When my dad's company started making them affluent, my insane mother, who hated, and therefore never did much, housecleaning, decided that the more dishes, glasses, cups, etc. she prchased meant less time washing dishes. As a result, the kitchen area next to the sink was always piled high as possible with dirty dishes and pans that she would ignore for days. I spent a lot of time after college between 1973 and 1979 washing dishes. I'm surprised that my brothers and I survived our childhoods with no bouts of botulism or E. Coli or worse.
In the old, poor white trash days, when she decided the house needed cleaning - the dust was thick enough to write in or you couldn't win the battle against the roaches - she would decide she was really ill and go to bed. After a couple of days, my Aunt Lois would come down from Columbus and see that my brothers and I were off to school in clean clothes, my Aunts Jenny and Dorothy would show up, and within two-three days the house would be spotless, laundry finished, and every dish cleaned. My mother would get out of bed and decide she was well.
None of this happened when my maternal grandmother was still alive; my mother was too afraid of her mother's censure, and when my grandmother lived with us in the late 1950s and early 1960s - she died in 1962 - she kept the place clean. I still miss my grandmother, but I find I do not miss my mother at all.
My dad should have killed her around 1958 before her madness went over the top around 1970.
