OK, so maybe this is weird and I am sure there could be a whole psychoanalysis done, but I love cleaning toilets! I really am not too interested in cleaning but somehow, if no one else around here will do it and I get the “toilet duty”, I take great pleasure in having a spic and span, sparkly clean toilet.
When I was growing up as the youngest and only daughter in a family of five with two older brothers, I was the house cleaner! Every Saturday it was my job to clean the house top to bottom. When I got married and had three daughters, I said that I would never clean again, I would let them do it. Yes, I realize that I am falling into conventional gender roles! I hope that if I had had sons, I would have expected them to clean too!
Both my husband and I have felt that in our family, rather than hire a cleaning person it is good for all of us to do the weekly cleaning and so for the past many years, this has been a regular Saturday activity, complete with a ton of grumbling, complaining, procrastinating (mainly from me) and yet all five of us get out the brooms, dust pan, earth friendly cleaning agents (more recently) and just do it. I could say that “a family that cleans together, stays together, stays together”!
Back to my love of cleaning toilets. I was privileged, as a young person to be taught by a master! One of my summer jobs was working as a cleaning person in an old folks home. It just so happened that I started the same week as a flu epidemic hit the facility. My boss was one of those women who was made to clean. She was spry, wiry, in her 50’s with a very interesting updo and wow, could she clean. I learned things about cleaning toilets that you wouldn’t believe!
All levity aside, for me cleaning toilets connects me with my humanness and my humility! Every time I clean a toilet I say to myself, I am no better or no worse than any other person on this planet, we all….(something to do with elimination) and we all clean toilets. It is actually, I guess, part of my spiritual practice!
peace, namaste & hippy love for generations,
Zoey