All Growed Up?

If being a grown-up looks something like this 

and my life looks something like this 

Don't let your mom see a kitchen sink crowded with dishes
when there's a perfectly good bathtub available! 

does that mean my 29th year isn't the year of my True Adulthood? 

It would seem so. 

In the 20 minutes preceding my mother's arrival at our house for my birthday last week, Brad and I scrambled around like maniacs to make the place look like somewhere reasonable, respectable people live. The results were a success, as my mother announced, "Your living room is so clean!" and "Oh, the kitchen looks so nice!" 

This is so not me. 

But, of course, I could not keep up the charade for .2 seconds: I said, immediately, "Yeah, we just did all this before you got here so it wouldn't look terrible." But she was unfazed - my mother possesses the handy-dandy (typically male) ability to not-hear when she deems it necessary. 

She also has the ability, and had even before retiring, to keep her house spic-and-span, in order, and generally pleasant. This ability was not passed down to me in the gene sweepstakes, and it's a darn shame. 

Every now and again, I get the cleaning bug, and when I do, Watch out. (Brad can attest to the ferocity with which that bug bites me 4 or 5 times annually.) But for the most part, I'm just like my husband: I live around the clutter and add to the mess. I'm just too busy to spend the time dealing with it or keeping the things looking nice in the first place . . . but then again, I manage to find the time for blogging . . . . 

So when does the adult attitude toward house cleaning commence? Are we talking 30? 35? 50?