I can clean my entire apartment in under two hours. That’s two podcasts or one catch up call with a dear friend or Janelle Monae’s new album four times. Most of my weekly cleaning sessions are scored by one of these three things, but sometimes I choose silence. Sometimes I let the swish of the broom and the rhythmic churn of the dryer—the reliable tap of zippers and buttons hitting the inside of the machine—be enough.
My partner and I are in a mid-distance relationship, he lives in Philly and I live in DC (it’s only long-distance if there’s a plane). Our relationship blossomed under the reign of fully remote work. We watered it with time together when we could work from anywhere. Since our offices reopened, our steady stream of time together has been reduced to a trickle, and what we’ve become over the past three years will need more than bi-weekly waterings if it is to thrive.
All that to say, it’s time to move in together.
I have a few friends in domestic partnerships where one person works remotely and the other onsite. With rare exception, the domestic load falls on the person that is most often home; that person will be me.
My partner is not as…detail-oriented as I am. He has a smattering of papers, pens and knickknacks on the bed in his guest bedroom that he treats as a giant open drawer. He claims to know where everything is, but subscribes to a lifestyle of organized chaos. He sweeps and folds and mops and does everything a responsible adult should. But he doesn’t dust as if every speck is an enemy lying in wait to infect your lungs. He doesn’t scrub with the intensity of exorcizing the outside world from his home. He doesn’t clean the way I do. As if a life depended on it.
The cleaning started small. I remember learning how to make my bed, folding back the blanket and smoothing it out to form a crease just beneath the decorative pillows. I was five when I stood on the dining room chair, sturdy against the kitchen counter, and dried the dishes my mother handed me. I placed them on the counter with care for grown-ups to put in the cabinet. My parents provided a contained autonomy. These tasks were supervised but no less mine and I had a role to play in keeping things orderly, neat, well-tended.
On Saturday mornings, my sisters and I woke to the sound of gospel music and my mother’s voice singing, “Rise and shine! It’s morning time! God loves you and so do I!” We would eat breakfast and get to work. There was vacuuming, folding, and scrubbing and when we were finished, it was still morning. We ran outside, played and got dirty all over again.
I didn’t realize then how hard my mother was working to make sure that, in the midst of her cancer, we would not see the difference between her good days and her bad days. I didn’t know then how quickly the bad days were closing in.
I was eleven when my mother checked in on me through a crack in the bedroom door, her frail frame barely blocking out the light. There was agony written on her face as she stood with her cancer and my fever creating a whole world between us. She wanted to mother me. She wanted to tend to her child. We were wounded in different ways by this wanting.
It was then that I stopped telling my mom when I was sick. I isolated myself instead and resolved to be alone in my tending.
Soon after, we became a shoes-off house. Before that, my sisters and I had gone shoeless to protect the carpet. This was different. My mother’s white blood cell count was low from chemotherapy, so we needed to keep germs out. We started to keep a pack of disposable booties by the door for guests unaccustomed to our new tradition. Everyone who entered our home was responsible for keeping my mother safe.
I didn’t think to grab shoes when I followed my grandfather to his Buick. I rushed into the car to trail the ambulance. I wonder if I would have had a plan in place to put shoes on if someone had told me that hospice meant dying. Instead my feet were clammy and cold on the hospital waiting room floor.
When my sisters and I moved in with our dad in Florida, the most noticeable change to Saturday mornings was the music that woke us and the voice that called our names. We traded my Southern Black mother’s Mary, Mary for my Black Puerto Rican father’s El Gran Combo. Once or twice, he threw in Smash Mouth—just to keep us on our toes. The music changed but the cleaning stayed the same. I wonder if waking children up to clean with startlingly loud music was a cultural element they bonded over when they first fell in love. I wonder if it was all a way to make sure that no one was alone. We tended to, for, and with one another.
