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.

I have just finished a book I would highly recommend:

Mr. Flood’s Last Resort, by Jess Kidd

Most of the books I get from the library are ones that catch my attention when I’m supposed to be reshelving them, and that’s how I found this book. It has some bad/crude language, a lot of humor, some violence, some grossness I found mostly avoidable, a narrator who is not exactly unreliable but not exactly reliable either. She is capable in a way I find soothing to read about: I like imagining what it might be like to be someone who isn’t always so THROWN by everything. There is a layer of the story in which the various elements may or may not be supernatural. There are mysteries to gradually reveal/solve; my one disappointment is that I guessed some things (I prefer to be mystified and then amazed). I found it really fun to read and I badly want a sequel.

One reason I particularly enjoyed it is that the main character is an in-home elder caregiver, which is a job I did awhile back. She’s been assigned to a swearing, yelling, difficult old man who is also a hoarder, and I found it satisfying to read about her competence dealing with both the house and the man. I also enjoyed the Irish slang.

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I am on Year Two of using up scraps of boxes of Christmas cards I already had, rather than buying new ones, and I can see how this clearly indicates I’ve had a little bit of a PROBLEM buying TOO MANY cards in the past, but ALSO I LIKE TO and I don’t plan to stop. (I had THREE boxes of cards in my cart at the store this past week, and it took a STRONG override mechanism to make myself put them back. One set was pink. PINK. PINK CHRISTMAS CARDS. If I see them again I may weaken.)

Anyway, the issue this year is that LAST year I laid out all the boxes of cards, and for each recipient I chose what I thought was the best card for them, forcing myself not to care if I might have sent them that same card in a previous year. And since I don’t REMEMBER which card I thought was best LAST year, THIS year I am in danger of sending each person the same exact card as last year—which, since these were already extras, might be cards they have in fact received TWICE before. I am all for “not worrying about it” and “who even notices, anyway,” but we are truly testing the limits of those philosophies at this point.

So this year my strategy is to choose the WRONG card for each person. It is quite fun, as it turns out. For my serious conservative keep-the-Christ-in-Christmas aunt and uncle, I happen to remember that last year I chose a traditional gold-and-holly Hope Peace Joy card; I intended it to reflect my election-outcome-related feelings—but they could of course interpret those sentiments however they pleased. THIS year I am sending them the bright and whimsical reindeer card I KNOW I have not sent them before. (Reindeer are representatives of SECULAR Christmas.)

Their daughter, my cousin, is super cheerful and happy and perhaps halfway to escaping her conservative evangelical Republican upbringing and becoming a progressive Democrat and I love that journey for her. I would LIKELY have sent her the bright and whimsical reindeer card last year, or else one or my other cheerful cards, perhaps the “Merry and Bright!” one with Christmas lights, or the Victorian cats one. So THIS year I will send her one of my more serious/traditional cards—which still fall within my own standards for what is a good card, so they’re not TOO serious/traditional. She’s not going to think “Whoa, what happened here?,” she is just going to see a typical Christmas card.

And so on! It gets trickier with the in-between people. My former high school classmate. My former college roommate. Our pediatrician. But it doesn’t really MATTER in any case; it’s just a fun game for choosing cards in the hopes of not sending anyone the same card three times. Which, if I DID do that, it would be fine. COMPLETELY FINE!

Speaking of buying cards. When my mom lived locally, she and I had a fun annual shopping quest, which was to find specifically-religious-Christian-Christmas cards she could bear to send. She had some strict standards (some of which I considered OVERLY strict and would campaign for exceptions to: e.g., the inside sentiment could not begin with “May…”) but also some standards that should not have been difficult to meet and yet were surprisingly difficult to meet (e.g., Mary and Jesus cannot be blondes; the text inside the card cannot be insufferably self-righteous and preachy).

