I am exhausted. I spent the morning running around like a lunatic, emptying wastebaskets, cleaning out the four hundred books and Burger King toys from under the kids' beds, and tidying up all the surfaces in the house. No, we're not having company. Today the cleaning lady comes.
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I know what you're all saying, "Oh, poor you, too tired from preparing for someone else to clean your toilets? Is your champagne is too bubbly or this caviar too salty as well?", and I'll take the judgement. Any of you who have had a cleaning lady, you know the particular stress I am talking about.
Years ago, when I was a teenager, I remember my first friend whose mother had a cleaning lady. This was so odd to me. We were rousted out of bed Tuesday mornings, at the early hour of ten o'clock during summer sleepovers, to get the hell out of the house in order for this Irish woman to come in an work her magic. Her ethnicity, made the situation even stranger for me. Of course my mother didn't have a cleaning lady, since we were just one generation from having been the cleaning lady. Didn't everyone's mother clean her own house, in her uniform of polo shirt and sweatpants, scrubbing tubs and toilets, using straight bleach, with her bare hands? When I became of age, seven, I was pulled in on the action and became an expert, knowing that Comet bleach powder was for the toilet, but it left too much residue in the bathtub. My sister, however, was apparently immune to this brain-washing. She literally had mushrooms growing behind her toilet at some point in her twenties. I took the lessons to heart, and this knowledge served me well into my adulthood, where much to H's chagrin, I (and after marriage, we) carried on my mother's tradition of spending Saturday mornings cleaning, hoping not to pass out from the Clorox fumes.
As H became more successful at work, and we became more conceited about the trappings of success, we eventually hired a cleaning lady. At this point we had no kids - what the hell were we doing with all our time? Sadly, I think finding time to watch Law & Order reruns played heavily into this decision. And thus began our weekly fight about "cleaning for the cleaning lady".
Many jokes have been made, usually by men, about this activity of preparing your house for it to be cleaned. And these jokes usually imply the woman of the house is such a neat freak she doesn't trust anyone to clean but herself. But, once and for all, let me make this clear, cleaning for the cleaning lady means putting all your shit away so she can actually clean the surfaces, not spend twenty minutes putting away your spare change, collar stays and the random business cards you collected at last night's NASDAQ event. Even the kids give me hassle. How is Anna, our Polish cleaning lady, supposed to change the sheets on your bed with eighty-five stuffed animals and every book in the Judy Moody series in her way?
And yet...I do sometimes get carried away. The truth is, I am uncomfortable having someone else do my dirty work. I can't help but wonder what these lovely non-English speaking Polish women are saying about me as they yammer away to each other, much like the Korean women at the nail salon when plunk my callused stumps in to the pedicure tub. I don't work, so why the hell can't I find the time to dust? Well, I try to make myself so scarce when they are there, so maybe they do think I am employed. Nothing is worse than being stuck at home, for example, with a sick kid, when your cleaning lady is there. You sort of bumble around, feeling constantly in the way, being chased through the house as they progress from room to room. There's no better feeling than when your kid is demanding a snack and you have to literally step around the woman who is hunched over on all floors scrubbing your kitchen floors.
This guilt and fear of judgement pushes me to extremes when I am preparing for Anna and Sofia's Thursday visits, lest I give them any evidence with which to think badly of me or my family. Some examples of the lengths I go to:
Wastebaskets must be emptied of anything other than paper. H wants to know why we have to empty the one in Little Man's room, which usually contains that morning's urine-soaked diaper. Because these women signed on to clean a suburban home, not the urinals at the Penn Station TGIFridays. Other things they are not required to touch - tampon applicators, used dental floss and particularly full tissues.
In the bathroom, H's razor and the nasty, plastic tub stopper need to be taken out of the shower and hidden away. Shampoo bottles must be lined up. The toothbrush holder must be cleaned of scuz, and the back of the toilet must be wiped of any urine. She knows she's touching our filth - let's not give her technicolor evidence of the fact, shall we?
In the bedrooms, all laundry should be put away and all beds cleaned under. One time Anna found a pair of my underwear under our bed and left them, neatly folded, on top of the freshly changed linens and I WANTED TO DIE, imagining the look of disgust as she folded, what I'm sure she knew, were dirty underpants.
In the kitchen, the recycling must be censored. We can not leave it in its usual state, overflowing out of the pantry. We also must remove 50% of the beer and wine bottles so the ladies can not add "drunk" to "lazy" and "dirty" to their list of adjectives for me. The breakfast dishes must be washed and put away. H asks, "Why can't they wash dishes if they're here to clean?" Because they are cleaning ladies, not housekeepers, like Alice from The Brady Bunch. Should they make dinner too?
Speaking of the kitchen, this is where the staff of my house intersect. H thinks using that word is funny and I indulge him. Thursdays are also the days my sitter, S, comes. Talk about a wave of white guilt? Since the cleaning lady had to switch from Wednesdays to Thursdays, it's a tsunami. Now I not only have the ladies upstairs cleaning, but S is folding laundry in the basement at the same time (while I get Botox and drink martinis - or go to the dry cleaners). The level of my mania was brought to my attention by S when I asked her to wash the breakfast dishes on Thursday. She said, "She cleans today, no?" forcing me to explain I don't like to make Anna do that, causing S to give me the "crazy white lady" look. She works for a very wealthy family in an adjacent town the other four days of the week and she is constantly laughing at what I will and won't ask her or the cleaning ladies to do.
When S first started working for me, I asked her sheepishly, if she would be able to fold the laundry during Little Man's nap, since finding her rearranging my silverware drawer and organizing the kitchen towels by size and color showed me she was looking to be useful, rather than watching Spanish soap operas all day, as was my fear. But even as she agreed, this domestic task had me riddled with anxiety. The first day, I pulled out all my underwear from the pile and put it away myself. I didn't think handling my thongs or nasty, period underwear were going to gain me any respect from S. Eventually, I allowed her to fold my intimates, since going on that Easter egg hunt every Thursday was proving to be a pain in my ass, and I usually missed some anyway. I still cringe thinking about it though, especially the one day I found she had reorganized my undies drawer, including the more adventurous stuff that hasn't seen the light of day sine we were trying to conceive #1.
Perhaps some day I will relax with having people work for me, but having grown up in such a do-it-yourself family makes it really difficult. It also makes me worry about the kids' attitudes and abilities when it comes to housekeeping. We have gone through periods of time when the cleaning lady has been let go and I go back to doing it, but it seems their memories are so short. I casually mentioned one Thursday morning when the girls were complaining about emptying their beds of all their crap, that one day they wouldn't have to do this because we wouldn't have a cleaning lady. They asked who would be doing it, to which I responded, "You guys. Why do you think I had all these kids?" I fully intend, when they get a little older, to turn the cleaning of the house over to my children, with a little supervision. H scoffs, thinking it unnecessary. Or really, Money Bags? How irresponsible would it be to send people out into the world who think they're too good to clean their own homes? Nothing is more grounding than having to pick your own pubic hair off the back of the toilet.
So I will continue to be an outcast from my own home every Thursday, hence, my current writing location, the library, and continue to thank God that I have them. I don't think my working-class, white guilt will ever completely go away, and I will continue to be embarrassed by having other people do my work for me, but it won't stop me from enjoying the benefits. I will also try not to smack the smug look off H's face every Wednesday night as we prepare for "my staff".
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