Am I clueless? Or would most people have not picked up on this?

@keobooks: “Was I clueless to have no idea that she was trying to insult me?”

To be somewhat clueless about peoples’ passive agressive attempts at insult or manipulation is a good trait to have.

Everyone has different standards of cleanlines. The fact that this person was struggling with this fact was her problem. Not your’s.

Some people care a great deal, though men who keep a messy house can often get a pass. I keep (what I believe to be) a tolerably decent house, or did when it was left up to me. But scrubbing the baseboards????????? I don’t know what to say. I’ll tell you this. My reaction to someone constantly cleaning and tidying up is to invite them to my place where I will pay them to indulge in their hobby>

You’re asking the wrong person. (Or rather the wrong person is answering your question.)

I’m totally clueless about stuff like this. I’ll make an effort to try to be less clueless because I feel like I’m missing out on some useful social cues, but I don’t think this situation would be one of them.

No loss here.

Also…if your cleaning habits were a real concern, why would she ask you to babysit her son? Sounds like she’s a rude, nit-picker with cleaning issues.

I wonder, when people say “scrubbing baseboards,” if they really mean just wiping?

Anyway, if the woman was referring to you and she didn’t say she was referring to you, I don’t blame you for not picking up on it. If the woman is the type to play passive aggressive games as someone suggested above, then it’s on her and I wouldn’t even give it a second thought or feel a need to discuss it with anyone.

My husband has a passive aggressive way of cleaning around me so I do get the hint when he does it.
Other people though….. I tend to say things like, “Thank you so much! People like me need people like you in our lives.” Then again, I can be pretty dense when it comes to people’s intentions. I don’t always pick up on sarcasm. It would probably fly right over my head.

I would also be clueless. I am a slob as well, and if someone is cleaning around me a lot I assume they are a bit OCD, and I think that that must be a pretty miserable way to be when there are so many more interesting things to do and think about.

But then, I’m pretty clueless about hints, I am a very unsatisfactory person to subtley insult.

What a sad woman. I really dislike people who behave like that. I’m not sure if I’d have missed the cues or not. I remember a woman I used to know coming around and running her finger along the metal lip of the grill. It was clean, but I noticed her action and I know she used to bag me to other neighbours about my housekeeping. Like you, nobody is going to call me a domestic goddess. At the time I was working full time, had a three-month-old baby and was frankly too exhausted to care if the house was spotless. As long as we had clean clothes, decent food and the place was healthily clean, I couldn’t have given a rats.

I do know I wouldn’t be babysitting for her again. If she’s worried about your housekeeping, perhaps she could offer to help out instead of bagging you to your mutual friends behind your back.

All I can say, @keobooks?
I celebrate your cluelessness. Your greatest strength and least weakness.
What hoot that a friend had to fill you in.

Are you still babysitting for her?

I can’t even comprehend that kind of behavior. If someone did something like that to me and I then found out about it, I would just call them a clean freak, straight to their face. I truly don’t even understand what would make someone think those kind of comments were even okay. Is this a generational thing? I mean… I get it if someone’s house is actually dirty, but that’s just bizarre.

I think if I knew my house was always out of sorts, and someone more than once mentioned something about cleaning, that I would start to get self conscious about it. At that point I would either bother to tidy up when they visit, not invite them over anymore, or decide they were OCD and I don’t give a damn what they think.

I might just say to them at one point, “do my baseboards bother you?” Just to make them uncomfortable.

I actually do wish I was neater. I never have everything put away, or 100% sparkling clean. I grew up in a very messy house, and it was embarrassing for me, so I’m more self conscious than average, and I don’t like when people talk about the cleanliness or messiness of my home or other people’s homes. My sister carried a lot of shame about our childhood home, and now she is judgmental of people who have messy homes.

No, I don’t think it’s bad that you didn’t pick up on her subtle attempts to insult you.

I’m sort of like you in the housekeeping department so I know what it’s like to be far more interested in life than in how many dust bunnies are under the bed.

And I think that’s the main reason you didn’t pick up on her attitude. You have so many more real interests and concerns in life than to be focused on the nitpicky details of how clean something is or isn’t. It’s not on the top of your priority list (as it’s not on mine either) so why wouid you be super focused on her cleaning habits? In the grand scheme of life it’s, quite frankly, not that important.

I want to add my father would never pick up in it. If that woman talked about keeping baseboards clean he would either miss what she said completely, or he would think she worries about the most trivial bullshit. It would be the same if she worried about what shade of green is a dress she bought. It would mean nothing to him, and he would not think it applies to him at all. Not only because he could care less about woman’s fashion, but just to make the example more extreme, he’s colorblind and all shades of green look grey to him.

This is all good to hear. I didn’t really care about her weird attempts to offend me, but I did worry that I was slow on the uptake. When I was in middle school, girls would say they liked my clothes and then snicker if I said thank you. I didn’t want to be put in that position as an adult.

It makes some other things she did make sense. Sometimes I’d say something about my daughter, and she’d post a bunch of weird stuff in Facebook about people bragging about their own kids in order to belittle and shame her about her son. She would get deeply offended by stuff people said or posted that had nothing to do with her. She always thought things people said were secret personal insults directed towards her. Perhaps she felt this y because she did stuff like that all the time.

@keobooks She is passive aggressive, insecure, and she projects.

Consider yourself lucky, and mentally more stable than her, that her babble went right over your head.