-scrub her any day.

By Pamela Gordon

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I come from a tribe of serious homemakers, generations of women for whom
the adage “cleanliness is next to godliness” was chiseled onto their DNA.

At Grandma Leah’s holiday table, we saw our reflections in the polished
cutlery and serving dishes. When Great Aunt Fanny died the neighbors crowded into her bedroom to marvel at her flawlessly arranged drawers. A cousin once balked at the rust stains in my kitchen sink and begged me to let her bleach them out.

My mother is so fastidious, the sheets and towels in her linen closet are
tied in bundles with ribbon. Pencils bounce off the tight drum of her hospital-cornered sheets. And feel free to eat a meal off her kitchen floor.

But the diva of all dust-busters was my mother’s mother. Every summer,
Rose was on her knees on a rubber pad sanitizing the porch floor of the cottage we rented, then making her way down the stairs, still on her knees, cleaning each one as she went. Her counters glistened. Her mirrors were fingerprint-free. She came after us with a broom if she caught us on her Victorian velvet sofa.

I am the aberration in this gene pool.

I inherited the sofa that Rose kept in perfect condition for 40 years.
Within a year, the upholstery was tattooed with cat pee.

My early indifference to housekeeping wasn’t entirely a case of rebelling against the fascism of my family’s all-consuming pursuit of cleanliness. I just had other things on my mind. Given the option of busing a dish or reading, I always read. Staying up late arguing about art, literature and politics captured my
imagination more than cleaning the refrigerator. Traveling whenever time
and money allowed won out over battling mildew.

Despite myself, I was well-trained. As the blush of post-college freedom
paled, I started to care more about a clean, welcoming home. Stocked cupboards, freshly made beds and organized closets filled me with a sense of peace. When I married, I received all manner of domestic utensils and tucked into home life with a vengeance.

The problem is, while I now cherish a clean apartment, I still lack the attention span for serious cleaning. No matter how often I de-scuzz the vegetable bin, wash the baseboards or pull hair from the tub drain, I never do it as frequently or as thoroughly as my grandmothers did. I will never meet the standards set by the women of my clan.

Maybe that’s why Cheryl Mendelson’s 884-page compendium of household
hints and sociological observations, “Home Comforts: The Art and Science of Keeping House,” reads like an encyclopedia-size slap on the wrist.

I began reading accounts of this doorstop-size tome even before it came
out in November. The idea of a contemporary book about keeping house both inspired my contempt (no one could best the education I received) and filled me with dread (here would be published evidence of how I’ve failed to live up to my training). Perversely, I succumbed to reading it. I came away impressed by its cleaning and organizing tips and its detailed research, but disgusted by its morally
superior tone.

Mendelson heads up the book with a smug treatise on the virtues of homemaking guaranteed to make anyone who doesn’t change the sheets twice a week feel inadequate. She follows with an exhaustive catalog of everything you need to know to run a household. Seventy-two chapters are divided into eight sections, with titles such as “Carefully Disregarding Care Labels” and “Peaceful Coexistence With Microbes.” They read like a to-do list posted by my grandmothers from the
grave.

Actually, Mendelson’s sources on housekeeping are not so far from that. Mendelson, who grew up on a farm until she was 13, learned housekeeping from her grandmothers. Dueling matriarchs, one Appalachian, the other an Italian immigrant, each had, as Mendelson puts it, “a right way to keep
house (the one she had been brought up with) and a wrong way (all
others).” “Home Comforts” is her attempt to preserve the teachings of her grandmothers, and then best them by becoming the reigning queen of domestic arts.

Mendelson lacks ambivalence about assuming a place in her homemaking
dynasty. I, on the other hand, am still making peace with my ancestral housekeeping ghosts.

Some parts of keeping house I’ve got licked. I’m obsessive about neat
drawers. Mixing colors and whites in the washing machine is sacrilege. Meticulous about folding laundry, I can out-fold anyone in America. (That includes you, Cheryl.) I stack food in the cabinets by size and category and have the weekly shopping down to a science.

I’m not big on mending. Not great with dusting. Don’t sweep in hard-to-reach places. And the only time I turn the mattresses is when we move. (Mendelson recommends turning mattresses once a season; when I tell my mother this she responds with horror, insisting, “I turn the mattress once a month.” There you go.)

For overall upkeep, I’m on the yo-yo plan. I swear I’m going to
be good, starting Monday. Then, I put it off until Wednesday. The mess increases. I set myself a point at which I must begin cleaning — let’s say when I can no longer see the floor in my daughter’s room. Soon after, giddiness sets in, followed by no longer caring and, then, dementia, when I decide to see
how bad it can get.

Finally, I’m forced to take action — because company is coming. I put a
few things away. Momentum builds and I start filling garbage bags. Then I start to clean. I see dirt that I was blind to for days, for weeks. I’m disgusted. I’m penitent. I dig out the cleaning products, pay homage to my foremothers by donning rubber gloves and scrubbing the toilet.

Afterward, catharsis. The living room looks so pure. I steer my kids
away from playing in it. The empty sink is such an inspiring void I don’t dare leave a dirty dish anywhere near it. Slowly, however, the tide of schmutz begins to rise, and the cycle begins again.

