Since becoming a single father at 52, the cleaning chores I once crammed into a single morning each week have taken over my life. Between flying fruit puree, endless laundry, toys scattered everywhere, and one baby crawling across her kingdom, I’ve discovered that even the job I hate most can be done with love—
Cleaning. Except for perhaps a small percentage of the population whose need to clean borders on compulsive, no one has ever approached it with genuine enthusiasm. Even people who claim they enjoy cleaning don’t really enjoy the cleaning itself, in my opinion. They simply can’t sit still as long as a speck of dust is wandering around the house without receiving their personal attention.
Those of us who are financially comfortable—or simply chronically lazy—usually hire someone else to clean for us. Unfortunately, I still don’t belong to the first group, and the second rejected my application after I got up from the couch during the entrance exam to retrieve the remote.
I’m sure I’m not the only person with this particular defect. Many readers of this blog will probably identify with me and consider this confession completely unremarkable, but I have never liked cleaning. Of course, everything feels nicer when it’s clean. But cleaning it myself? God help me.
It has always been one of those chores I would put off again and again until I had no choice but to perform the task my soul despised above all others.
When I still lived with my parents, several thousand years ago, the subject didn’t really bother me. Every now and then, I helped my mother clean the shutters, the bathtub, the floors, and various other things, but it was never an official duty or a source of real frustration.
As you may have guessed, the real despair began when I moved out on my own. For all the pleasures that came with independence and freedom, I always loathed the dirty part attached to them: cleaning.
Friday Was the Big Cleaning Day
To prove that I was a responsible adult who could actually maintain an apartment on his own, I established one ironclad rule that I followed for more than 20 years: Friday was the big cleaning day.
Every week, on the morning before the Sabbath day of rest, I completed every major and essential cleaning task: dusting, mopping, laundry, windows, shutters, toilets, and the bathroom.
Compressing all those vile and detestable chores into a single morning made the work slightly more bearable. After all, he who cleans before the Sabbath earns the right to rest on the Sabbath itself—and on every other day of the week—until the hell of the following Friday arrives.
To ease the suffering of those unwanted hours, I always turned on the radio and allowed the music to dull my sense of disgust. There is no question that I owe a great deal to 88FM. Without that radio station, Fridays would have been much harder for me.
And so I lived in relative peace with cleaning for 20 years, while life moved slowly along. Friday after Friday after Friday.
I sacrificed between four and six hours of my precious idling time each week. Instead of improving my skills on the various PlayStation and Xbox games, I devoted my finest energies to making my apartment slightly more suitable for human habitation.
Eventually, that tiresome routine became an inseparable part of life: annoying, but unavoidable.
Then Sara was born.
When I Became a Father, My Life Turned Upside Down
In this area of my life—as in many others—everything changed when Sara was born 10 months ago.
Whenever people recommend bringing a baby into the world, for some reason they always dwell on the enjoyable parts while carefully avoiding any description of reality as they themselves, in my estimation, actually experience it. They create the illusion of a life filled with endless happiness and fun.
I’ll be the first to admit that becoming a father is the most meaningful thing that can happen to a person. But between all the laughter, cuddles, and baby talk, there’s also a whole lot of dirt.
Tons of dirt.
Sometimes I suspect my daughter Sara owns shares in the Hiriya landfill—or, at the very least, in one of those companies that manufactures enormous black garbage bags. Those bags have become almost as essential in my home as Similac and the nutritional supplements that accompany it.
For the first month after Sara’s birth, the two of us lived with my parents. That was where my dear mother—after whom Sara is named—taught me the secrets of parenting, or at least the fundamentals.
During that basic-training period, my mother shared the relatively limited cleaning duties trailing behind a baby only a few weeks old: washing and sterilizing bottles, cleaning Sara’s little plastic baby tub, and occasionally mopping the floor after a diaper loaded with poop landed on the wrong side.
Things became much more complicated when Sara and I moved into our own apartment.
Incidentally, I am still trying to process and accept the fact that the bigger she gets, the more garbage she produces.
All those irritating chores that I had once confined to a single day each week have now become—along with chronic sleep deprivation—one of the central features of my life as a father.
The Daily Cleaning Festival Begins in the Bathroom
The cleaning festival in my home is particularly rich and varied.
It begins with cleaning the bathtub every single day, lest Her Majesty encounter a speck of dust or any other form of dirt when I place her exalted body in the baby seat attached to the bottom of the tub and fill it with water.
Since Sara loves to splash around in the bath and send water flying in every direction with her happy little hands, I am sentenced to clean the bathroom floor later that night as well.
This happens only after she finally surrenders to exhaustion and falls asleep, following a fierce and uncompromising struggle.
When Feeding a Baby Becomes a Kitchen Massacre
Another activity that keeps me constantly cleaning is feeding Sara. In the past, all I had to worry about was washing and sterilizing her bottle. Now that she is a slightly more experienced human being, the operation has become much more complicated.
