Panic Cleaning Season

Newsletter 2025-05-05

Triple Birthday Party season is upon us. It feels like I just wrote this newsletter. The years start coming and they don’t stop coming. Smash Mouth truly is the leading philosophical body of our time. Thanks to the impossible scheduling conflicts created by trying to get all of my brothers and sisters into one place, my parents delayed our Easter celebration in favor of combining it with Triple Birthday Party weekend. In two Saturdays, all of my siblings will come to my house. The following day, we’ll go to my parents house for a rare May Easter egg hunt plus the high school graduation of my youngest brother. If you’re wondering what the age gap is between us, it’s approximately a thousand years, give or take a few centuries. This will be the first time in many years—if not ever—that my entire family will be here for the Triple Birthday Party. It depends on your definition of “entire.” All of my siblings have been here before, but one of my brothers has three kids who have never set foot in my house. The pressure is on for us to throw the shindig of a lifetime. Naturally, we aren’t up to the challenge, but that won’t stop us from trying. It’s time to panic clean like we’ve never panic cleaned before.

The house certainly looks like we’ve never cleaned before. In theory, this year shouldn’t involve any panic because we’re starting the process earlier than ever. We’ve been at it for a month. We began prematurely enough that it couldn’t really be considered party cleaning. It was just our regular roster of unending chores, but with added intensity. Existence is a burden. The idea was that, once we hit the panic-cleaning stage, we’d be starting from a messy house rather than one that was in complete shambles. I’ve been a parent for a long time, but I still don’t understand how our house reaches a state of decay so quickly. There’s hardly anyone in it for most of the day. We all have to deal with minor inconveniences like work and school, which take up all of our daylight hours. Betsy and Mae also have extracurricular activities that keep them out of the house on nights and weekends. When we’re at home, we mostly devote ourselves to sedentary activities. The kids are always on their screens or doing a solo craft project like knitting or diamond dotting. Lola and I often host our friends. We do exciting activities together like playing board games, watching TV, or playing board games while watching TV. We’re living our best lives. None of that should generate much debris, yet there’s always so much to clean up. Thirty seconds after I force my youngest two kids to pick up their laundry, I blink, and their dressers have exploded, tossing every article of clothing they own around the room. And thus the cycle begins again. What we really need to do is clean for a week straight and then send the kids to live somewhere else. That’s not an option, so we have to stay on top of our regular cleaning plus the special bonus cleaning for party time, all while the children actively work against us. It’s the same challenge as every year, only harder because the kids are bigger and make larger messes. They have bigger attitudes, too.

My nine-year-old, Waffle, got herself grounded for a week last Sunday due to repeated defiance over a completely basic task that would have taken, at most, five minutes to complete. I grudgingly respect her commitment to not being productive. Deep down, I’d also like to watch the world burn rather than getting a single thing done. In Waffle’s defense, she has less motivation than the other girls. She’s the only one who doesn’t have a birthday being celebrated at the party. Don’t feel too bad for her. Some people bring her gifts anyway, and she gets a party all to herself in the fall. That’s future gratification, though. For now, she’d rather focus on the instant kind, which mostly involves doing the opposite of whatever I say. This spring, I estimate that I’ve had to threaten to ground her forever approximately once every two days if she doesn’t pick up her clothes. The rate at which they end up on her floor is impressive. She only wears one outfit, making it a mystery how the other seventy-five pairs of shirts and pants end up all over the carpet. Perhaps she wants to up her fashion game before she starts at a new school this fall. I still maintain that she could do that without blowing up her dresser. I shudder to think of what those clothes must look like after I make her put them away. I choose to believe that everything is neatly folded and not crushed into crumpled balls. I’ve written a lot of books, but that fantasy is my single greatest work of fiction.