It doesn’t help that my husband is domestically challenged. He can pass a
bursting bag of garbage, positioned blatantly by the door, without even considering taking it out. He prefers chairs to hangers when it comes to putting away his clothes. He leaves his wet towel draped over the bedpost every morning. And when he’s stuck in the house with the kids alone: cyclone time. (To be fair, when he puts his mind to it he can clean with the best of them: He scours a mean tub and vacuums like an Olympian. But I have to plead with him to do these things, which he considers a favor to me.)

Having two kids, ages 5 and 2, doesn’t help, either. Nothing short
of straitjacketing them would keep my apartment in order for more than 10 minutes. (Mendelson, I’m certain, does not have a child under 5; if she does, I’ll just kill myself now.) Having children, I once heard on the car
radio as I was racing to pick one kid up after dropping off the other,
decreases marital satisfaction by 75 percent. Of course, marital satisfaction is a relative phrase. In my husband’s universe, it means sex. In mine, it means swept floors.

“Why aren’t we ever romantic with each other anymore?” he
demands.

“Why can’t you ever clean the kitchen in under three hours?” I
growl.

Ultimately, keeping the house in order is about feeling in control. For
my grandmothers, my mother, my cousins, it was and is about asserting their values in the domain in which they feel most powerful. It’s about creating shelter from the storm of the outside world. It’s about sweeping the cobwebs of sickness, sadness and tragedy out of the corners and over the threshold for as long as possible. It’s about keeping chaos at bay.

I tolerate chaos in my big, fat, sloppy life in ways my relatives don’t.
But I still feel overwhelmed. There’s a solution to this. I can hire someone to help me clean. And I plan to, just as soon as my financial ship comes in, right after I pay off my credit card debt and right before I buy a car that starts without my having to pray to it every morning.

I have a vision of household perfection: guest towels in the bathroom
without peanut butter handprints on them. Little soaps in a delicate dish by the sink. Wood floors that gleam. Beds that stay made. A dining room table sans clumps of hardened oatmeal. Cassettes, CDs and videos that never, ever get separated from their boxes. A sense of peace when I walk into the apartment, the only thing in motion a stray dust mote swirling in a patch of sun.

I imagine I may achieve this in increments: as my 2-year-old grows out of
pushing the puzzles I have just stacked on a shelf right back onto the floor; as I have more time to work and earn money to pay someone to help me. I run my fingers across the glossy pages of the “Hold Everything” catalog, and dream.

In the meantime, my grandmothers tsk-tsk from the beyond.

Thursday, Dec 23, 1999 5:00 PM UTC

I was a closet thumb sucker until I was 11

I want my daughters to suck without fear.

By Pamela Gordon

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My 5-year-old daughter looks tiny in the beige vinyl chair, her eyes fixed on the dentist towering over her. She wears an expression only a mother can interpret: On the surface, she’s compliant and eager to please. Underneath, she ripples with defiance, her unspoken warning: “No way in hell, bub, will I listen to you.”

The dentist is telling her to stop sucking her thumb. “You’re a big girl now. Big girls don’t need to do that,” he insists, and launches into a litany of horrors that have befallen or will befall her — from calloused skin to buck teeth to being teased — if she doesn’t end this wretched habit now.

I clutch the edges of the counter behind me. This man is threatening my daughter, and I am swimming so far out in bad memories that I cannot catch my breath long enough to protect her.

I sucked my thumb until I was 11. I sucked with passion, with devotion, and I adored every succulent moment. I sucked while watching television, while riding in the car, while lying under the covers at night, the forefinger and thumb of my other hand plucking soft tufts of flannel from my pajamas and rubbing them against my upper lip.

I needed to suck my thumb. Sucking soothed me, calmed me, focused me, gave me comfort in an anxious household electric with barely-contained panic. I would slip my thumb, worn in as a leather jacket, silken as a dog’s ear, into my mouth, circling it with my lips as I tucked it between my tongue and top teeth. It fit tenderly there. I nudged it against my palate, creating a seal against the roof of my mouth. In that movement, the sucking closed a broken circle; it completed a loop; it tied a knot at the end of a rope that otherwise might have spooled out of control.

I never sucked in school. I worried too much about what people thought and was terrified of ridicule. And no photographs exist of me sucking. What I did, I did in private, purchasing an exquisite solitude I still crave today.

And I was told on.

“Ma,” my brother would wail when he’d come upon me doing the deed. “Pammy’s sucking her thumb!” Busted. Suddenly everything private went public; my inner world cracked open and I was exposed. I wanted my thumb and felt guilty about wanting it. I sucked my thumb but had to plot ways to do so in secret. The pleasure I derived was coupled with shame.

I don’t blame my brother. He was conscripted by a task force of adults who had mounted a campaign against my behavior. As my mother tells it, everything started with Grandma Rose: “You were born with your thumb in your mouth. Grandma pulled it out; you put it back in; she pulled it out. And on it went for years.”

