I’m turning into a “hausfrau”.

* Merriam-Webster Online Dictionary says:
Main Entry: haus·frau
Pronunciation: \ˈhau̇s-ˌfrau̇\
Function: noun
Etymology: German, from Haus house + Frau woman, wife
Date: 1798
: housewife

That’s right, I am starting to turn into a housewife! I prefer the term “Hausfrau”, however. Hausfrau sounds a bit more exotic, it is unintelligible to those who don’t speak at least a little German, and it’s a term I remember my Grandma using. She spoke a little German, and every so often I come across a word or phrase in German that I recognize. Hausfrau is one of them.

Recently, Shawn and I decided to move the computers, all the audio equipment, and a bunch of assorted geek type stuff from the main room to the back bedroom. This involved, of course, moving a bunch of stuff, including a couch, a fat, old, huge television, and the stand it stood on, into the main room. It involved moving the large bird cage, (and the five cockatiels that live inside it), from one end of the house to the other. Needless to say, this required a lot of cleaning, dusting, organizing, and appeasing of angry cockatiels. (They don’t like change, not one little bit).

This is where it started. Slightly before New Years Eve, I began cleaning up the back room. I was unemployed, and this allowed me to spend hours sweeping the floor. The birds enjoy throwing the kibble they aren’t interested in eating onto the floor. It bounces. I think they have made a game out of it. Kibble and feathers were everywhere! The floor also needed a serious scrubbing, because of the amount of dirt that had been tracked there. Moving the couch and tv stand unveiled both more dust, and the color that the floor should actually be. It was an incredible mess.

How did it get like this? Easy! First of all, anyone with pets knows how much dirt and mess a pet can make. Secondly, there just wasn’t time to really give the room a good cleaning very often. Shawn and I had the best intentions, but, both of us were working. This room would get nothing more than a general cleaning, when we had time.

I have severe allergies, and cleaning a very messy, dirty, dusty room will make me sick for hours afterwards (and sometimes recovery would take days). So, I couldn’t simply clean after I got home from work one day, without risking that I would become too sick from it to make it to work the next day. For me, cleaning had to wait until that perfect window appeared, where I had enough of time off of work to fully recover from allergic reactions before I had to return to work, and fight whatever allergens I would encounter there. Therefore, while our home never became a bio-hazard, it was far from pleasing the likes of Martha Stewart.

But now, things have changed. Right before Christmas, I became unemployed for the second time. I had all kinds of free time, a large cleaning project in front of me, and no worries about “can I do this and still make it to work tomorrow?” There was no work tomorrow, or for the conceivable future! I had nothing to lose by giving my home a sorely needed cleaning.

So, that’s where things started. Now, as I write this, it’s about a month later, and I haven’t gotten off the “cleaning kick”. I find I’m actually happier when the house is clean. I’m buying Swiffers every time we go shopping, and going through them like someone with hay fever goes through kleenex. I find I get better results if I get down onto the floor and scrub the dirt away by hand, using the swiffers at first. After that, it’s easier to maintain it with the swiffer mop. I do windows. I’m running out of windex from using it to clean the dust off of all the little knick-knacks that we moved from one part of the house to the other. I have been washing the walls.

I seem to have gotten myself into this routine. I feed the birds, and, when they are all fat and happy and sleepy, I remove the food dishes from their cage for a little while. Why? So I can sweep up the kibble, and have a nice clean floor for a few hours. I spend a little while writing, or going through my google reader, or playing one of the addictive games on facebook, and then I go clean something. Now that we are done moving furniture, and everything is settled, it’s much cleaner. After some experimentation, I think I can manage to get most of the house clean on Wednesdays, while Shawn is working.

I’ve attacked the bathrooms a bit as well. (Although, now that I think of it, those are due for another cleaning). On one of our trips shopping for groceries, I found this little hand held scrubber, that I threw into the shopping cart, as I told Shawn I had to have it. I used it on the bathroom floor, and was thrilled by how well it worked! When I realized that I was actually excited and happy about how clean I could get the bathroom floor, I knew it was too late.

I was becoming a hausfrau.

Never in my life would I have expected this particular turn of events. I’ve always been good at cleaning. I learned a great deal about how to do it well from my Gramma that spoke a bit of German. Having a clean house always has made me feel better, physically, because less dust means less allergic reactions. Perhaps this was inevitable, and all I needed was enough time off of work to make it happen.

If you could go back in time, and tell the “Me I used to be”, the young woman who was working three jobs and struggling to get a teaching degree, how my life is now, she would be severely disappointed. Back then, I would have considered a life where I stayed home all the time taking care of the house, where I didn’t have a job of my own, and where my husband was the “breadwinner”, to be a failure. Now, years and years later…. I’m surprisingly happy about this new life.

Being unemployed sure has some strange side effects.