The pigs have been equally unhelpful in getting ready for the party. It’s warm enough outside for grass to grow, which means my annual war on mud has begun. The pigs have done their part to make the yard less of a mess by bringing all of the mud into the house. In general, they really are clean animals. They don’t roll around in the muck. They just walk through it while going about their normal business and track it into the house on their hooves. My tiny backyard is divided into two sections separated by gates. I seeded and watered one side and kept it safe from the pigs until the grass was obnoxiously high. Last week, I let them graze on it so I didn’t have to mow. Then Luna, the smallest and best behaved of the pigs, started digging, destroying the fresh section of lawn. She always roots up the same spot where the elm tree used to be. There must be something down there that smells good. Either that or she’s just bored and strikes where the ground is soft. My beautiful, carefully manicured green space now has a massive hole in it that will soon reach all the way to China. I think I found a workaround for the tariffs. Meanwhile, I’ve reseeded the other side of the yard. In a few weeks, it will be lush and green, at which point I’ll let in the pigs to destroy that half, too. Much like with the inside of the house, keeping the outside in good shape is a losing battle. I need to catch it in that elusive condition where one side or the other looks good for the day of the Triple Birthday Party. The art of hosting is trying to have people over when your house is in that rare transitional state before everything gets destroyed again. That’s why it’s best if all parties are as short as possible.

This Saturday was an especially busy day of chores in preparation for the party. While the pigs were outside wrecking the fresh grass, I made the critical mistake of trying to clean up their room. I didn’t realize how dirty the space was until I scrubbed down parts of it. I forgot that those brown baseboards were supposed to be white. I had only planned to wash their blankets and vacuum the room, but once I got started, I fell down the black hole of “and one more thing.” By the end of it, I was on a stepladder dusting transoms and vacuuming cobwebs from the corners of the ceiling. The pig room hasn’t been this clean since before we had pigs. It’ll stay that way for the next six to twelve hours. If I had been smart, I would have waited to clean that room until ten minutes before the party. By the time people actually get here for the celebration, that room will look just as dirty as it usually does. I took pictures of it in unnaturally pristine condition to prove it happened. I’ll show people those images on my phone and ban them from entering the actual room. If they need a beer from the fridge in the pig room, I’ll send a kid to fetch it. It’s not like they’ll have anything better to do at their own party.

Once we get everything clean, the birthday party will generate a new mess. I don’t mean the normal trash from a large gathering. Most of our guests clean up after themselves—and even after others. My mom has been known to sneak off to do my dishes. The bigger issue will be all the new gifts. No one in the history of the world has ever needed more stuff less than my daughters. Their rooms are bursting at the seams with the bounty from previous birthday parties. We’ve gone through their spaces multiple times to get rid of items they’ve either aged out of or no longer use, but it’s a losing battle. Material goods are flowing into this house far faster than they’re going out. I thought the problem might ease as the kids got older and became more interested in digital gifts. That hasn’t proven to be the case. They’ll never stop asking for more water bottles and Lego sets. We’ll only have room for new ones if I start sleeping outside.

It seems like we’re ahead of the curve on party preparation this year, but that’s probably because there’s a million things I’m forgetting. The real terror won’t set in until the final day or two when I remember them all at once and try to do them simultaneously. Lola and I both put in leave for the Friday before the party. There’s nothing quite like burning vacation time to do chores. Those efforts won’t impress anyone. No one will believe we’re good hosts, but they might leave thinking we live like actual human beings instead of swamp creatures with a hoarding problem. It’s an impossible standard to maintain. If we don’t disappoint them this time, we’ll have to put on the same facade next year—or whenever the least frequent visitors eventually come back. We should draw a line and only panic clean when my Missouri siblings come to visit. The ones in Illinois have been here often enough to have already caught us on a day when we didn’t have time to perpetuate our lies. I need six to eight weeks of notice to create the illusion of being a functional adult. If you show up sooner than that, it’s your own fault if you’re traumatized by what you see.

As my readers point out every year, the solution to all of this is to host the Triple Birthday Party at a neutral site. It would eliminate any need to clean. However, the biggest drawback of hosting at my house is also the biggest upside. It’s good that, once a year, we’re forced to get our house back into livable condition. Without the pressure of the judgment of others, we would be crushed by the weight of our own squalor. Instead, we dig ourselves out every May. The house might not stay clean for very long, but it gives us a new starting point from which things can fall apart. If we shoot for the stars and miss, it will at least take us a little longer to descend to rock bottom again. As much as I hate all of this party preparation, I desperately need it. Plus, it’s nice to see everyone. That’s important, too, even if it’s at the bottom of the list.

Anyway, that’s all I’ve got for now. Catch you next time.

James