Filing Away My Toilet

When I worked in the “real world” there were undoubtedly things that would come up which I had no desire to deal with. I am sure that I am not alone in this. Everyone has a regular work task that they do not enjoy doing. There is always that report that you dread completing, or a phone call that you don’t feel like making. One of the things that I just did not like doing at work was filing. It was tedious, time consuming, and way down on the list of priorities. It was way, way down there, after sharpening pencils and cleaning lint out of my pen tray. Some things that you dread doing, you can put off until the end of the day. Sometimes you can manage to put a task off until the next day. And still, there are some dreaded jobs that you can possibly push from Friday into Monday. When it came to me and my filing I would put it off until the stack of filing on my desk had grown to roughly the same thickness as Webster’s Dictionary. About that time I was beginning to think it was possibly necessary to break down and face the monster head on.

On one occasion I asked Megan and Hailey if they would like to go into work with me on a Saturday afternoon and “pretend that they were office workers” and help me with some “very important work”. Their eyes lit up like it was Christmas morning. Never have I seen my hermit children race to the car with such enthusiasm. When we arrived at work I presented them each with a stack of papers that needed to be filed and instructions on how to go about completing the task. I used my “very serious so please pay close attention” voice and in great detail explained the concept of finding a file with the correct identifier on it, pulling the file out, placing the necessary piece of paperwork in the file and then returning the file to its correct place in the drawer. Hailey looked at me with great eagerness. Pen in hand and stack of papers in the other she was locked, loaded, and ready to go. Megan looked at me and said, “That’s boring. I thought we were going to do real work.” When I explained to Megan that this was in fact “real work”, I think I killed any thought she ever had of going into my then field of employment. I guess it is safe to say that she has the same impression of filing as her mother. So, Megan spent the remainder of the time in my office spinning herself around on the spinning chair while Hailey happily pulled files, placed papers in the file, and put the file away. When I later showed Hailey how to use the copy machine, she looked like she was going to cry tears of complete joy. I awarded her with a pen from my office. I think that day is going to go down as one of her greatest life moments.

What I am finding now that I am a full time stay at home Mom is that it’s not so easy to push those undesirable tasks off to another day, week, or yikes- month. My current undesirable task is cleaning my bathrooms. I hate it almost as much as filing. To make matters worse, Hailey doesn’t seem to possess the same unbridled enthusiasm for cleaning bathrooms as she had for filing. This means that I can not manipulate her into cleaning the bathrooms for me. And Megan? Well, I have come to the conclusion that the only thing Megan genuinely likes to do is play. I tried to have Megan “play” that she was a mommy and needed to clean her bathrooms in her house. She saw right through that. She said when she plays mommy, she has a maid. Smart girl, I need to see about getting one of those maid things.

Nope, it’s all up to me. On a regular basis I have to reach deep down inside, pull on my rubber gloves, and break down and clean that bathroom. I go right for the centralized filth; I go for the sink first. In the sink I am regularly greeted with layers of dried on, day old, sticky, minty toothpaste. Is it so hard to rinse out your sink after you brush your teeth people! And is it just me or does anyone else go crazy, lunatic nuts when five minutes after you have cleaned the sink someone goes and brushes their teeth and leaves a fresh glob of toothpaste in the sink! Are you kidding me?!?! I digress. Moving on, it’s over to the shower where the daughters thought it a good idea to turn the shampoo bottle upside down and not close the top. Excellent, now I have gooey, sticky shampoo running down the side of the shower. No amount of Scrubbing Bubbles is going to rinse that away without physical intervention from me. With the sink and shower cleaned and marked off the list, it’s time to turn to the ugly filing cabinet of my bathroom, the toilet. It takes every ounce of focus and perseverance that I can muster to take that toilet brush by the hand and scrub away. The scary thing is that when you have small children in your house, you never know what you will find when you open the toilet. I will spare you the horror stories. I will only say that there have been occasions when I have lifted the toilet seat and let out a scream of terror. I know that I am not alone in this. I am sure there are many of you out there who can relate.

The bottom line (no pun intended) is that there is no way of getting around this undesirable task of bathroom cleaning and especially no way around the toilet cleaning. No, putting it off for a few days will only make the toilet monster more ferocious, and I would most definitely not recommend putting it off until next week. No, I just have to suck it up and accept that there is no way I can file away my toilet which does plenty of filing away for my family. Sorry but I just could not resist that one.