Dialogue: More to life than keeping it tidy

By ROANNE PARKER

My big sister told me years ago that she saw little point in housework. They way she sees it, you could clean and tidy and sort all day long and it never ever gets finished.

It's like the old story about painting the bridge: you just get to the end and then the next day you start all over again. She said, "Why not just accept that it's a lost cause, give up on being Mrs Kleen and do something you really want to do?"

Her example is a case in point. Now pregnant with her fourth daughter, she began her bachelor's degree extramurally when the first was a baby and hasn't left varsity since.

The children may well wear wrinkly clothes, but instead of ironing she gets to spend all day teaching the philosophy she's discovered that she adores.

Now if she had stayed at home and cleaned all day, she would undoubtedly have children with high levels of disinfectant in their bloodstream, and a mother who couldn't spend all day contemplating ethics. Then where would they be?

Believe everything you hear about suburban neurosis - it's all true.

I had a close call when I found myself stuck in this little groove a few years ago of having to match the peg colour with the item I was pegging, or at the very least choose an eye-catching, coordinated shade.

I have a friend who can't relax until her regime of Lego apartheid is upheld and all the colours are safely in their own boxes.

Another very good friend in Melbourne, who was at home with her three toddlers, had a bastard of a husband who would come home and inspect the house every night for cleanliness. He would push everything off the bench and tabletops onto the floor if he deemed it to be too untidy. I'm surprised she didn't turn into a fully fledged madwoman.

He bought her this book which had a kind of cult following among a certain sector of housewives at the time. It instructed you to put your whole life onto index cards, which you then shuffled to the front each day and built your life around what they told you to do.

Every day it would tell you to empty the dishwasher, maybe once a week to change all the sheets and once every three months - hey presto - you'd draw the card that told you to clean out the medicine cabinet.

There were cards on which to write what size and colour were the shoes Kid One had just grown out of so you were sure to get them out for Kid Two at just the right time - and on and on ... I mean, really!

Think what you like and judge as you will, this was an intelligent, gorgeous woman living her life around the housework, and it consumed and controlled her and she was desperately unhappy.

Extremes? Well, yes, and here I have unashamedly formed a strongly biased and perhaps somewhat defensive case against doing lots of housework.

I don't want to belittle the efforts of millions of (mostly) women for whom a clean and tidy home is the yardstick of the day's success.

I was there, too, when I worked from home, measuring what I had achieved for the day by a visual appraisal of the lack of clutter.

I used to iron, but I notice that since I've stopped neither my kids nor myself have any fewer friends to play with. In fact, a chat at a party last year over a particularly crinkled green shirt won me my own mad Scotsman.

The toilets get cleaned lots around here, and I think that's a good thing. The kitchen floor gets cleaned a little less. Every night at least two loads of washing get dealt with.

But those fine little cobwebs hang from my bedroom ceiling until the moment I remember they are there and I have a vacuum hose in my hand - a coincidence that doesn't happen often.

I do hate clutter, I really do, and I don't know what the answer to that is. At present I just pick it up, and I can't see any alternatives. I have to practise that rule of never leaving a room empty-handed, but only because at my place it's three against one and if I don't help the stuff find its home we'll soon be lost under it all.

The important thing is to keep it in perspective: if you have to choose between the dishes and the storybook with the 6-year-old, well, that's an easy one.

In fact, if it gets down to choosing between cleaning and anything, the anything would have to be pretty darn dull not to get my vote.