After eighteen years of family and ten years with a total of forty roommates, I was determined not to live with someone if the only reason was because we could not afford not to. On May 1, 2020, I moved in with myself. It was right when we stopped telling ourselves we’d be back in the office in two weeks and turned our attention to stockpiling masks and wiping down our groceries.
“Train up a child the way he should go and he’ll never depart from it.” A decade after leaving my parents’ home, I proved their bibles right. Under my own roof, with or without music or a God to rise and shine for, I folded the blanket forward just below the decorative pillows. I emptied the sink before I went to bed. I took my shoes off at the door.
Some nights, if I spot a speck of dust at 10 PM, I’ll stay up as late as it takes to pass a white glove test. I’ll crawl into bed at 12 or 1…morning on a technicality…knowing I’ve ruined the day ahead, but satisfied knowing I’ll be asleep before the dust has found its place to land. Friends compliment the cleanliness of my apartment. They ask for advice for organizing closets and arranging decor. I rattle off my mantra with pride: A place for everything and everything in its place.
Somewhere along the way, tending to my home became a part of tending to myself.
Somewhere along the way, tending to my home came at the cost of tending to myself.
A few weeks into living alone, I decided to try my grandmother’s recipe for pear preserves. It was 10:45 PM. I started the process of peeling and slicing, but the pears were past their prime, soft and slippery from so much juice. Right around 11 PM, I dropped the knife on my foot. It wasn’t as bad as it looked, but it looked really bad. There was blood all over the floor, mixing with the juicy sweetness. I called my EMT brother-in-law and dutifully followed his instructions on how best to bandage it.
Then, I went to bed.
I couldn’t remember the last time I left something in the sink overnight that wasn’t to soak. One summer when my sisters and I were kids, we visited our grandparents, and one of us left a cup in the sink. Our grandmother woke up to get a glass of water, saw the cup and woke us all. I don’t remember whose cup it was, but we were all responsible for taking care of it before we could go back to sleep. To leave something in the sink wasn’t just dirty and summoning roaches, it was inconsiderate. It was based on the assumption that someone else would come along and clean up your mess.
After I washed and bandaged my foot, I went straight to bed. I left the knife in the sink. I left the blood on the floor.
For the first time in my life, how I took care of my space was not in response to the assumed needs of other people. I didn’t have to be considerate. Had I a roommate, I would have stayed up however late I needed to to make sure no one else woke up to a biohazard. But in that moment, in that space, when tending to myself and my living space were in conflict, I chose me.
I wish I could say that moment was a turning point and that I’ve achieved a balance of taking care of my home and taking care of myself. The isolation of the pandemic made me rigid in my routines and secured cleaning as a way to feel ordered in the midst of so much chaos. But on the whole, I’ve left a few more things in the sink since that day. I’ve started to save some problems for tomorrow and prioritize what I need over the appearance of things.
When I’m not worrying about being a bad feminist for leaving the city I love for the man I love, or brooding over disappointing my grandmother by shacking up, or fretting about being a bad pansexual for winding up in a cishet relationship, I fear that because my partner and I do things so differently, because my entire life has been shaped by making space for others, that I will be crushed under the weight of the domestic load. I fear I will lose myself to the tiles and the wash. I fear I will fall into the traditional life of a woman in the home. I fear I will be alone in my battle with the dust.
I’m still getting used to the truth that my partner won’t leave me alone in the tending. That the life ahead of us is one of tending to, even as we are tended by, one another.
Saturdays in Philadelphia don’t begin with Kirk Franklin or Fania All-Stars. They don’t start off with a broom and mop and a knock at the door.
Saturdays in Philadelphia begin with a kiss on my forehead and the rustle of a bike as he heads to the gym and I go back to sleep. They begin again when he returns and asks if I want pancakes or french toast. When he’s in DC with me, Saturdays do not start with a cleaning spree. They start with him shredding cheese while I whisk eggs. After we finish eating, he washes the dishes while I sweep the floor.
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