11-1-2003 - Cleaning House
I'm a little embarrassed to admit I have a housekeeper. Not really a housekeeper but a group of women who come to my home every two weeks and clean. I pay them $65 and provide the cleaning supplies.
They usually arrive about 8:30 and are always gone if I come home for lunch. Since the GranMa usually meets them and lets them in, I haven't seen them in months. I only recently learned the woman I originally dealt with about doing this job is getting ready to have a baby this month and won't be back for awhile. She has a child the same age as the BoyChild and has at least one more about the same age as the GirlChild. I suspect there may be more in between.
They vacuum, dust, clean the bathrooms, mop the floors and change the sheets on our beds. It embarrasses me that I've had to resort to hiring that work done.
The dog hair on the stairs, however, embarrassed me more. The mold and soap scum in the bathtub made me feel unclean. And the sticky stuff on the kitchen floor made me tired.
I have to clean my house before they can come. That first week after they've been here, we do pretty well. Things stay picked up. We wipe up our messes. The junk mail makes it into the trash. The newspapers make it into the recycling bin.
But something happens that second week. It's like the house knows it's on the downhill slide. Leaves appear on the stairs. Socks appear in the living room. Dog hair pops up like the dog has had a stressful week and her hair just started falling out. The bathroom mirror begins to get those pesky little white spots on it. The dining room table gets covered with the minutiae from our everyday lives; bills to pay, broken pencils, crayons, junk mail, news papers, magazines, the GirlChild's school work. So Sunday afternoon and evening we spending getting ready for the housekeepers to appear and make our home habitable again.
I think it embarrasses me because I have this ideal in my head. I've bought into this thing that everyone (especially women, I think) wants to believe. I can do anything and I can do everything. I can work 10-11 hour days, come home, cook the meals, do the laundry, spend quality time with the kids, be romantic with the DearHusband, be well read, exercise, have an opinion about current affairs and not be exhausted.
It should be that way. Sometimes I feel like such a failure because I can't do all those things. I feel like a failure because if I have a night when the kids are both gone, my big hope is to go to bed early to get a few hours extra sleep. And I don't really want the kids to be gone because every night they are somewhere else means another night they aren't with me and we aren't together enough as it is.
But I'm making progress. Hiring someone to clean my house is progress. Admitting I can't do it all is progress.
I can't remember the last time I saw the news on television. I can't say I'm proud I don't know what's going on in the world but I try to accept that I can't do, and know, everything. I can't remember the last time I read Time or Newsweek. I heard recently about a disgruntled client who went after his lawyer at a courthouse somewhere and shot him five times. One of the major news stations caught it all on tape and showed it over and over again. I didn't see it so maybe that's progress too.
Now if I could just afford to have someone do our laundry, and could bring myself to actually hire them to do it, I'd be set.
M&Co.
