How to deal with a visit from the great-grandparents…

I come from a long line of perfectionists on my mother’s side – my maternal grandparents being the Patriarch and Matriarch of Perfection. They are always prompt and extremely polite. Their cars have always been polished until they shone, every log book service completed on the due date. When they had a lawn, it was always manicured, the plants pruned and the gardens weeded. The house was always pristine, and when I stayed with them as a little girl, I’d never slept in fresher sheets or been tucked in tighter.

My maternal grandmother is the quintessential 1950’s housewife – she has had weekly hair appointments for her entire adult life, she wears heels and stockings – all year round - even on the hottest Australian summer days. She always dresses as if she might bump into The Queen at any given moment.

She and my mother are the most obsessively organised women on the planet. They diarise everything (my grandmother even transfers things from her handbag diary to her house diary) and both have supreme budgeting skills. They have always kept a rigid cleaning/ironing/housekeeping schedule, which my mother somehow managed to juggle with work.

 I, on the other hand, am seriously flawed. Yes, I inherited some of the organisational skills, my grandmother’s uncanny knack for remembering dates, and their obsession with details, but somewhere in the mix I lost the Suzy Homemaking gene.

My sister is the exactly the same. My mother has been known to place her head in her hands and utter, “I just don’t know where I went wrong”, like our lack of ability to iron, or more to the point, our lack of ability to care about ironing is somehow a reflection on her parenting skills.

I would love nothing more than to exist in a tidy environment, be able to find a matching pair of socks on demand, or pull something out of the wardrobe that is *gasp* already ironed, but sadly this is rarely the case. And having children has just exacerbated the situation. Most of the time it looks like a crazy dictator just released a nuclear bomb in the house, except that I have two crazy dictators and twice the explosive aftermath.

And that’s what the house looked like yesterday - at 11.00am - when my grandfather rang and asked if they could give Miss Curious (Miss C) her 5^th birthday present TWO WEEKS EARLY! I looked at the clock. I was still in my pyjamas and my hair looked like a scarecrow. I looked at the bedraggled kids. I looked at the monumental pile of filing and paperwork and miscellaneous crap on the coffee table. I looked down at the suspicious brown stain on the kitchen floor, which had only been brought to my attention moments ago by Miss C. “When Clare (Miss C’s Best Friend Forever) comes over when I’m 10; I hope she doesn’t spot THIS!”

I paused and then said to my grandfather, “sure, we’d love to see you. What time do you think you will be here? In 20 minutes……….great!”

During these moments, I am torn between wanting desperately to impress them and really not giving a toss. Under the time constraints, I usually manage to satisfy both.

The kids are aware of the dire need to clean up at these times. They have learnt from experience that at some point I will spontaneously combust. So they started running through the house. The Ranga was throwing cars into a drawer at an alarming rate. Miss C cleaned the entire back room in a matter of minutes. I showered, threw the scarecrow hair into a ponytail and made all of the beds.

And then I saw them walking down the driveway. I glanced around but there was no more time. The kitchen benches were covered with breakfast dishes, left over fast food packaging from the night before, and another miscellaneous pile of paperwork (where do these piles come from?)The Ranga had also traded cleaning up all of his cars for emptying the entire contents of his wardrobe onto the floor.

On a positive note, I wasn’t naked. Last week, after showering, I was walking from the bathroom to the bedroom (in the nude) and noticed, through the bedroom blinds my husband had kindly left open, my mother, my aunty, my uncle and my cousin all arriving for a ‘surprise’ visit. I immediately dropped to the ground and commando rolled across the floor to reach my robe. But a robe wouldn’t have sufficed on this occasion.

My grandparents don’t do nudity.

 I answered the door fully dressed and lead them through the bomb site to the back room where we made pleasantries and drank cups of tea and ate the ‘good biscuits’. I told them about The Ranga’s major toilet training achievement - the wearing of undies for two days in a row (even though he is three years, five months and they hail from the era of toilet training children at the age of one). The children then regaled them with lessons in Star Wars 101, reciting the names of ALL characters from the trilogy and the three prequels.

And then The Ranga disappeared.

The thought crossed my mind that I should check on him…and then he reappeared. His skinny white legs were moving at lightning speed. I scanned him up and down and realised he was wearing nothing but a   T-shirt. In the time it took for me to wish I could just wiggle my nose and materialise a pair of pants (and a clean kitchen), he streaked past, his weapon of mass destruction dangling from side to side. I lurched forward to grab him, but it was too late. My 82-year-old grandmother was clutching the side of the buffet and hyperventilating.

We promptly shuffled my grandparents down the hallway, kicking The Ranga’s bedroom door shut on the way through to contain the hazardous waste that was spilling from the doorway, and bid them farewell.

I slowly exhaled, glanced around, and thought: perhaps perfection is overrated…