Similar: my quest to find Happy Holidays cards. It is a fun quest, but surprisingly challenging. I want to like them in the same way I usually like cards I choose: i.e., I want to like the look of them, I want to like what they say on the inside, etc. But also, they cannot say “Happy Holidays!” alongside exclusively Christmas symbols (Christmas trees, Christmas ornaments/lights, etc.). It’s a low-pressure quest because I think 98% of my holiday card list celebrates Christmas, so as long as I have ONE box of cards that are, like, a nice winter scene (NO PINE TREES WITH STARS ON TOP!) and/or woodland animals (NO SANTA HATS! NO STANDING AROUND A PINE TREE WITH A STAR ON TOP!) and/or glittery snowflakes, I’m all set. I can still buy the pink cards with Christmas trees on them for everyone else. But my IDEAL would be finding Inclusive Holiday Cards for All, and so it’s a fun shopping mission.

This is where you should feel free to tell me how you choose your holiday cards: what you look for, what you avoid. Also, whether you send everyone the same card every year or whether you have a bunch to choose from (or both, like where you send everyone the same card, but then every X years you have a year when you send out all the leftover cards). I love that kind of talk.

You know what, I am doing this early. We are going to need plenty of time this year to order things, and calendars are not something that can arrive late and still be fine.

Ballparks calendar (Target link) (Amazon link). I realize this could seem off-brand for Swistle, and indeed it’s not a top contender. But it caught my eye because “watching baseball” was one of our summer projects this year, and I enjoyed it, and so now baseball stuff catches my eye, and I have some small assorted opinions about several ballparks. I am also considering the calendar of the particular MLB team we followed.

 

Happy Hedgehogs calendar (Target link) (Amazon link). Brace yourself, because this is one of TWO hedgehog calendars in this post.

 

Kawaii Kitties calendar (Amazon link). This is not the only cat calendar, either.

 

Avatar: The Last Airbender calendar (Target link). This gives me nostalgic feelings for the years when this would have been a top contender at our house.

 

Spacecats calendar (Target link) (Amazon link). Every year it is a contender. Most years it sells out before I decide. THIS YEAR I AM EARLY.

 

Everyday Herbs calendar (Target link). I enjoy the look of this calendar. I like the idea of having something to read while I’m in the kitchen waiting for a timer to ring or whatever. I’m not sure I would enjoy having every page look so similar.

 

Harvest Mice calendar (Target link) (Amazon link). The mice we regularly catch in traps at our house would be so surprised to know how cute we think they are.

 

Corgis calendar (Target link) (Amazon link). There is strong pro-Corgi sentiment in this household.

 

Great Danes calendar (Target link) (Amazon link). I think Corgis are adorable, but Great Danes are the dogs of my heart—despite the internet telling me they are short-lived heartbreakers who are much too much dog for a first-time dog-owner.

 

Men and Cats calendar (Target link) (Amazon link). Why, yes. Yes, I do love cats!

 

Can’t Kill Me Plants calendar (Target link). Elizabeth chose this calendar last year, and I noticed it each time I went into her room. It was visually pleasing, and also somehow really did give the feeling of having a plant in the room. I might get it for the kitchen this year.

 

She Sheds calendar (Target link) (Amazon link). Aspirational for those of us who do not already have their own personal little sunporch rooms as part of a spousal house-buying deal.

 

’80s Flashback calendar (Target link) (Amazon link). I am absolutely the right age to appreciate this concept, but not old enough for some of the captions, which have a more Boomer-ish vibe (e.g., picture of lawn-mower with the caption “Growing up in the ’80s, this was your GoFundMe”—as if GoFundMe is used for new toys The Youth don’t feel like working for, rather than for crippling late-stage-capitalist-society-breakdown medical expenses).

 

Cross-Stitching calendar (Target link) (Amazon link). Oh, this is pretty and fun! And possibly inspiring? I have been meaning to learn how to embroider, so that I can embroider things on my jeans. I wasn’t thinking cross-stitch, but seeing ANY embroidery might be motivating, and might keep the idea at the front of my mind.

 

Patina Vie calendar (Target link) (Amazon link). This has a restful palette that makes me feel pleasantly calm, and reminds me of the wallpaper-themed calendars I’ve liked in the past. The squares are a little skimpy, though.

 

William Morris calendar (Target link). This too is reminiscent of the wallpaper-pattern calendars I’ve liked. I had a William Morris one year next to my desk and it was a success.

 

V&A William Kilburn calendar (Amazon link). One more with patterns; I like this even better than the William Morris. This is a strong contender.

