The Best Kept Secret Blog - The Jig Is Up

Some women are passionate about shoes. For others, it's jewelry that turns them on. Me? Lately I've become obsessed with cleaning products.

These days it seems that nothing can get my attention more than an ad for soap scum remover. I stare, transfixed, as the woman of the household (always the woman), smartly clad in loafers, a crisp button down shirt, and what I am sure are freshly ironed jeans, wipes away grime in one turn of the wrist.

I want to be that woman.

Like most people, I don't really enjoy cleaning my house. Certainly not to spit and polish perfection. But the problem is, I feel as if I should. And I'm convinced those little bottles hold the key.

Throughout my 30s, I carefully crafted my Suzy homemaker image. So much so that at times, I went to extremes.

The cookie exchange incident immediately comes to mind. Overjoyed at being included in Christmas festivities with friends, I temporarily forgot that I'm not genetically programmed to produce edible cookies.

After three failed batches, I ran to the grocery store for a rendezvous with the Pillsbury Dough Boy. After carefully splicing 10 rolls of pre-fab chocolate chip cookie dough, I passed the finished product off as my own. Everyone marvelled at how uniform they all were.

On some level, I knew I was never really any good at this stuff. Nor did I enjoy it. But it went with the life I was living. It's taken me until now to accept that I'll never channel my inner Martha Stewart. Heck, I don't even have an inner Martha Stewart.

I'm in awe of the friends who never seem to suffer from this particular problem. ("That's what cleaning ladies are for, silly!") But I suspect that if you pressed them, they'd reveal a skeleton or two in their own closets.

Like the friend who has made it big in business but admits she still feels like an impostor. She masks her insecurity by spending money on big ticket, luxury items she admits she doesn't really need. Or the devoted mom who has put every ounce of her energy into her kids but secretly worries about what she'll do with her life once they leave home.

We spend so much of our younger years carefully constructing who we want to be. But then you reach a stage where you realize that the final product isn't reflective of who you truly are. Or if it once was a good fit, it no longer is.

Maybe that's part of the work of this stage of life. Like our first adolescence, we once again get to discover ourselves. And like those teen years, we need to find the courage to be true to the person we find.

So let the dust bunnies party under the sofa. It's time to come clean. I mean dirty.