Tidy home won’t make you a better woman

I’m not exactly what you’d call a naturally neat and tidy person. I don’t match my socks, I don’t fold my towels, and there are currently seven punnets of half-eaten mouldering cherry tomatoes in my fridge. Now, as an introverted part-time misanthrope, I live on my own so I can get away with the soup of decomposing vegetables washing around my fridge’s bottom.

I know it bothers my mum, though, and she has taken it upon herself recently to apologise for not raising me to be a cleaner/tidier/more willing to change my bedsheets at weekly not monthly intervals kinda person. (I’m kidding. It’s not monthly. They’re black sheets for a reason; who knows how long they’ve been on there?)

Now, I don’t blame Mum in the slightest for my messiness. It’s true that she didn’t teach me how to wash my delicates, clean a dishwasher, whip up a five-course meal complete with raspberry vinegar, miniature gherkins and those truly hideous cheese and grape hedgehog canapes. (Does anyone actually eat those?)

Instead, she chose to spend her time teaching me useful, delicate, complicated skills like how to pick nice underwear and how to discover the poems that’ll change your life. I’m glad she did. I can YouTube how to make quiche lorraine, but I can’t YouTube how to find the rhyming phrases that’ll crack open my heart and nest there forever.

But the point is that she feels bad that she didn’t teach me how to be a pristine, Betty Crocker-esque washing fairy who also knows how to match socks and make herbal tea.

And she doesn’t feel bad because somehow, notwithstanding the cherry tomato habit, it’s turned me into a bad adult. She feels bad because she’s been told that ‘‘good mothers’’ are both the Betty Crocker Washing Fairy themselves and raise their daughters to be Fairy Betty too.

I’ve heard many different iterations of this Fairy Betty complex at every women’s leadership conference I’ve been to. Invariably, working mums express shame that they can’t fulfil the standards of domesticity that their mums, who were often stay-at-home mums, did for them.

There’s a whole lot of overwhelming guilt and exhaustion that they just can’t get it all done. They can’t work, look after families, be loving partners, great friends, eat healthily and work out five times a week in pineapple-patterned activewear and keep their house to the level Fairy Betty expects.

Now, the No 1 piece of advice for women in this situation is: get a cleaner. Now, that might work as a temporary stopgap for people who can afford it, but the problem is that it doesn’t do anything to address all this shame and guilt we’re carrying around that causes us to obsess over surgically clean surfaces.

And it’s the guilt that’s holding us to this perfectionist ideal, despite these ideas being based in dodgy logic.

Firstly, we’re ashamed over not meeting a totally unrealistic goal. We can’t maintain lofty societal standards for housekeeping that were set in the apple pie and Valium era. They were only achievable at the time because women did literally nothing else. It was a woman’s job to be a housewife. Now we’re doing a whole lot of stuff, and we don’t have eight hours a day for sprinkling domestic fairy dust.

Secondly, it’s not as though the difference between ‘‘functioning cleanliness’’ and ‘‘where Fairy Betty expects you to be’’ is actually adding anything to our lives. In fact, I did try once to go a week folding my towels, matching my socks, and not leaving coffee mugs in exciting places like the shower.

There was no improvement in my happiness, utility, or anything really. In fact, it was rather annoying because I lost my go-to place to find an emergency coffee mug.

As long as you have socks, no-one’s going to die because they’re unmatched. Mum never matched my socks as a kid, and I’m yet to die of gangrenous foot fungus. But lastly, the best thing we could do is realise that it’s not women’s sole job to do this. We all seem to acknowledge this on the surface, and yet there is still the underlying reality that women will do the majority of the housework in a relationship.

Obviously this isn’t every couple, but you only have to dip a toe into Facebook to hear the reams and reams and reams of modern women who still struggle with male partners who don’t pull their weight.

Which really isn’t cool.

So if we could let go of this guilt, and the burden of perfection, and the dudes could be a bit better at stepping in . . . maybe we could finally make this work.