 

Flower Fairies calendar (Target link) (Amazon link). I like all the colors of this, and certainly would have chosen it for Elizabeth’s room when she was little. The squares are skimpy, which makes it nice as a bedroom-wall-decoration calendar and less nice as the kitchen calendar where I need to write things.

 

Pre-Raphaelites calendar (Target link) (Amazon link). YEAR AFTER YEAR AFTER YEAR there are calendars featuring the Impressionists; it’s fun to see the pre-Raphaelites for a change!

 

Redouté calendar (Target link) (Amazon link). Oh, I really like the look of this one. I have added it to the cart.

 

Dogs as Animals (i.e., in Animal Costumes) calendar (Target link). I think this would be very popular with the household overall.

 

Hedgehogs! calendar (Amazon link). This one too would be very popular in my household. It’s hedgehogs wearing cute little clothes and doing cute little things with cute little furniture and other cute little props.

 

Siolo Thompson Greenwitch calendar (Amazon link). Oh, this is very sweet/storybook.

 

Feathered Friends calendar (Amazon link). A contender every year. In fact, I actually can’t remember if I’ve chosen it or not at this point, it’s so familiar and so beloved just from this annual post.

 

Floriography: Secret Meaning of Flowers calendar (Amazon link). I like the look of it; I like the idea of learning some flower meanings; it has good squares.

 

Esté Macleod calendar (Amazon link). This was my choice for 2021, and I am tempted to repeat it for 2022. It was a very pretty calendar, very colorful.

 

Masha D’yans calendar (Amazon link). I’ve had a calendar by this artist twice, and would choose it again; very pleasing pictures, and a nice variety.

 

Flower Crown Animals calendar (Amazon link). I completely love it but the squares are too small (squashed by an oversized picture, and then ALSO huge numbers). Perfect as a bedroom-room-decor calendar, or for someone who only needs the squares to record very small appointments.

 

Klimt Landscapes calendar (Amazon link). A strong contender again. I like that there’s more variety in the pictures this year.

 

Star Trek Cats calendar (Target link) (Amazon link). YES. Kirk is ABSOLUTELY a male orange cat.

 

The Curious World of Catrin Welz-Stein calendar (Amazon link). It is more surreal than I want in the kitchen—but I looked at it for a long time.

 

Feline calendar (Amazon link). I had this one next to my desk one year and really enjoyed it. Nice and colorful; interesting to look at; cats but not quite SO cats as when it’s photos of cats.

 

I think for me it’s most likely down to: Klimt Landscapes, Esté Macleod, Masha D’yans, Can’t Kill Me Plants, Floriography, Feline, V&A William Kilburn, or Cross Stitching.

If you use a wall calendar, what are you considering or what have you chosen?

 

And one of these is going to be my desk calendar for next year, replacing the wall calendar I used to put next to my desk, which doesn’t work well in this house so I switched to a page-a-day:

The Field Guide to Dumb Birds of North America (Amazon link)

Effin’ Birds (Amazon link)

It is a dreary/chilly/damp day and I am alone/warm/dry in the house, and this should be a LOVELY combination but I am twitchy and weird today and nothing can please me.

Oh! Except! I am very pleased about a decision regarding an advent calendar. I bought this tea advent calendar, despite ALREADY HAVING a See’s advent calendar AND already having a drawerful of tea I rarely drink:

I mentioned this somewhat silly purchase on Twitter, and Twitter reminded me of our idea of doing advent calendars starting the day AFTER Christmas, when many of us could really use the emotional support. WHAT, I ask you, could be better for that than TEA?? In the festive weeks leading up to Christmas, I will be buoyed by stress and excitement and busyness; in the weeks AFTER, that is when I will want to sit in a chair with a cozy therapeutic drink and perhaps spend a few minutes focusing on mental wellness if applicable. So now I am even more excited about the tea advent calendar, and also less sheepish about buying it when I already had an advent calendar.

I am also pleased because I re-solved a mystery. Quite awhile ago, I started having an odd and icky problem (I will be brief with the description of the ickiness and will not linger on it) where it seemed like the inside of my mouth was very lightly (I’m sorry in advance) peeling. Not a lot, nothing where any part of the inside of my mouth looked injured, but just, there was a little bit of matter that seemed to be a very very thin layer of skin that had peeled off from the gums and/or the insides of my cheeks. I asked the dentist about it (IS IT MOUTH CANCER) and he said that happens to some people when they use certain whitening toothpastes, and he said it was hard to even find toothpastes without whitening anymore but try using plain Colgate or plain Crest. I bought a 3-pack of plain Colgate (surprisingly hard to search for; this is the one I bought), I started using it, the problem completely disappeared, and I forgot all about it.

