Áilín Quinlan: My husband suggests maybe I’m not a housework type of person

“Our house,” I declared to my mother, “must have been really manky when the kids were young.”

“Never!” she replied loyally. “You always had everything beautiful anytime we visited.”

“Thanks,” I said. “But, you know, there were these massive clean-ups anytime you were due. Every time you were due.” My mother laughed.

But seriously.

I know that there are people out there who can effortlessly achieve clean, homey kitchens with aged copper saucepans, pots of basil on the windowsills, and jugs of wildflowers everywhere.

Reader, I tried.

In the old days, amid the dizzying whirl of full-time jobs and small children, the years of baby bags, school lunches, uniforms, and missing socks, those eternally knocked-over toy crates crammed with billions of My Little Ponies figurines and Sylvanian family members, I never got to see the real dirt.

I never registered the dried, tracked-in clumps of dirt from football boots as I stumbled upstairs to bed after the usual exhausting routine of work, family dinners, homework, school lunches. I never felt the stickiness of the floors I scurried around on, nor the parlous state of the fridge. I never noticed the dust accumulating in the jugs of dried flowers, nor the healthy fruit withering away in those decorative ceramic bowls.

Eventually, on the advice of a wised-up colleague, I called in help, and from then on, a calm, efficient lady, who always managed to get a handle on things, started to come on Fridays.

For 48 hours after she left, our house would be a calm, lemon-scented oasis with spotless floors and perfectly finished ironing that had been put away both neatly and correctly.

God, I really loved coming home from work on Friday nights.

But it never lasted. Sadly, because everyone was around all the time for the next two days doing what they always did and never putting anything back, despite the nagging and begging, the normal order of things inevitably reasserted itself.

By Sunday evening, that gorgeous lemon-scented atmosphere had evaporated, and the wreckage from the My Little Pony tsunami and the pasta water spills reigned.

Life moved on as it does, children grew up as they do, and one day, after more than two decades of gleaming Fridays, the Friday Cleaning Swoop lady was unable to come any more.

Now, it’s basically down to me to stay on top of the sneaky bits and pieces that sidle in between the cracks.

To my horror, I’ve now started to notice things I never saw before.

It can only be a case of the more you look, the more you see.

Tiny, sticky food particles that furtively slide down the side of the hob into an area that’s nigh impossible to access. Miscellaneous accumulations just inside corners and sneaky spaces underneath worktop kickboards. Devious dirt behind taps. Sly spills at the back of the fridge. Smeary glass in windows and on door panels. Cupboard interiors splotched with spice powder spills and cunning little dribbles of soy sauce and tomato sauce. Dust under beds and on windowsills. Incomprehensible stuff like the tiny pile of eggshell fragments in a corner of the kitchen that I came across the other day. Like, how did they get there? That kind of thing. You could spend entire years fruitlessly trying to stay on top of it.

I read recently about someone obsessing about the dust on the tops of her picture frames. If that’s all you have to worry about, lady, I felt like telling her, you’re living the dream.

“It’s ridiculous.” I whined to my husband. “As soon as I get things into line in this place, it all immediately starts to get dirty again.”

“Maybe you’re just not a housework kind of person,” he reassured me, in a kind voice that was possibly also very patronising, but I’m too weary to take on battles I can’t win about potential tones of voice I cannot prove.

The man definitely does not consider himself to be a housework kind of person. Not only does he utterly fail to see mess or untidiness around him. Not only does it not worry him. It would never even occur to him to worry about it.

To distract myself from the stress of watching my house fall apart, I did a bit of reading about the man/woman/housework thing, and it seems this widely-held belief that men don’t recognise untidiness is a complete myth.

Research says that males do see it, but that they have been basically socialised to ignore it and to certainly not feel responsible for it.

Studies show that while many naturally tend towards being tidy, they gradually learn to feel self-conscious about it because tidiness is perceived as, well, kind of effeminate.

One expert even said that men and boys often condition themselves not to notice messiness and not to act like they care about it because doing so would cost them socially.

Imagine! Lucky buggers.

Next time, I want to be reincarnated as a male.

No, stop. In fact, now I come to think about it, reincarnation as your basic common-or-garden male, any colour, any social level, but with all the automatic brownie points and privileges that having a John Thomas endows, would be sufficient.

Jehovah, hear my call.