Clean Complaint

Having my mother-in-law live with us can be an exercise in frustration.

What do you call a person whose idea of cleaning something is to run a little water over it? She wouldn't know clean if it jumped up and bit her in the face.

Her approach to hygiene is most noticeable in the kitchen: she's the only person I know whose prime skill is the ability to annihilate cookware. She turned a brand-new high-quality frying pan into a useless hunk of metal in less than two years by not washing it after each use.

Every pot in the house is messed up in some way, as is the rice cooker and water boiler.

The main culprit is her oily cooking, which in turn coats everything nearby with sticky yellow grease. Keeping the walls goop-free is a constant battle.

In our house, I have to wash everything before I can cook.

Her concept of mopping the kitchen floor is to sops up spills by pushing a rag around with her foot, and then leaving the rag in the corner.

She says she doesn't like the smell of cleaning products, and since I can't expect her to change her ways, I'm doing the only thing I can: hire a cleaning service to come in once a month to give the place a thorough scrub down.

I'd do it myself, but there are only so many hours in a day, and I have enough on my plate.

Such as grumbling to you ...

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