The Breakup
“I cannot work for you any longer. I won’t be coming back.”
I have paid someone else to clean my home since my boys were born. I have felt mildly guilty about it for at least as long.
That was until last week. I managed when I lived in England to somehow keep my 400 square foot flat clean myself – with the help of Henry the Hoover and some Poundland cleaning supplies. But when I returned to the States and to larger quarters I fell back into my old ways and hired a business-like woman with a cadre of workers with solid references to care for my home. She would come into my closer to 2,000 square foot place with two helpers and blow through like a tornado in about an hour and leave it sparkling.
I noticed, however, that over time, she flew through more quickly and cleaned less thoroughly. Perhaps she and her crew of two developed an efficiency over time (that is the benefit of the doubt I tried to grant initially), but almost every time she visited something was either broken, mislaid, or simply done poorly. In my complete inability to and intimidation over confronting anyone with anything, I rarely mentioned this, and if I did it was with a polite, almost pleading text or written request (we almost never saw each other as I left so she could have the run of the place to herself). “Please, might you remember to empty the trash?” I’d ask. Or I’d implore, “ Please use the reusable microfiber cloths (I bought about 1,000 of these to avoid the waste of the paper towel that she was going through rolls of at a clip), and please don’t leave the used wet ones sitting on the wood floor (she did, over and over).”
I referred her to more than a dozen people, and I paid her for not working throughout the worst of the lockdown in the hopes that it would help her survive the pandemic and that she’d trickle it down to her assistants. I didn’t need The Compleat Servant-Maid — a 1729 British handbook for “mistresses and maids and other household workers” — to know that treating others with kindness and respect is simply the right thing to do.
And then the day before Thanksgiving she arrived to clean at 8 am and left at 8:25 am. I know this because I have cameras at my front and rear entrances and at two places inside. I live alone and feel better knowing the place is equipped to keep me as safe as is reasonably possible. I do not use the cameras to spy on her and told her as much once I let her know they were installed. She seemed unconcerned: “Everyone has cameras these days,” she said. However, these clever little bots do alert me any time someone comes or goes or does anything in the house. Unless they are covered up, as they were that day for those 25 minutes. She put some semidiaphanous cloth over both interior cameras when she arrived and removed them when she left – leaving me baffled and a bit concerned.
After validating my concerns with trusted friends and family who agreed that this was suspicious, I texted her to ask why she’d covered the cameras and why she managed to clean the place (which, as I discovered once home was not done so thoroughly) in world record time, she replied “I cannot work for you any longer. I won’t be coming back.”
A Brief History
Housecleaning is hardly a lucrative career, and until recently wasn’t even remunerated. Domestic servants were, in fact, slaves or serfs from ancient times right up until the end of the Civil War. Paid domestic work is relatively new, and wages remain minimal in most countries. Only new innovations in cleaning products and appliances, and the accompanying advertising that made housekeeping both sexy (who wouldn’t want Mr. Clean and the Brawny towel man to keep them in steamy company in the kitchen?) and a badge of achievement –extra shiny kitchen floors were the envy of the neighborhood courtesy of Simoniz and Mop&Glo. Women who used these products looked smug, satisfied, and nearly orgasmic as they asserted their dominance in the wife/mother contest.
But even with pay, housecleaning has long paid subsistence wages: The Victorians referred to their domestic help as “slaveys” who made as little as £6 and £12 per year. The Wall Street Journal reports that house staff in India might earn as little as $100 per month and in our country, the median wage for a “maid” is $24,850, and that is likely underestimated since undocumented workers often do this labor receiving under the table payments. That salary falls below the federal poverty line. Neither OSHA nor unions nor employment laws ensure that such workers receive fair pay or decent treatment.
Although a bona fide employer-employee relationship, it always made me feel slightly elitist, in an Upstairs, Downstairs sense. However, as Inc. Magazine argued, no one should feel guilty about hiring domestic help at a fair wage under good working conditions.
Outsourcing
For me, the opportunity cost of doing all cleaning myself assuaged some of the guilt. I could separate homemaking from housecleaning. I clean neither well nor efficiently (in a bad pun I might say I’m rubbish at it). Ceding the responsibilities made sense because it would let me use my time in more productive ways. I parented my boys full time, managed every other household responsibility including finances, volunteered at the boys’ schools and in the community, and bettered myself with activities like earning a black belt in Tae Kwon Do, a PhD in Holistic Nutrition, and a Yoga Teacher certification, all while my children were still in school. I’m not saying that cleaning the occasional toilet would have prevented any of this, but it would have made it more difficult. An economy functions optimally when people use their time and skills to their best effect, and cleaning was definitely not mine. As for the lovely women who have kept our home clean and tidy over the years, they did their job (mostly well), and we had what I certainly hope were mutually beneficial and respectful relationships.
The End of the Affair
The same cadre of confidants that I called when I received my ex-housekeeper’s shocking text advised that I return home immediately to confirm that nothing had been taken and change the garage door code (it hadn’t and I did). The whole experience left me as shaken as a can of Easy-Off. I sat with the shock for a few days and digested and watched the tempest morph into a gift. I concluded that she, in order to increase the number of clients she could serve to maximize her (and, I hope, her staff’s) income had caused her to cut corners over time, and on this particular visit she simply did not want me to see the sprint that replaced the longer event. I choose to believe her precipitous resignation and subsequent barrage of vitriol resulted from guilt at having been busted.
Despite my rationalizations for hiring housecleaners, I don’t need to do this any longer. I have time, sometimes too much, on my hands at this stage in life. I no longer chase toddlers or drive teenagers around. I largely make my own schedule, and since I worship at the altar of the OCDeity, I keep my place pretty neat and tidy anyway. In fact, I always cleaned up before they came to clean up lest they judge me to be a reprehensible slob. I like things in their place and I don’t like people in my place. I would come home and rearrange everything each time they left, search for things they’d hidden, and repair things they’d broken.
I felt a sense of deep relief at the thought of not having do this, and delighted to save the money I paid her biweekly. In a buying spree of all the latest innovations in cleaning supplies that will last me for months, I spent less than I’d have paid her for one short visit. So this Princess Di will remove the tiara, don the nonlatex gloves, and give the toilets a good scrub. Maybe I’ll reconsider if green mold creatures and dust bunnies begin to invade despite my efforts, but until then, I’m on my own.