I have just cleaned all three bathroom floors on my hands and knees, which is how I clean that kind of floor because it is, counterintuitively, the easiest way for me to handle it; and I have had gin in order to face that task, and it is deliberate that I am also using that gin to write this post. This was the plan. For well over two weeks I have been wanting NOT to think about the housecleaner situation, and telling myself “You don’t have to think about that right now,” and certainly not wanting to write about it—but also it is something that has been blocking up my brain until I talk to you about it. Certain topics are like that, I have found: they continue to bump against my brain until I tell you about them, and they prevent other topics from getting through. I was pretty sure gin would help break down the resistance, and I felt the resistance needed to be broken down, so I planned a Helpful Gin Occasion: floor terribleness, then topic terribleness. The whole time I was washing the bathroom floors, I rehearsed, but I am still not ready, and I will just say each thing in turn without trying to order my thoughts.
I mentioned that William had an envelope of cash and gift cards go missing over the summer, when, as it turned out, the substitute cleaner was also here. I did not spend much time fretting about this at the time, even though it drives me up a tree to have things Missing, and so I DID spend a fair amount of time looking for it; but I thought William had, at most, the few gift cards (maybe $100 total) he’d received for his recent birthday, plus maybe up to $100 cash. After Edward’s money and cards were stolen, I sent an email to William at college telling him what had happened, explaining how that cast the disappearance of his cash and gift cards in a different light, and telling him that we were going to replace them for now; and that if they DID turn up later, which they still could do, we would figure it out at that time.
It turns out the amount that disappeared was about a thousand dollars. I hadn’t realized it, but he had saved all of his high school graduation gift cards and cash, among other things. I’d thought he’d ignored my advice about hanging onto it until he thought of Something Specific/Deliberate to spend it on, but he had not ignored that advice. He also had Christmas money, Christmas gift cards, birthday money, birthday gift cards. Luckily he had also been keeping a spreadsheet of all his money, so we knew how much disappeared and could pay him back accurately.
Again and again I hear myself saying to him, my white son living in a privileged household that can afford housecleaners: “The ONE THING I DO know is that it was NOT the housecleaners.” And that should have been correct. I should have been correct. If it had just been our usual housecleaners, I would have been correct. I stated something with absolute confidence, and I was wrong; and in stating something that SHOULD HAVE BEEN TRUE I undermined my child’s actual experience with reality, which is that he had carefully stored his cash and gift cards in a desk drawer, which should not have been opened by anyone else for any reason, and they had been stolen by someone his parents hired to come into the house. His mother then assured him confidently, as he searched frantically and with increasing despair, that the housecleaners were DEFINITELY not to blame—and so, by implication, that it was HIS fault. HE must have misplaced them. This is not the way things should have been: I should have been right. Our cleaners should have been blameless, because there was NO WAY they would have risked so much for so relatively little. My son should have learned a valuable lesson about keeping track of his possessions, and about not blaming people who did not have his privileges and would not in a million years have jeopardized their lives in that way. Later, he would have found the envelope in a box of other things, or stuck to the bottom of a textbook, or tucked into a different drawer—and he would have learned not to jump to wrongful conclusions so quickly. In most situations I would have been right. But in this situation I was wrong. Statistics playing out, as statistics do.
The money is not important. A thousand dollars makes an impact on us, of course it does. A thousand dollars is enough to cause pain, and we are lucky that it causes pain rather than an impossible situation: if a thousand dollars disappeared in a different way (car repair, household repair), we would manage it, as we managed it in this case: we can come up with the money; we can reimburse him; we are so lucky. The real impact is that William learned two things that he should not have learned because they are not generally true: he learned that housecleaners steal, and he learned that his mother is wrong about things like that. And he learned, I assume, that when his lived experience differs from his mother’s impression of reality, his mother will side with her impression of reality. This is in fact what happened. That is more of a steal than the thousand dollars.
Speaking of which. Someone came to our house and stole a thousand dollars, and nothing happened. She took that envelope, and nothing happened. Months went by, and there was no response, no reaction; nothing happened. This is unbelievable to me. No wonder she stole from us again. No wonder. Imagine taking the bonkers risk of stealing a thousand dollars from a household, and there is absolutely no reaction from the household in question, not because the household is so wealthy they don’t even care/notice, but because the household believes absolutely that housecleaners Would Not Steal. Because the household in question would instead blame their own child for carelessness. Because the MOTHER in that household would blame her own child for carelessness. Because I would blame my own child for carelessness. It’s true I didn’t know it was a thousand dollars, I thought it was less than two hundred. And it’s true my children can be careless, as can we all. Still: I stated to my child that the one thing I knew for sure was that the housecleaners COULD NOT have taken it; I stated that as an absolute fact. And I was wrong. I guess it helps somewhat, a little bit, to pay that money back, AFTER a second theft has occurred; I guess it helps somewhat, a little bit, to say “Oh, it turns out I was wrong,” AFTER a second theft has occurred. It doesn’t really fix it. Does it.
