The Real Housewives Of Colorado: A Mountain Mom’s Confession

I’m a horrible housewife. I don’t know about any of you, but if I miss 1 day, shoot I’ll just be real honest here, If I’m not cleaning 24/hrs day, my home becomes a wasteland of socks, toys, crayons, paper, books, nerf bullets, and so on and so forth. Piles build up out of nowhere. Bathrooms look and smell like latrines. Sheets walk off beds and drape themselves over chairs and desks. Gloves, boots, hats, are all over and when we need something we can never find it. I simply cannot keep up.

Winter is the worst. There is so much extra gear and times that by 13 I’m beginning to think I need a personal assistant just to help keep it all organized. One thing is blatantly obvious, we are very, oh so very, bad at picking up after ourselves. I have friends that remind their children once to pick up their belongings or they are gone, as in thrown out or given away. I have tried “threatening” this, but you’d have to be exceptionally dumb to think I would throw out or give away something we still use and need, like shoes. We paid for those shoes. I’ve tried taking them and hiding them, but soon I needed a second home to house all the contraband that I was storing.

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The other blatantly obvious reason I’m beyond overwhelmed is that there are far better things to be doing than cleaning. I’d much prefer to be snowboarding or sledding or building snowmen (of course you need snow for all these activities and there is NO SNOW), but you get my drift. I’m a subscriber to the philosophy that my kids won’t remember how nice our furniture was or how clean our house was … they will remember mommy and daddy playing with them, boarding with them, kayaking with them and just plain old being there with them. But this leads to me having panic attacks each time I walk in a boys room or the laundry room or open a closet or Heaven forbid, walk in the boys bathroom.

There are rooms in our house that I religiously keep clean, of course or I’d be certifiably crazy. Our kitchen, our great room, our TV room and our basement. There are rooms I try desperately to keep clean, but it lasts all of maybe 1 hour, like the boys bathroom. I won’t go into detail, but suffice it to say I’ve found toothpaste on the ceiling and toothpaste on the shower curtain!! I could literally make a 40+ hour/week career out of standing guard at the bathroom door and cleaning it each time one the boys came out.

Speaking of careers, you know there are people who will do this for you? Clean your house, that is. There are people for whom this line of work provides food for their children. Who am I to covet Dan’s money and not spread the wealth as they say? (ha ha) I think that mental health practitioners ought to forget the mind altering drugs they prescribe and instead prescribe housekeepers. I can’t tell you what having a housekeeper used to do for my frame of mind. I was, well, functioning. It was cool.

What I need to do is figure out which of my children have skills/talents in housecleaning and begin to help hone those skills. In the meantime, I just want to throw out there that we are not to proud for charity. You can come clean my house anyday!! When you arrive, you can find me by the low moaning sound … I’m the one curled into a fetal position under the Christmas tree that will most likely be up until mid-July.