Am I a Clean Freak?

Am I a clean freak or am I just concerned about my health? The more and more I think about that question, the more I realize that I just prefer things clean for certain reasons. As a child, I used to always break out in these hives and rashes because someone’s house was not clean and my mother had to literally bring me back to health until I got better. There were some times I did not understand this but I do now. When I grew up, my mother never kept a dirty house and when someone was dirty within the house she usually left. The older I got, I found out my mother had lupus and she would always say she can not be around anything dirty.

Growing up with a mom with lupus

I would wonder why we always left people’s houses early. That was because their house was not clean enough for my mother's standards. She would come home and take a bath so quickly. I watched my mother take at least 3 baths a day. I thought she was trying to rub her skin off as much as she had taken a bath. Now that I am older and when I get admitted to the hospital, my mother does not play. She comes in and wants to bathe me and clean the room herself instead of the workers doing it. I also find myself in the habit of cleaning my room when I leave the hospital and it is a force of nature. We just naturally go into clean mode.

Life before, as a cleaning lady

When I worked for Molly Maid, I had the experience of cleaning others' houses and realized how many spots we miss when cleaning a house. I never realized it because my mother and my sisters and I would always clean the walls, baseboards, doors, carpet, and floors when it's chore time. It usually doesn’t take a while to clean a normal house but when I started to clean big houses, when I came home I started cleaning in a whole different manner to which my husband thought I was going on a cleaning rage. I made him notice dirt we both never noticed. I must say my health improved about 80 percent. My husband is a clean freak and was disgusted by what he had clean off the doors and baseboards. When I was a child I used to think it was a game we cleaned with my grandmother when we went to see her. She told all the grandkids to grab a towel and we would wipe the walls and baseboards with her.

How a clean house helps

This has helped me with hygiene and more. Lupus plays a big role in our health overall but also with our skin. Think of our skin like being a newborn baby. Well if a baby is in a full diaper for a while, a rash would present, if their clothes are not washed in sensitive fabric softener they would break out. That is the same thing with someone dealing with an autoimmune disease. Especially if you have to do infusions or self-injections you have to take special care of yourselves. So, nope, we are not crazy, I call it concerned.