I am twitchy and insecure again and again as I think of fresh things to worry about. Because someone who would do the equivalent of taking the cash out of the equivalent of a wallet AND THEN THROW AWAY THE REST OF THE WALLET RATHER THAN PUTTING IT IN A MAILBOX SO THAT THE OWNER COULD HAVE BACK THOSE THINGS THAT ARE USELESS TO A THIEF BUT CRUCIAL TO THEIR OWNER—someone like that might do any number of things. Someone like that might take a spare house key hanging by the door, and be able to get in whenever they want to. Or a spare car key. Someone like that might leave a window/door unlocked in a forgotten part of the house, so that they could get back in. Someone like that might take important paperwork. Passwords. Garage door openers. ID cards. Little-worn jewelry. So many things that are important but we don’t think of those things or check them often. Any of those things could be gone, and maybe we haven’t noticed yet. There could be more things that have already happened but we don’t know yet. There could be more things that will happen. This might not be over.
And I feel like I put so much work into accepting having people in the house in the first place. That was such a mental hurdle. It was something I wanted, something I’d BARGAINED for, but it still felt like an invasion, and I felt so sensitive about what they might think about my house / my possessions. You may remember me leaning heavily on you for support at first, and many of the things you said (some of you from the actual experience of having been housecleaners) came back to me comfortingly again and again in anxious moments.
And of course there is the issue of needing to clean the house ourselves now, and I use the plural pronoun with bitter irony. I will say again that I do not expect sympathy on this topic: MOST people have to clean their own houses. That is the NORMAL state of things. But if you are at all inclined to give me sympathy, remember that I WAS cleaning my own house without wanting extra sympathy or seeing it as anything but normal, and that it was ONLY when my husband wanted to move to a much bigger/better house (from a cookie-cutter builder’s-grade development house to a historical antique needing care and respect), and I did NOT want to move, that I made “hiring housecleaners” a condition of the move. I did not want to move to my husband’s dream house, after living with my husband for over twenty years and knowing he could not be counted on to clean even a smaller/lesser house; I did not want to agree to something that would increase HIS happiness but MY workload; but I ALSO did not want to be the personal crusher of his dream. And so I made a deal: he could have the house, I would not stop him even though I didn’t want to move—but I would not clean it beyond the normal everyday cleaning. Someone else would handle the acres of hardwood. Someone else would handle the bathrooms. Someone else would handle the kitchen and the laundry room and the chair rails and the trim and all the little carpets.
And he agreed, and he hired the housecleaners. And so we moved. And now we are here, we have moved, and now there are no housecleaners, and this is my literal bad dream, I literally have had this as a bad dream: a house I didn’t want, and I have to clean it. (If you have even ONE moment of thinking that you don’t understand why I don’t have Paul and the kids help clean, then this is the moment for you to realize that you are RIGHT: you DON’T understand, on MULTIPLE levels. ((The kids DO do some, though not without me having to be the one who tells them and reminds them and checks their work; Paul DOES do some of his own volition, but it feels like he feels like he’s doing me a favor / needs praise / can opt out if he doesn’t feel like doing it; it still all feels as if it is ultimately my responsibility; the kids will soon grow up and move out and then I will not even have their help; I DON’T understand EITHER how I ended up married to, or why I stay with, someone who is not a partner to me in this way; is there anyone on earth for whom “the husband/children should help more” would be a fresh/new/useful suggestion as opposed to something they had already been working on to the point of screaming frustration for years/decades; etc.)) And you are going to have to accept that my lived experience is more relevant here than your impression of reality—which is more than William got from me, when his envelope with all his money and gift cards disappeared. You and I will apparently have to buckle in and prepare for many more lessons in this seemingly endless series entitled “When You Feel as if Something Is Scoffingly/Eye-Rollingly Obvious/Easy, Prepare To Be Proven Embarrassingly/Humiliatingly Wrong.”)
I should say for the sake of honesty/frankness/history that there are some positives here. One, and this does not speak well of me, is that resentment of one’s spouse can be deeply satisfying. To me, anyway. Take a moment to be glad you are not married to me. (On the other hand: I am a spouse who cleans bathroom floors on my hands and knees. So. Trade-offs.)
