Tired of Spending Your Weekends Cleaning? Try This Instead.

As the child of a single, Caribbean mother, our weekend routine was painfully consistent. We would wake up Saturday mornings and our first and only mission was to make our house 'surprise visit ready." This meant that everything in our 2 story, 4-bedroom, 2 bathroom, eat-in-kitchen, with formal dining room (which we were not allowed to sit in) and a sun porch (where we would have much rather been watching Saturday morning cartoons than cleaning the house) has to be swept (not vacuumed), dusted, polished, and de-messified for my mother's approval. "Cleanliness is next to Godliness" and "I WILL NOT LIVE IN SQUALOR WITH YOU" were two of my mother's go to phrases when her house teetered on undignified. When our cleaning was finally satisfactory, then and only then would we get to watch Saturday morning cartoons (many of which would already be off-air if we didn't get started early enough, usually around 7 am). After a couple of hours of TV, we would then pile into the car and spend the rest of our afternoon in my personal childhood hell, Sterns and/or Macy's, where I would stare listlessly into the fitting rooms mirrors positioning them to face each other at just the right angle, so I can see an endless loop of the misery on my own face, vowing to never clean or enter a department store when I became an adult.

When I got grown, I actually kept my promise. I rarely, if ever, enter a department store and I definitely refuse to spend my weekends cleaning (especially not when capitalism squeeze the life out of us Monday through Fridays). While the shopping thing has worked out just fine (take that, Retail Therapy!) Unfortunately, my mother was partially right (something I find myself thinking more and more these days), cleanliness does appear to be next to Godliness, or at least for me, my home being clean offers a peace of mind that no amount of self-care, yoga, or Netflix binging can.

While I do appreciate the benefits of having a clean home, I am not willing to sacrifice the equally important time I spend lazing around with my husband on a Saturday morning after we've spent the week dutifully bound to work schedules and other priorities. I also appreciate the freedom in which my niece can play in my space and then clean up after herself as opposed to the restrictive play environment I spent much of my childhood in.

So it was important to find a way to get my cleaning in, while remaining the other ways in which being relaxed around my environment keep me sane.

ENTER: The Friday morning (or evening) cleanup!

Now, if you're a woman of a certain age like myself (a certain age being 34 if you must know) Friday evening is that glorious time of the week when nap time can start as soon as you get home and last until whenever you decide the next day. I don’t know about yall but the happy hour days and Friday nightclub ended around 27 and 28. So Friday mornings have become my new cleaning time. I take a few minutes before work to tidy up main areas, straighten out the living room, clean and sweep the kitchen and bathroom. Generally speaking, this tidying gives me enough peace of mind that even if my weekend is jam-packed or I decide to nothing else, the squalor has been alleviated and my peace of my mind has been restored. If deeper cleaning is required, I allow myself a Friday evening or occasionally a Saturday morning to go in. Not every weekend, not even every other weekend but usually once a month to make sure that my mama can roll back over in her grave (she was actually cremated but that’s besides the point).

Empress's Peace of Mind-1, Capitalist and Trauma- 0 (at least in this case)

How about y'all? Do you still have the same cleaning routine you were raised with? Does it work for you? If you've remixed it, how do you get your cleaning in?