Wife's (41f) lack of effort around cleanliness is frustrating me (40m)
TLDR: wife makes a huge amount of mess and doesn't help with any of the houseworks. When I ask her to either help or try to make less mess, she comes up with excuses or says that I am "OCD" about cleanliness.
To start off, my wife has never been the cleanest individual. She came from, to put it bluntly, a hillbilly family. I mean that quite literally as they lived in the middle of nowhere in the Ozarks. They never had anything nice, so she never learned how to properly treat things and they did not value cleanliness. Last time I went over there, I found a dead mouse in the cutlery drawer that had been there for some time.
This wasn't as much of an issue years ago, as I have always been very clean and was able to keep up with her mess. Now, after moving into a much larger house, at her behest, having a kid, and taking on a role where I work about 16 hours a day, I'm downing and become increasingly frustrated.
A few examples:
She cannot open a cabinet or drawer without leaving the contents in total disarray and then leaving the door ajar. I'm not talking just a little out of sorts. Every time she goes into a space looking for something it appears like she just took the entire contents of that space out, jumbled them up, and just shoved them back in. You can tell wherever she has been because she never closes any door or drawer she opens.
She cannot eat anything without crumbs and pieces of food going everywhere. You can sit and watch her eat and crumbs just pour out of her mouth so that any surface she is eating on is covered and smeared in mess. She then just takes the crumbs and drippings and sweeps them onto the floor.
After innumerable requests she still takes wet and hot items and places them on wood furniture. I collect vintage furniture and she has ruined dozens of nice, valuable pieces by putting, for example, hot cups of coffee with wet bottoms on them.
We have a coat closet 5 feet from the front door. Every day she just piles her stuff on the floor and table next to it rather than putting it away when she gets in. The pile grows and grows and grows until I put it away. There are often leaking water bottles and opened food in this pile.
The cost in my time and money has been incalculable. I spend every waking moment outside of work doing chores. We have also had to repair and throw away so many things because her lack of care has ruined them. This wouldn't be as much of an issue if she contributed or didn't make an amount of mess way above the norm. When I talk to her about it, she treats me as of I'm crazy and as if she can't even see that there is a mess. I can point out that we have mice because she leaves half-eaten food everywhere and she just does not get it.
I've tried innumerable ways to rectify this. I've given her chore lists and she says I'm being too controlling. I've asked, begged, and pleaded. I've tried to demonstrate to her how to clean and take care of things. I've provided detailed verbal and written instructions. I've swapped tasks with her so that I do the things she say are preventing her from cleaning (literally the only chores she does are "watching the kid", which entails sitting on the sofa on her phone while the kid watches TV and calling me whenever she needs anything, "doing her laundry" which is doing 3 loads of washing a week and throwing the clean clothes on the floor, and taking out the trash twice a week). I've yelled. I've stopped doing chores for some time thinking that eventually she will get sick of the mess.
None of it works.