But my parents kowtowing to others’ authority made them just as responsible. They deferred to Rose’s old-world view of controlling children. And they pawed the ground in front of the family dentist, a paternalistic warlord who extorted our time and money under the guise of doing what was best for us. (I went to the dentist so often as a kid, it was an activity like dance class, music lessons or religious school.)

By the time they were through with me I had been bribed (“We’ll get you a dog;” “We’ll pierce your ears”), warned (“Do you want the skin on your thumb to peel away permanently?” “Do you want to get married and still suck your thumb?”), spied on (“Ma, she’s doing it again”), mutilated (Herr Dentist fitted me with a metal plate and fangs that hung down from the roof of my mouth), and poisoned (my finger was marinated in a sinister-tasting potion known as “Thumb”). Yet no amount of cajoling and manipulating made me stop. I stopped on my own, because I was ready and wanted to, right before I went to sleep-away camp for the first time.

Not surprisingly, both my daughters love their thumbs. Sonograms revealed them each sucking in utero. Long past infancy they arm themselves against the abyss, as I once did. In fact, they’ve improved on me: The 5-year-old walks around with her thumb in her mouth clutching a stuffed animal; the 2-year-old sports thumb, animal and blankie.

They sit together on a chair in front of the TV, entwined in one another, sucking. They sit on opposite ends of the sofa, a picture of glazed-over contemplation, one with the left thumb in her mouth, the other the right, enjoying self-imposed timeouts before tearing around the apartment again. They suck voraciously and have no compunction about sucking in public. I wouldn’t dream of telling them to quit.

The rest of the world seems compelled to stop them.

Strangers come up to my children on the street, on the subway, in the supermarket, in restaurants and tell them not to suck their thumbs. The dry cleaner says, “Get that thumb out of your mouth.” The nursery school teacher reports on her efforts to curb the childish behavior of sucking. And now the dentist is bullying the oldest.

Not all professionals spout this dentist’s party line. I find this out after we escape from his lair and I make some inquiries. In theory, at least, pockets of enlightenment exist, not only among dentists but among pediatricians, psychologists and speech therapists. Most of them assure me that thumb sucking for security and comfort is normal. Most agree that it should be curtailed when a child’s permanent teeth come in, to prevent damage to the teeth and jaw.

This seemingly universal wisdom is refuted by Dr. Wayne Eric Turk, D.M.D., a pediatric dentist who takes what he calls a “humanistic approach” to his young patients. “I only treat thumb sucking if it’s causing a problem,” the good doctor says, and explains that sucking does not automatically condemn a child to orthodontia since damage to the mouth depends upon the intensity, the duration and the frequency of the habit.

Children who never suck a day in their lives may need braces if, genetically, their lower jaws sit further back in their mouths and their front teeth protrude. And children whose early years of sucking cause irreversible changes before the age of three may need orthodontic treatment whether they suck after that age or not. So why force them to stop?

“Each person is an individual and should be treated accordingly,” Turk concludes, and quotes from the guidelines of the American Academy of Pediatric Dentists (AAPD) that “all treatment modalities must be appropriate for the child’s development, comprehension and ability to cooperate.”

Tell that to the man in the diner dispensing unsolicited advice. Just what drives him to tell my kids what to do?

Sucking is a primitive act, occurring in utero and deriving from core urges for nourishment and connection. It’s emblematic of our neediness, our blind dependencies. Such yearnings frighten and embarrass people. How many of us ever really get those buried needs gratified by others? How many of us figure out how to gratify them ourselves?

Anger and jealousy are stirred in adults who see a child satisfying herself blissfully and in public. “Some grown-ups cannot tolerate their own needy feelings,” notes Dr. Marilyn Meese, a child psychologist. “If they don’t try to make your child stop, their mastery over their own needs will crumble.”

The response is similar to what people feel when they see mothers breast-feeding toddlers or hear about parents who sleep with their children. Giving that kind of solace is not thought to provide closeness or protection. It’s thought to encourage over-attachment — as opposed to the ideal of independence which is valued at a very early age.

How ironic such an ideal is, considering how many of us stagger into adulthood desperate for comfort and find it through compulsive habits far more dangerous to our health than thumb sucking.

The way strangers discipline my children leaves me with the sickening feeling I had when people put their hands on my pregnant belly without asking. I feel invaded, as I did when a woman who saw me with my month-old firstborn in the market scolded: “That child should not be out of the house at her age.”

I am not immune to the pressures of public attitudes. I confess that since the oldest started kindergarten this fall, my concern for image and my fear of ridicule leak out of me, unbidden. “Do you suck at school?” I hear myself ask. “Does anyone say anything?” But since the dentist’s useless attempt to make my daughter stop, I’ve vowed to back off, to leave it to both kids to figure this out in their own way, at their own pace, to suck as long as they need to, for as long as that might be.

I may end up in hock up to my eyeballs as a result of orthodontia. And years from now my kids may be sitting around together bitching about me: “Can you believe how oblivious she was? She let us suck our thumbs for eternity.” Or they may be in hock themselves, putting in time with a therapist, bemoaning my neglect.

If so, so be it. Until then I say, suck as if your life depends on it.

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