A Guide to Spring Cleaning (when middle aged and divorced with children)

Finding meaning in grime and dust.

It’s that time of year, when we emerge from the cocoon of winter and realize the dust and detritus accumulated over those dark cold months must be vanquished! I’m here to help.

First, Scrub the Bathroom.

For deep cleaning tile, try this nifty powerized spinning tool. Use it to scrub the bathtub tiles, particularly the grout, once white, now ripe with damp dark spots of mildew from those extra long bathtimes over the years; the ones with the rubber duckies and the stories between the big duck with the Statue of Liberty head and the little one Sam won from that big clunky machine, you know the one with the mechanical claw that swings through the air and hovers over the graveyard pile of rubber duckies, and grabs fruitlessly in the air. The one that actually worked and grabbed the pink duck in the shape of a cube like Sam’s favorite Minecraft character, and held onto it and delivered it through the metal chute and Sam was so happy and now he plays with it every night, as the bath water gets cold and you are on your knees next to the tub, watching him play.

And now there are over a dozen duckies from different places and duck machines and cities and stores, and every night, even now that he is 11 and has hair poking out from under his arms, he takes his bath and you sit with him because he likes to talk to you then, but he keeps the curtain drawn half way so that he has privacy and he plays with all those duckies and before he gets out he says, one minute mama I have to get my ducks in a row, which is so funny, but also true because he lines them up on the ledge of the tub in the same order every night. And you feel so much love for this boy who is now changing and growing and still makes your heart surge and fill and ache from the changes that you can’t stop.

Photo by Annie Spratt on Unsplash

Now, tackle the laundry. I like to use a powdered OXY detergent along with my regular GAIN Spring Fresh pods. On a hot cycle, wash all the sheets, including the stained mattress pads and duvets, sweaty with nights of high fevers and raw throats and stinging earaches, crumpled from pleas for one more story, soaked through from night terrors that leave Sam breathless and screaming and the soothing you try and the gentle shakes to wake him and stop the screams that the doctor says are normal and happen at this age but you did just get divorced and he is only 8 years old and now you shuttle the kids back and forth every 5 or every 2 days. And even though you think, “we are still a family,” and you don’t want to think of yourselves as broken, even though time has passed and you are technically happy, you are also deeply sad, and even though you vacation together and still do holidays, there were four around the table, and now there are three in two different places every 5 and every 2 days and that seems kind of broken? Or maybe you’re just broken?

Wash the laundry, even though none of the socks match anymore and there are boxer shorts for Sam that seem suddenly to be man-sized, and also boxer shorts for your daughter who used to wear panties but now she says she is a boy, and she is trans and her name is not emily anymore it’s Eiji, and her pronouns are he/him and you try to do it right and you do 90% of the time but of course the 10% you don’t makes Eiji mad and angry and lash out and you apologize and try harder to think before you let the instinct of calling her Emily come out of your mouth.

Move the laundry to the dryer (I love these dryer sheets!) and see the blue hospital pajamas with the little flowers he was given when he was 11 years old and tried to hurt himself right after COVID and you remember that you had to leave him there in that place because of his “suicidal gesture” so that he would be safe, so that he would not hurt himself, but he was hurting and he was your baby and you left him there in that place with the locked ward and the bars on the windows and how was that going to help him, without you there to hold him?

He stayed for two weeks and you drove every day on the Hudson River Parkway past the Cheesecake Factory in the Mall and the people going about their days and buying the groceries and picking up the dog from the groomer and getting the gel polish and picking a color while your child was sitting in a hospital where you have to keep the doors open when you visit and meet with the therapists and look at the other children and parents and wonder how did we get here? And this went on until the doctors could get his meds under control, and then he came home and it was less scary, and there were weekly Cognitive Behavioral Therapy sessions and now he is okay, and he is Eiji and you don’t make mistakes anymore; Eiji is your son and you love him even though somedays you wish he were still your daughter because that would be easier wouldn't it, in this mean cruel world?

