Thread: Too much of a clean freak?

Originally Posted by DaddyLove

uhmmmmm.....so. I found this thread through a search engine because I live with a woman (I am a man) who sounds a little like the Original Poster. I am responding because the first response to the original post talked about respect. After thinking about the respect aspect of this, there was something that sounded very hollow in the response and the questions which came to my mind were "how is she respecting me and our children when she screams at the children because they bring dirt into house on Saturday morning and polarizes the entire family for the entire weekend because they did something which she did not like ?" How is she respecting the family when we go to a public place and one of the children touches something which she thinks is not clean and she disrupts then atmosphere by stopping everybody and scolding the child which touched something ? My opinion is that there is more than respect for the woman who is cleaning at issue here. In the case involving our family, we have learned to deal with it by spending ALL of our free time away from this woman. As I type, I am remembering how the kindergarten teacher had a meeting with me (the father) because one child was afraid to play outside because "her mother told her to not get her shoes dirty". In the case of the woman we live with, it appears the root cause of the "cleaning" was the grandmother who died washing windows of a heart attack when her children told her not to wash them. This was the same grandmother who rubbed the face of her granddaughter in her urine at 4 years old after she wet the bed. I must say in the beginning of our relationship I tried to respect her cleanliness by buying a new house for her after I saw that living in a rental house caused her extreme anxiety as there was other people's dirt there. After buying the new house, my surprise was that the carpet had to be vacuumed 3 times a week, the windows had to be washed once a month and the kitchen had to be cleaned once a day from top to bottom. Saturday and Sunday are the days when we stay away from her and she takes the opportunity to clean while we are out of the house. The new house had no effect on her cleaning habits, if anything she started cleaning more and complaining more about the dirt. I noticed this year that everytime someone in the house uses the bathroom she is cleaning the toilet with toilet cleaner and a toilet brush even if there is no "trace" left behind. I asked her about this and she said she is using the cleaning chemicals to remove the smell. The strange thing is that after all of this cleaning, she is so tired that she sometimes forgets to eat and starts shaking. I don't understand this behavior very well but one thing that I have a hard time with now is respecting it. I have an even harder time respecting a person who screams at their family and cannot enjoy simple pleasures in life because they are worried about what some dead grandmother taught them when they were 4 years old.

You must be walking on egg shells and the children aren't being allowed to be children, this is / has to affect them in their up-bringing...

Children are meant to get dirty, they are meant to play.. Can your lady not see that and compromise?

There are bacterial wipes she can have in her handbag, if the kids touch something, hand one to them at least the kids can be kids, would she consider that?

She needs to understand that this is affecting the whole family and when that happens, it's selfish....

Offer that you will clean the childrens shoes, they need to play...

She needs help on this, what her Grandmother did was not even old school, but discusting and what she is doing to her family is selfish, all her way and more importantly, she's not allowing the children to grow up in a normal environment, she can guide them to the importance of bacteria but they have to live, as children..

I would hate to think what she thinks of sexual fluids....

I can only imagine the life you are leading and I think you need to put your foot down and realise that this isn't good for you or the children, it's obsessive in-deed...

CW