Coming Clean Read Online Free

is, a blocked toilet. Having produced a turd of gargantuan proportions, he avails himself of half a toilet roll. The waste pipe can’t cope and he comes running to me. “Soph, the toilet’s blocked again.” Note the lack of personal responsibility.
    “So get the plunger and unblock it.”
    “But the smell of shit makes me gag.”
    “Yeah. Me, too.”
    Over time, the irritation I’ve always felt about his slovenliness turned to real resentment and I started yelling at him. Greg is much better than me at controlling his temper in front of the kids, so he rarely yells back. As far as the kids are concerned, it’s Mummy who’s the baddy.
    It goes without saying that it wasn’t long before our sex life was on the skids. Most nights we would turn our backs on each other. Or we would engage in a whispered (so as not to wake the kids) fight. Our fights were always identical. Greg would accuse me of being self-centered. “You’re not remotely interested in any of my worries or struggles.”
    “Er, hello—since when did you acknowledge mine? On top of that, you think you have the right to treat me like some skivvy.”
    By the time Tanky rolled in, our sex life was already severely wounded. Tanky merely delivered the fatal shell.
    The thing that hurts most about Greg’s slovenliness is that he claims to be a feminist. Gender equality, free child care, a woman’s right not to shave—he’s into it all. I’ve often asked him how he reconciles this with behaving like an idle git at home. His defense is two-pronged. First he insists that he does his best and that any lapses are down to his being exhausted and preoccupied with work. Then he accuses me of being hung up and obsessed about untidiness and hygiene. According to Greg, my so-called neurosis is typically petit bourgeois and born out of the need of the middle classes to ape the grand, well-ordered homes of the aristocracy. Whenever he comes out with this, I tell him he’s talking arrogant claptrap and make the point that his background was just as petit bourgeois as mine. He refutes this on the grounds that his mother was—and is still—prone to dropping her cigarette ash into the Bolognese sauce and keeps a grease-spattered notice on the kitchen wall asking people not to feed the dust bunnies.
    Being tarred with the neurotic woman epithet really pisses me off. For a start—as I keep telling my husband the feminist—it’s male chauvinist piggery at its worst. Second, it makes me sound like I’ve turned into some kind of mad, pacing Lady Macbeth constantly fretting about the spots she can’t seem to get out of her granite countertops.
    Let me be clear. I do not want to raise our kids in one of those perfectly coordinated, sterile homes you find in interiors magazines, where the mum is the type who uses vaginal deodorant, irons the family’s underpants and adds talcum powder to the kitty litter to make it smell more fragrant. Nor do I want to be like my grandma Yetta, who was rarely to be seen without a sponge in her hand. “You have to use the toilet now?” she would moan to my granddad. “When I’ve just cleaned it?” To which he would reply, “No problem. I’ll tie a knot in my penis and wait until you tell me I can go.”
    All I want is to live in a house that doesn’t look like we just had burglars in. I’m fed up with our domestic chaos: the whole of the downstairs is strewn with books, comics, game and puzzle parts. Even the breadboard isn’t fit for its purpose, since it’s covered in screws, pliers, a couple of iPod Shuffles that haven’t worked for months, not to mention a pickled cucumber jar full of sea monkeys.
    I’d like to stop thinking it’s normal to find a can of tick repellent in the pasta saucepan or screw plugs in the sugar bowl. I’d like to come into the kitchen and find the counters clear of loose change, junk mail, CDs and a giant lattice of drinking straws, Ping-Pong balls and cereal packets, which turns out to be