My coworker Grace hails from Taiwan and she loves to share stories of her upbringing. “My mom was a classic Tiger Mom,” she likes to say; “I’m not sure if she was my mother or my warden.”
As I listen to Grace’s stories about a childhood filled with music teachers and soccer lessons and summer vacations spent in trigonometry camps I often think that if Grace regards her mom as the warden, my mom was like the world’s most efficient executive housekeeper. The difference is that Grace is an only child and my mom had 6 kids: you do the math.
Mom was a neurotically organized clean freak with obsessive compulsive tendencies and, thanks to the influence of her mother, the intimidating Grandma Katie, she learned to manage her large and boisterous household with a truly frightening Slavic efficiency.
Take towels for example. Since Floridians generally take multiple showers every day an 8-person household can generate a staggering amount of laundry, so when we kids were in school and Dad was at work Mom would dry the towels in the sun, refold them and put them back in the linen closet. “It’s not like they were dirty,” Mom told me, years later when she was very old. “You used them after you were clean from the shower.”
Once Mom absorbed the lesson of drying off and reusing damp towels it was not a stretch to apply that principle to other household item, like dishes. She could not tolerate clutter, (you would never find a dirty dish in Mom’s kitchen sink) so we were trained to use a dish, rinse it and put into the dishwasher immediately. But to save water the dishes were never actually washed: Mom just took them out and reused them as needed. “It’s more sanitary than washing dishes in a sink of filthy water,” Mom said, adding, “Besides, no one ever died!”
Mom also believed that germs could not live in the freezer and so, because six thirsty children can utilize a lot of drinking glasses, we were each allowed one color-specific glass per day. Then, when we were done using the glass it went into the freezer to be reused the next time we were thirsty. “Germs can’t live in the freezer,” said Mom.
While mom rarely used her dishwasher to wash dishes she used it often for other household items, and I still cringe at the memory because hairbrushes, toothbrushes, paintbrushes, dog brushes, scrub brushes and small gardening tools were all routinely washed in the dishwasher — often simultaneously.
Similarly, Mom absolutely refused to scrub floors so she covered every inch of the pristine terrazzo floors in her home with “Sears-best” avocado green shag carpeting—even the bathrooms which, in a household with 4 sons, was ill-advised.
What’s interesting is that while Grace’s mom devoted her life to raising her daughter, my mother’s energies were focused on maintaining a neat, clean, efficient house. She was surprisingly laissez-faire about sthings like schooling and report cards: (“Don’t feel bad; you tried!”) and did not press her kids to engage in after school activities: (“Don’t bother to try out; you’re not very good at sports anyway”.) And things like teenage smoking and drinking did not bother her in the least: (“You’re gonna do it anyway, you may as well do it here at home.”)
I remember once when Mom was older she visited a friend whose cat had just had kittens. As she shared the story afterwards she mentioned how impressed she was at how clean the mother cat kept the cardboard box where she and her 9 kittens were living. “That cat is a good mother,” said mom approvingly; clearly her litmus test for effective mothering was based soley on the cleanliness of the living area, which makes me think that if Grace’s mom was a Tiger Mom mine must have been a Cat mother.