Another way in which this is not an entirely negative situation is something I’ve referred to before, which is that it was actually kind of satisfying during the pandemic, when we didn’t have the cleaners, to have a CLEANING SYSTEM, and to successfully manage to implement it. Toilets, every other Friday night! Bathroom floors, the OTHER every other Friday nights! Showers! Sinks! Kitchen counters! All HANDLED. At our old house, we had five babies one after another and sometimes two after another, and so the housecleaning DID slip. And once it slipped, it was hard to get it back. I hate to compare this to dieting and weight loss, but have you ever thought to yourself that if you could just suddenly MAGICALLY APPEAR at your ideal weight, you would be able to maintain it from there? that it’s the struggle to GET there that’s so hard? I felt that way about the housework: if I could just start over with a clean house, I WOULD maintain it this time, I WOULD. And then to get to that point with THIS house, and have it be TRUE! If I started with a clean house, as I did at the beginning of the pandemic (and, more importantly, no little kids, no interrupted nights, no general exhaustion, no endless busyness), I DID keep it clean, I REALLY DID! Well, it was satisfying to see. And in some way, satisfying to DO: to see the shine, to see the results, to feel able to cope in a period of (PRESUMED SHORT-TERM) adversity.
Another positive, which I hate and have mentioned before: I am a better cleaner, when I do clean, than the housecleaners were. Which makes sense! They do not have the time to sit there messing with the eensy dirt in the eensy corners, using a toothbrush around the faucets! If you want something done “right” (i.e., to your own too-high standards), do it yourself! Etc.! But. Also. It is galling to pay a rate that works out to an hourly rate of four times what I make at my job, and have things skipped and missed. I DID NOT WANT TO COMPLAIN. Imagine how spoiled that would be. And also: I was so grateful that someone else was cleaning our toilets, which is something I believe no human being should have to do for another able human being, so the sooner we can get self-cleaning and/or individual/personal toilets, the better. And so when I cleaned the bathroom floors tonight, and I cleaned UNDER things and BETWEEN things and BEHIND things and IN THE CORNERS OF things, there was a satisfaction in doing things WELL. Housecleaning is not an area where, as a woman who stayed at home with children and in many ways regrets it and in still more ways deeply resents society for it, I wish to excel. But it is still satisfying to do something well, and to have it done well, and to see it multiple times a day and see it DONE WELL. By MY definition of “well.”
Another positive: the complete elimination of the pre-housecleaners stress. Which feels like some serious BRIGHTSIDING here. But it WAS immensely/disproportionately stressful to anticipate their arrival, and I DO feel the deep relief of it. (While also missing the motivation it gave me to deal with things I should be dealing with anyway, such as clutter piles, and forcing the children to deal with their rooms, and giving us all a helpful structure for remembering to change sheets and put the toothbrush holders through the dishwasher and so forth.)
But mostly, it is negative. I feel stuck. I feel trapped. I feel resentful. I feel disillusioned and cheated and hurt and betrayed, and incredulous, and so sad. I don’t want to seem to inappropriately put this above much more serious incidents/situations, but at my own proportionate level I feel our house has been violated, and our privacy has been violated. I feel insecure/unsafe in my own house; I’ve been locking doors in a way I didn’t lock them before, and having frequent anxious thoughts about how easy it would be for someone to break in even with the doors locked. I have been forceably reminded of the bad things human beings are willing to do to each other. I feel nauseatingly privileged, to have this kind of problem: “Oh, our HOUSECLEANERS stole some of our EXTRA MONEY.” I feel like I am overreacting: no one died, no one is injured, no one has a new terrible diagnosis, we didn’t even have anything sentimental/precious/irreplaceable stolen, all we lost was money. (As far as we know.) I feel like I am in menial service to this house I didn’t want. I feel like I am in service to my husband’s life and wants, and that his is the Main Life and I am only the Support/Accessory Life. I feel hopeless to fix/change the situation; at this point I don’t see any way to solve it, either now or later. I think that if I am the “default” cleaner, so that everyone else gets to essentially choose if they clean or not and everything else ultimately falls to me, year after year, that I will end up leaving my entire family to go live by myself in a 1BR/1BA apartment where I will clean only for myself and not have to hate anyone.
I am going to post this now, and edit if necessary tomorrow. Please don’t feel obligated to comment if this is the kind of post where you don’t know what to say: I know that kind of post, and I know that feeling about commenting, and I will entirely understand. Thank you for being here; thank you for reading this.
