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"  Ten minutes before my friends were supposed to arrive, I was sitting in the kitchen with my 9-month-old son, both of us covered in mashed banana, with stacks of breakfast dishes piled precariously on the corner of the table. At least the floor was pretty clean, because the dog was licking it. Normally, I&amp;#039;d have been madly wiping the surfaces and kicking Cheerios under the cabinets, but not for this gang. They don&amp;#039;t care if my house is a disaster. In fact, they expect it. They were coming over specifically to help me take it from a Category 5 hurricane to a tropical storm. Every month, I get together with three of my friends at one of our homes for four hours of cleaning, organizing, errand-running, and moral support. We do the chores you can&amp;#039;t face alone, either because they&amp;#039;re too big (pack the kitchen for a move), too heavy (put a rug under a solid wood bed), too tediously soul-crushing (dust the top of every single book), or too emotionally wrenching (sort bins of a late mother&amp;#039;s clothes). We call our group Unite &amp;amp;amp; Conquer, though my husband&amp;#039;s name for it\u2014Lift &amp;amp;amp; Separate\u2014has stuck too. It started five years ago, when one of my organizers-in-arms, Patricia, said, &amp;quot;There should be a thing where friends help each other clean,&amp;quot; and another of them, Karen, replied, &amp;quot;Let&amp;#039;s invent that.&amp;quot; Though they only come to my place once every four months, I have a list of U&amp;amp;amp;C tasks on my phone. Just knowing they&amp;#039;ll be there quiets the frantic &amp;quot;my life is a mess&amp;quot; voice in my head. There&amp;#039;s something about tackling someone else&amp;#039;s to-do list that is surprisingly undaunting. Here&amp;#039;s what people who care about you, but don&amp;#039;t have a lifelong connection to your stuff, can do for you: They can point out that the jeans you adore don&amp;#039;t look &amp;quot;hippie chic,&amp;quot; they look &amp;quot;ratty.&amp;quot; Or they can give you a skeptical look when you say you&amp;#039;re saving those grass place mats for your country house, which you will buy in the year two thousand never (we&amp;#039;re proud of you for letting the dream go, Patricia). Or they can test every single pen in the five jars of pens you own and toss the ones that don&amp;#039;t work (cough, Karen). While most of our time together is dusty and grimy, punctuated by Diet Coke breaks and the refrain &amp;quot;Are you really going to wear that/use that/get that fixed?&amp;quot; there have been moments of transcendence. I owned a very large set of my grandmother&amp;#039;s china, which my dad gave me. The pattern was not my style, and the entire set sat behind cabinet doors, taking up precious real estate in my tiny kitchen. But how do you get rid of your grandmother&amp;#039;s china? It felt wrong to even entertain the thought\u2014until Patricia came along. She adored the pattern so much she knew the name of it. So, after much discussion with U&amp;amp;amp;C about what it really means to remember someone you love, I approached my dad. &amp;quot;I have beautiful jewelry from Mam-maw that really makes me think of her,&amp;quot; I said to him. &amp;quot;The china, though: I don&amp;#039;t use it. Would it be okay if it went to a new home?&amp;quot; Indeed, it was okay. Now, three people who never met Mam-maw have fond memories of her. And every four months, I see those Friendly Village plates displayed at Patricia&amp;#039;s and I know I did right by her. When our group manages to meet for dinner or drinks, it&amp;#039;s always a thrill to see how nicely we clean up. But our chore days bond us like nothing else. That&amp;#039;s why new members are hard to come by. Recently, when we did have an opening, we took several months to fill it. We needed the right addition, because we are more to each other than a cleaning service, or nosy neighbors, or halfhearted helpers waiting for our turn. We are hardworking, thoughtful, problem-solving friends\u2014with aspirations of cleanliness, but similar habits of messiness. So when Amy surfaced and Patricia vouched for her personality (unflappable, with an eye for furniture arranging) and the state of her apartment (lovely, but with teetering piles of stuff), we knew we had our fourth. I may have met her less than a year ago, but I&amp;#039;ve folded her sports bras and she has seen the state of my freezer. We have a level of trust it can take years of girls&amp;#039; nights out to build. My U&amp;amp;amp;C afternoon ended with a child-proofed living room and an organized jewelry box. After, as I watched my son pull up on the now-secure TV stand, I was grateful not only for the chore checked off my list but also for the brain space it freed up, so I could just sit and play with him. We didn&amp;#039;t get to all of my to-do&amp;#039;s, but my friends are not deterred by my endless list of chores. They&amp;#039;ll be back. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.redbookmag.com/home/tips/a15653/cleaning-group/>