Good Housekeeping

I don’t dig washing dishes, and housecleaning is not my bag.

My house is not clean by any standard.  It’s wall-to-wall wee-wee pads and surfaces that rarely if ever see a dust rag.  (I have a few bags of solo socks and old torn t-shirts to USE as dust rags but they rarely ever get used.)  I often wish that things would just miraculously clean themselves, like my windows or my Pillsbury Dough Boy cookie jar (that never actually has any cookies in it).

I frequently don’t even notice the accumulations of dust and grease and detritus until it gets pretty disgusting, or if guests are coming, and then I devote a day or two to a thorough surface cleansing.  I also think my level of disgusting is on a sliding scale.  I can be made to feel a little better about my lack of housekeeping when I see someone else’s house that’s worse, but that’s not saying much. 

My sister and I grew up in a home increasingly bordering on a hoarding situation, so we never developed any semblance of housekeeping skills.  (My mother was perhaps a candidate for Dr. Robin Zasio and Matt Paxton, the anxiety expert and “extreme cleaning specialist” who show up at a hoarder’s house with the 1‑800-GOT-JUNK crew.)  It took us years to get my mother out of our childhood home, which involved forcing her to part with forty-plus years of STUFF she’d long forgotten she had and trying to convince her how ridiculous it was to hold on to an electric yellow jumpsuit from the ‘70s that couldn’t have fit any of us even if we’d wanted to wear it as a joke.

I have the utmost respect for cleaning ladies.  One of my best (and longest-standing) friends has cleaned houses for a living most of her adult life.  I suspect all those chemicals had a detrimental effect on her health, truth be told (occupational hazard, I guess), but that woman can clean with the best of them, and takes pride in it, and deservedly so.  Her house is always spotless, too, just like her mom’s house was when we hung out there as kids – it still is, despite her mom’s crippling arthritis – even though she raised my friend, an only daughter, with five exceedingly rowdy brothers (my friend also had four sons), who I’m certain never lifted a finger to help with the housework.

I wish I had the money to hire a cleaning lady.  A lovely woman named Rosa cleaned my house for Miracle Maids (run by a man, of course) back when I was making actual money, but I ended up hiring her solo when she wisely gave me her direct number.  I wish I could do it again because she and her assistant were pretty damn thorough.  I stayed well out of their way while they worked their magic.

Cleaning may be considered menial – in my humble opinion, it’s more accurate to call it “essential” – but it’s so valuable, and requires a depth of skill that maybe you and I (definitely I) don’t have.  So you’re happy to pay someone else, a qualified professional, a fair fee to do it for you.  That’s mercantile life.  It certainly makes sense as far as I’m concerned.

And what Rosa and my friend do is not less valuable – in fact, to me, it’s MORE valuable – than the work I do for my law firm clients, and I’ll get paid many times more than Rosa for doing it.  That could have something to do with the years of education required to do what I do, or it could be because what they do is deemed to be “women’s work” and therefore deserving of less respect and compensation.  But their years of experience with tried-and-true best practices, and expertise with the tools of the trade, are of equivalent and measurable worth to someone like me who can’t clean for beans.

In fact, the current state of my house embarrasses me, and I wonder and worry every day about getting the house ready to put on the market when the time comes.  I certainly seem incapable of maintaining it, and I really only call for help when I’m in desperate need (an overflowing washing machine, say, or a permanently dripping faucet).  I’m going to have to hire handymen, painters, plumbers, tile-and-grout guys and, more than likely, an “extreme cleaning specialist,” which is going to cut into my expected profits.  But it will have to be done. 

And don’t even get me started on the five years of dog urine saturating my floors (not to mention the moldings) – it’s a given that all of it will have to be replaced, and most if not all of my furniture will be out on the curb for the garbage men when I vacate the premises.  (That’s another job that amazes me:  What would our world be like without our sanitation engineers? They deserve every dollar, and undoubtedly more than they’re getting.)

If this pandemic has taught us anything, it’s that we need to value the lives of all those folks that we take for granted – the cashiers at the grocery store, the fruit pickers, the hospital cleaning staff, fast-food workers – and ensure that they have a living wage, and health care for their families, and an opportunity to have a little nest egg for treats and trips and to send their kids to the college of their choice, and can set some aside for a comfortable retirement.  It’s really not a lot to ask.  It’s kind of the American dream, no?  It infuriates me when I see the wealth of a Bezos or a Walton, and their employees can’t even feed their kids without food stamps.  Could they not spare a small fraction of their billions to ensure that the people who are ultimately the source of their great wealth are fairly compensated for the vital services they provide and have the dignity of respectable income (and paid time off when needed) for a job well done?

I wish I could pay Rosa to clean my house on a regular basis, and I would have no qualms paying whatever she asked of me, because it’s worth every penny for me to not have to do it myself. Not to mention that she does such a better job at it than I could ever muster.  But I guess I’ll always be stuck washing dishes . . .