It’s easy to keep score and trust me I do (especially as I fold the four loads of laundry piled on my bed). Every week I find myself doing certain tasks that I don’t feel should be only mine and yet I grudgingly do them.

 

Living with a bigger group (the two kiddos, husband, 80-something-year-old in-laws, three dogs and a cat) there is definitely more dirt, dust and muck built up than I create. Lucky me, I also happen to be the cleanest person in the bunch (for a variety of reasons). There is effort from others and bless my mother-in-law’s heart, when she came in to her bathroom and found me scrubbing the toilets, she almost blew a gasket. My response – “Oh, I should let the blind lady clean the toilets, eh? Sounds like a great strategy…”

 

While it would be easy to say their bathroom is their bathroom, I don’t ever want it to be about keeping score like that. Perhaps it’s me thinking about karmic payback but how I treat my in-laws today is more about making sure they are taken care of than me not having to wipe down yet another marble crown.  

 

Right after we moved in all together (that was two years and three months ago if you’re counting) and I started noting that their bathroom was not staying to my definition of “clean” or even almost clean, I knew I was going to have to let go of the fact that I despise cleaning the toilet. If I couldn’t let go of it, this passionate dislike of a task was going to consume the rest of my score keeping days. Each week that I’m now down there scrubbing with the Oxiclean, I’m actually grateful that I have the opportunity to show my respect and value to my in-laws. It’s Wabi-Sabi. 

 

Now, I just need to be able to do this trick with tasks like folding the laundry, clipping dog nails and cleaning out the fridge. See, perfection is a long ways off for me!