I live in an old house that needs a lot of work. Lots of character and personality, but the house needs new flooring, updated bathrooms and better insulation.

So I contracted to get a new kitchen floor and two guys come the first day, but only one guy comes back the next.

“He’s going to get started on our next job and I’m wrapping this one up,” he said. Sounded good to me. Later in the day, he shared with me his partner has clinically-diagnosed obsessive-compulsive disorder. “He’s always cleaning everything. He’ll go into people’s houses and ask me, ‘How can they live like this?’”

I mulled this over and suddenly became very paranoid the man could not work in my house because it was too cluttered and disorderly. It is. I do the best I can, but I am single-parenting while my husband is deployed, I have three young boys who mess up faster than I can clean and, frankly, I’d rather spend time with my children then with a dust broom and mop.

I know I am not alone in this dilemma. Modern moms have to make a lot of choices, especially moms who work outside the home. Which comes first, sorting through the boxes of serviceable hand-me-downs a fellow mother-of-boys has given us, or playing Candyland with my six-year-old? Especially when there are toilets to be cleaned and dust to be removed?

My house looks like I choose kids over cleanliness, and despite my paranoia over what an obsessive-compulsive floor installer thinks of my home, I can live with that.

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