Mold, Mormons, and Marriage

My favorite Mormon newlywed blog has died the death of a busy blogger. Love the Grows was a fun, newsy, well-written bit by a young Mormon wifey and I loved it. (She's the trendy, hard-working, motivated kind--not the polgymist kind.)It satisfied my nosiness curiosity about Mormon religion that I developed after reading a book too many, and more importantly, gave insight and anecdotes about being a young (really young--like me) married lady,  and balancing housecleaning with homework, and newlywed adventures.
After reading LtG and the litany of sweet newlywed blogs that accompanied her site, I felt the copycat urge welling inside me. But Love the Grows was such a too beautiful of a blog for me to even attempt to re-format, solidify my own bloggy thoughts, and commit to creating one of those adorable newlywed blogs.

Until now.
Since my life revolves around Starbucks, schoolwork, and living and loving life with my husband, I'm dreamin' and plannin' on doing a life as a newlywed post once a week, or fortnight, or whenever...I'm not that organized. ;) I changed the name and I LOVE it, and I'm working on changing the design beyond my feeble nothing-beyond-the-template abilities. Thankfully, I have my own graphic designer/brainy airman--that I'm pretty sure is in love with me--to do all that fun stuff for me.

Why should the Mormon girls have all the fun?!

In loving memory of my favorite newlywed blog...

How I got in a fight with mold and accidently killed a colony of ants

I'm blessed to be the oldest of eight kids, and as big sister I've had a lifetime of experience in housekeeping, baby catching, and playing laundrywoman. So, as my wedding neared, I felt no qualms about my new role as woman of the house. Aside from cooking of course, but I love my George Forman grill and my sweet husband is a master at culinary concoction.

And then I got married and realized...

I didn't have my sisters anymore.

No longer could I join forces with my sisters (and often times brothers) and spend a solid 45 minutes transforming a lived in home to a neat, tidy nest. Many hands make light work is never truer when there's ten hands to do the working. The first few weeks after we moved into our wee apartment, I had my husband home on leave, so he would help me tackle dishes, boxes of wedding presents, and we would make our bed together with our glorious married people comforter. Why ARE married comforters so pretty?

But then hubby went off to work and I was left alone in an empty apartment that was well-equipped with Netflix. I missed my siblings so fiercely those first few weeks. Where were my youngest siblings to go scrub the bathrooms, on my orders! My just-younger sister and brothers to do the other chores I didn't relish? And where oh where was my mother's (comparatively) spacious kitchen to dance in as I tossed dishes in the dishwasher and the stove to scrub oatmeal off of? While I love our apartment, I'm fond of calling our kitchen a closet-kitchen, for if the dishwasher is open, there's only room for once person...and I definitely cannot dance in it.  I reluctantly did minimal cleaning and housekeeping and wondered what it would be like to have sister wives--kidding ;)

Thankfully, our poorly ventilated windows pushed me towards drastic action.
Our bathroom decided to play the greenhouse and grow that fungus that offends mothers and housekeepers everywhere: mildew. Ewwww.

I ignored it for a while, hoping it would just go away. (Or that my military-trained husband would clean it. (Hehe.) Of course, as my husband said, the law of entropy was applied and it just worsened. Double ewwww.

Finally, I took my mom and mom-in-law's advice and applied a bleach cleaner, an old toothbrush, and a scrubby with a handle and showed that offensive fungus who truly was the lady of the house.

After nearly fainting.... because I closed the door..

And ruining hubby's old t-shirt that I had requisitioned...

And killing an ant colony that I didn't know existed...

My beautiful soft blue, sage green, and chocolate bathroom was clean. Spic and span. Mary Poppins' white glove clean!

How I relished my  beautiful bathroom! And the resulting text from my hubby when he saw the bathroom? I found such pride in my gleaming bathroom.

A few days later, I saw some nefarious dark spots around a fixture in our bathroom. Annoyance, and more than a bit of anger made me fixate on that spot.

In that moment, I felt what  generations of mothers, housewives, career women, and every woman in between has felt--no matter what her philosophical suppositions about gender roles: a well-scrubbed bathroom is a thing of beauty, joy, and pride. Mildew is my new enemy.

Why yes, I'm an obsessive Instagram-er.

(Follow me at susa_mau)

 No, my bathroom curtain isn't that wrinkled still. 

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