Now we move forward in time: much more recently, my lips, which I pick at out of habit/anxiety and so they are never in the best of condition, got noticeably worse. They were chapping beyond the lip line, and the corners of my mouth would (again I apologize in advance and I will be brief) crack, like little tiny paper cuts. DID NOT FEEL GOOD. I went so far as to completely stop picking at my lips for several days, to let them fully heal, and that helped somewhat but not as much as you’d think, and the corners kept cracking. I tried many different lip balms and ointments. I wondered if it could be mask-related, or maybe the detergent I use to clean the masks. I wondered shudderingly if it could somehow be something…fungal. And then I noticed that my toothpaste, which was supposed to be plain Colgate, was somehow a whitening toothpaste again. It didn’t seem like it could be the same problem as before, with such a different symptom, but it wouldn’t hurt to go back to the plain toothpaste—and I did, and the issue ENTIRELY CLEARED UP. Lips went back to normal levels of chapped/picked! Corners stopped cracking!

I mention this in case you are having any similar issues and wish to attempt the absolutely easiest first-tier solution just in case it works. I would never have suspected whitening toothpastes, because I’d used them for DECADES with no issues. But perhaps this is just one more of the ever-mounting joys of getting older.

When last we spoke, the housecleaner (the main one, the one I trust) had offered to reimburse us the $300, which I found did not fix the issue for me. I also did not get the feeling that she was fully understanding the situation; I thought she might still think the money was somehow accidentally lost, rather than stolen, and that she might be offering reimbursement in order to keep me as a customer, while not feeling any urgency about making sure the thief was removed from our lives.

I took the rest of the day to think through what I wanted to have happen, what was possible to have happen, and what the various likely outcomes were and how I would feel about each of those outcomes. I talked about it with Paul, and it turned into a family discussion, which was kind of satisfying (I really love having teenagers). Then I fired the housecleaners.

It was brutal and sad. But I came to the conclusion that no matter what arrangement she and I made, I would not believe that the thief didn’t still have access to my house. There are so many circumstances in which she WOULD have access:

• if the housecleaner misguesses who the thief is and fires the wrong person
• if the housecleaner loves/trusts the thief, and thinks they won’t do it again
• if the housecleaner doesn’t think a theft happened, and so doesn’t fire anyone
• if the housecleaner gets in a staffing pinch and really needs a replacement and thinks she’ll just keep a closer eye on her this time
• etc.

I realized that, no matter what, I would be continually monitoring my possessions for theft, and I don’t want to do that. I need to be able to keep my own normal possessions in my own house, and not have to move everything of value into a giant vault every time trusted professionals come to do work. When I was a babysitter, I had access to people’s jewelry and cash, and there was no “I wonder if I should take that?” (I did get into the cookies rather more aggressively than the average family might have anticipated.) When I did in-home eldercare, I had access to clients’ checkbooks, credit cards, passwords, narcotic medications, various antiques/valuables—and “Should I take advantage of this access to steal something?” could not be (and was not) something to even CONSIDER; forcing myself to consider it makes me feel queasy, and that is how it MUST BE. Our main housecleaner, I am certain of it, could see a heap of diamonds and cash on my bureau and she would not even be tempted to touch them; she would go out of her way NOT to touch them; the relationship is impossible if she isn’t violently emotionally opposed to touching/taking them.

