I agree— it probably has a lot to do with how she was raised. It’s hard to reprogram people.
How much time did she spend on her own after graduating school (high school? undergrad? associate’s degree?) and marrying you? Dorm life/college life isn’t the real world. If she went straight from student life to married life, that was a major growth opportunity missed where she would have been forced to develop certain responsibilities which were probably never expected of her previously.
Honestly, a lot of the things you could say about her were things I had to struggle dealing with on my own. My husband had to “raise” himself (along with his older brother) in high school when his parents had to go out-of-country on business for two years. Then he continued being independent when he went to college. And then he went out in the workforce for a few years after graduating. Me? I got married six months after I graduated from undergrad. Perhaps five of those months were spent living at my parents’ house while I worked and saved. It was a serious problem, trying to transition from student life (you want to stay up until 2 am playing on the computer? why not?) to being an adult.
Another difficulty I had was a matter of perception. He saw something out of place-- he sees it as a mess. If I see something out of place, I see a reminder of a project I’m in the middle of. As one of four kids, my parents’ house was never a picture-perfect magazine spread, so I never got into the habit of registering dust or dirt and thinking, “Y’know, I need to do something about that…”
One thing that really helps me is setting a timer. I tell myself, “I’m going to clean the kitchen for 20 minutes.” And voila! I find 20 minutes’ worth of stuff to pick up that would never have occurred to me to pick up if I hadn’t trapped myself in the kitchen for 20 minutes.
A second thing that really helps me is a list. I might write down five or six things that I definitely want to get done, no matter what, before I go to bed. It wouldn’t occur to me that I hadn’t cleaned the sink/tub/toilet in x period of time, but if I’m searching for something to write down, and think I haven’t done that in a while-- I put it on my list, and by golly, that bathroom’s going to get clean!
A third thing that really, really, tremendously helped me was when my MIL came and lived with us for a period of time. I got to see how proactive she was when it came to housekeeping, and how regular she was with her chores. Amazing-- dishes didn’t stay in the sink overnight! Wow! She actually mops the kitchen floor on a regular basis? Being able to model my behavior off what I saw firsthand was way more helpful than just theoretically knowing that dirty dishes and dirty floors bothered my husband.
A fourth thing I like, but my husband doesn’t, is when he gives me a specific request to fill. “I hate telling you to do stuff, because I’m not your dad,” he’d tell me, but I thought of it as letting him put something important to him on my to-do list, whether it was cooking something out of the ordinary, or tending to a particular room I didn’t realize had been neglected as badly as he thought it had been.
If clutter is a problem, I recommend reading “The Organizing Sourcebook : Nine Strategies for Simplifying Your Life” by Kathy Waddil (ISBN 978-0737304244). (You can pick up a used copy for 50 cents plus shipping off Amazon.) I found it immensely useful because it helped me figure out what I mentally needed to do in order to tame my piles of “stuff.”
Pregnancy isn’t the easiest time for major behavioral changes, especially with a toddler in the picture. It can be tremendously fatiguing. But being frustrated because your wife is lacking the maturity/responsibility to pick up on those thing herself is a common problem, and not easily solved in a short period. But it can be improved upon. Good luck to you and your family.
Think of all the diapers and messes she cleans up day after day.