Photo by Nathan Dumlao on Unsplash

Get after those counters. For kitchen counters, try this Mrs. Meyer’s Clean Day All-Purpose cleaner, it’s good for the environment and it comes in all sorts of floral and herbal aromas that smell so good! For best results, take everything off the kitchen counters and wipe off all the crumbs — the ones from the Sunday morning pancakes with chocolate chips for Sam and bananas for Eiji, and flatbread crackers for the fancy cheese that Sam decides he loves because it is “artisanal,” and the sleeves of saltines from when Eiji started puking at the end of the school day and you drove into Midtown during rush hour to pick him up because he couldn’t get on the F train because he was vomiting so much, and even though he is in 10th grade you still feel he needs you and you’d drive into the city during rush hour everyday just to feel that.

Clean the oven! You know you never do this during the year, so get a can of Easy-Off and spray down all the sticky grime and grease from frying chicken cutlets pounded thin and dredged in flour and coarse panko and crushed up Cornflakes because that makes them crunchier, and then for the kukus, that mixture of leftover egg and breadcrumbs you loved when your beloved grandmother, your Bibi, who came from Persia, used to make, little fried fritters that your kids fight over like you and David used to, and from frying the meatballs that they love, the ones you make with almonds ground into the flour and cinnamon and cumin that are studded with currants and that simmer in that slow Sicilian sauce that the kids always say mama this is soooo good you have to make this every day, but it takes hours and hours so you don’t make it every day, but that’s okay because when you do it is like a holiday even though it’s just a weekday, and it makes you happy because you love to feed them, but also sometimes you want to just lay down on the kitchen floor and scream or sleep or both because you are always feeding them, then cleaning up and starting again, they never stop needing to be fed, my god, but also please never stop needing to be fed.

Photo by Jonathan Francisca on Unsplash

Empty the pantry. Take everything out – the spices, more colored dust than anything even spice adjacent, certainly not spicy, maybe spice-ish? Sweep out the sawdust remains of the Tostitos you bought for the Super Bowl when you were married and would make big pots of short rib chili and have other families over for the big game and you would open bottles of cold white wine and chat with friends, and the kids would all play and run around while you watched the ads and the people who understood the game discussed downs (what is a down?!) and whether Tom Brady would retire, and you would think, is this happiness, I think it is. Is this enough? It was. And then it wasn’t?

Toss the leftover mini-cereal boxes from the variety Kellogg’s multi-pack you bought for the kids to make breakfast fun on vacations from school; the Apple Jacks was never a winner. Throw out the sticky honey that you could not give the children until they were over a year old because they could die from allergens and that now has seeped out of its plastic bear to coat every surface, every bag of rice and every box of Swiss Miss Hot Cocoa you mixed with warm milk when they were small when it used to snow so much, and they would go out into the yard and hurl their bodies into the world of white, and together you would build a “snowman” mostly made of rough snow mounds shaped into something vaguely vertical that you poked with a carrot nose, chocolate chip eyes, and topped off with an old hat, and you’d all admire him, and come inside and get warm together and then the next morning you’d look in the yard and the sun would be shining in the big blue sky and there, where the snowman stood, is just a small curious pile of carrots and chocolate chips and one hat in a puddle on the ground.

Don’t forget the couch! Lift up all the couch cushions – find the wrinkled Halloween candy wrappers and Sam’s favorite Paw Patrol action figure, and Eiji’s press-on nail that popped off, and Penny’s old cat toys, and a quarter the kids used on the scratch off lotto tickets they love to get on their birthdays, and suck it all up in this cordless dustbuster, and realize this is life. All of it – the crumbs, the grease, the dust, the grime, the stains, the mold, the tears – all of it that fills the pantry and the washer and the dryer and the sink and the couch cushions, and also, your heart. And maybe there’s nothing left to clean after all.