Two of the main meals on Sara’s daily menu are fruit and chicken soup. Both are pureed, of course, because Sara currently has only two teeth, and both of them are in the front.
Sara is a very active baby. Even when strapped into her high chair, she manages to move her body throughout the meal—especially her arms.
Picture the following scene: a plastic spoon loaded with fresh fruit puree is making its way toward Sara’s mouth. Before it reaches its destination, however, the intended recipient swings a long arm out of nowhere and sends the spoon and its contents flying into the distance. She looks like an experienced baseball player who has just smashed the ball into the farthest section of the stadium and completed a magnificent home run.
Much of the time, Sara demands to hold the spoon being offered to her. Past experience has taught me that such experiments rarely end well, so I do not grant her that kind of freedom—especially not so early in the meal.
Impulsive Sara’s response is immediate. She becomes angry and deliberately strikes the unfortunate spoon.
As a result, Sara is not the only participant in the meal. Also dining with us are the clothes covering her body, the clothes covering mine, the high chair, the floor, and the walls—not to mention her hair and face.
In the more serious cases, when I surrender and allow her to “feed” herself, the situation becomes much, much worse.
The owner of the establishment concludes such a meal by cleaning and polishing the kitchen, preparing it for the next pogrom.
Mountains of Laundry and the Takeover of the Kitchen
This should also give you some idea of the amount of laundry I am forced to do.
Every two days, I run a load devoted exclusively to Sara. Afterward, the portable drying rack—loaded with diapers, sheets, tiny towels, and miniature clothes—permanently blocks my path through the kitchen.
That is yet another room that was once under my control and has now passed into her hands with almost no resistance.
The Living Room Became Sara’s Kingdom
Another room I lost control of long ago is the living room.
That beloved space where I once sat in my racing chair and played Gran Turismo has become the exclusive property of the home’s new owner. She has marked her territory by scattering countless toys across every square inch.
Since the living room is Sara’s regular hangout, I am forced to clean it thoroughly every day.
Ever since Sara began crawling around her kingdom, I—her obedient servant and immediate subordinate—have been condemned to ensure that the floor is spotless and gleaming, so that the mistress of the house does not accidentally put some stray crumb or particle into her mouth.
Or perhaps not accidentally, as is usually the case.
Over time, Sara has expanded the borders of her kingdom to include the hallway, the kitchen, the dining area, and, of course, my faithful home office, which now serves as her throne room.
Therefore, I am required to clean all of those areas every day as well.
Musical Chairs: The Servants and Masters Edition
Cleaning these rooms is no simple matter. Since Sara is with me all the time, properly cleaning each room requires special logistics.
The procedure is as follows: first, I use a cloth to remove the dust from every object in the room, large or small. Then I vacuum to ensure that the hardwood floors across which Queen Sara crawls are entirely spotless. Finally, as a complementary measure, I wipe down the floor with a damp cloth.
I don’t run the vacuum near Sara, lest she inhale dust into her tiny and aristocratic lungs. Instead, I sit her in her stroller in one room, facing a screen playing the finest hits of her generation on YouTube, and then clean another room.
When I finish, I transfer Sara, the stroller, and the screen into the clean room, freeing me to clean the next one.
It is a sort of musical chairs: the servants and masters edition.
Constant Cleaning and Chronic Sleep Deprivation
My life now revolves around constant cleaning and chronic sleep deprivation.
On the latter subject, I refer readers to my other posts about Sara’s nightly abuse, during which she regularly deprives me of uninterrupted sleep. I believe she does this deliberately, although I still have no evidence to support the allegation.
I clean so much that sometimes, in moments of despair, I raise my eyes to the heavens and beg for divine assistance. Instead of receiving help, however, I can feel a celestial chuckle descending toward me. A laugh filled entirely with mockery:
“You wanted to become a single father at 52. Did you honestly think it would be easy?”
I know. I’m a lazy man who never stops complaining. But I have earned the right to complain, fair and square.
Besides, I live alone with a baby who has turned me into her full-time janitor. If I don’t complain to you, then who should I complain to? Sara?
Far too dangerous.
The last thing I intend to do is anger a creature who will stop at nothing to demonstrate who is really in charge of this house.
When Cleaning Is an Act of Love
But in all honesty, beyond the difficulties and the cynicism, I thank God for the best thing that has ever happened to me.
I may clean far more now than I did before becoming Sara’s loyal subject, but now I do it with love. I do everything in my power to give my daughter a clean and hygienic home, even if it comes at the expense of my back, my sleep, and my future as a professional PlayStation player.
When something is done with love, no matter how difficult it may be, the suffering becomes a little less noticeable.
I have learned to accept my new job title with pride and peace of mind:
I am Yaniv Ovadia, Sara’s full-time janitor.
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