The Bad Housekeeper
‘YOU really are the most useless housekeeper,” said my husband, Gerald. Often. Like a broken record. “How hard can it be to keep a house clean, Patricia? I’m sick of this.”
Yes, by this stage he’d taken to calling me “Patricia”.
But, just as often, I reminded him, “I warned you from the start, Ger. I’m not going to end up like my mother – much as I love her.”
My mother has always been a paragon of germ-free cleanliness. But it’s cost her dearly. Her hands are raw and red from bleaching chemicals. Her eyes dart this way and that, in a constant anxious hunt for that bit of fluff on the carpet, that grain of sand violating her tiled floor.
It cost me dearly too. I can remember as a child,