But one of her employees is not only a thief, she’s the kind of thief who, after stealing the cash from a dropped wallet, throws the rest of the wallet in the trash, deliberately disposing of the things that are of no value to them (driver’s license, sentimental photo, the million little cards and other things that are a huge hassle to replace) but of huge value to the person who lost the wallet. A normal empathetic person who desperately needs money might take the cash out of a found wallet (feeling bad about it, but also feeling it is a necessity), but would leave everything else where it could be found—might even drop it into a mailbox to be sure it would be returned to the owner. There are LEVELS to theft, and what happened at our house is a level that strikes me as dangerously callous: she took a child’s money, and to cover it up she threw away a driver’s license and other important papers. And she did it knowing what a terrible perilous situation it would put the other cleaners in. I can’t take the risk of that person ever having access to this house again. It is bad enough that she could theoretically come back and break in, now that she has inside information about our house. I also worry that she stole other things we haven’t yet discovered, and that there will be more unpleasant realizations. I am trying not to think too much about either of those things at this point. We have saved the footage from our security cameras of the three people who came to clean that day, and of their car. We are sometimes a little casual about locking doors during the day, but we are not being casual right now.

When thinking through all the options, I kept trying to think too many steps/decisions ahead: “But will we be able to trust ANY housecleaners after this?,” and “If so, WHO??” (it was hard enough to find cleaners the first time), and “IF I HAVE TO CLEAN THIS HOUSE MYSELF I WILL END UP LEAVING MY FAMILY AND LIVING BY MYSELF IN A STUDIO APARTMENT.” But we only have to make one decision at a time, and then we can coast for awhile. The house was cleaned on Monday, which at least gives us a nice starting point. I cleaned the house during the pandemic, so I have the supplies and I remember how to use them. (If I do that cleaning again, however, I will pay myself at the rate we paid the housecleaners, which was 3-4 times what I make at the library, so that will be a nice little raise for me.) But for now: we only needed to make the decision about whether or not to fire the housecleaners, and we made that decision, and we fired them, and now we can coast a bit while we figure out what is next and see how we feel about things as the strong emotions die down a bit and we have time to process everything.

The housecleaner has reimbursed us for the loss of Edward’s money. We are going to reimburse William for the gift cards and cash that we’d assumed he’d misplaced, and maybe he DID misplace them and one day we will find them in a box of college stuff or whatever, but for now it seems reasonable to assume that those were stolen as well. (I did mention that incident to the housecleaner, in an imprecise “At the time we didn’t think anything of it, but now we wonder if it was connected” way—just so she will have the information if it becomes important for noticing a pattern.) When we thought he’d misplaced them, that seemed like a hard but valuable lesson in keeping track of one’s important possessions. But when a trusted worker, hired by his parents, steals them out of his own desk drawer in his own room in his own house, the lesson is not “Well, *shrug*, you shouldn’t have anything in your house you don’t expect to have stolen,” the lesson is “Some people do truly bad things, and it’s nice when you are in a position where something else (insurance, parents) can at least make up for the loss of possessions, if not for the loss of trust in humanity.”

I have a small and uncertain update on yesterday’s appalling story. I texted the main housecleaner—the one I always deal with, and the one who was not there yesterday. I told her what we’d found, and asked if she could ask the cleaning team if they knew what had happened. She said sure, she would call them right away. She then texted me back to say that they said that the box was in the trash, and they happened to notice the license and fished it out; the phrasing was unclear, but it sounded as if she was saying the license and other papers were already in the bag (the one that was taken inexplicably from the laundry room trash) when the cleaner found it, but there is room to think the cleaner just noticed the handy bag and used it (but then it would be weird for her to know which other papers in the trash were important and save those too).

She (the main housecleaner) said she was sorry this had happened, and she volunteered to come look through the trash. We have already looked through the trash very, very thoroughly. We have looked everywhere a stack of 15-20 bills could possibly have gone if they flew out of a box that fell off of a bureau into a trash can, even though that is not part of the story the cleaner is telling. We have picked through every single garage trash bin, including recycling bins, and we have looked all around the trash bins, and we have looked in every household trash can, and we have picked thoroughly through the one trash bag the cleaners always fill and leave next to the trash cans.

So. It seems to me the main theory is the one where one of the three cleaners who came yesterday is guilty, and the other two are not only innocent, but in fact one of them saved our bacon by noticing the license in the trash, or else that could have been lost, too, before we noticed the missing box. And this explains the “Why would they draw attention to the situation by leaving the other things on the counter?”: they didn’t, they threw away everything but the money, and it was only by chance that another cleaner noticed. But none of this is provable, and I don’t know what to do next.

All morning at work, what I was mostly wondering was what ELSE has been taken without us noticing? And can I ever let ANY cleaners back into the house, now that I will be anxiously on Theft Patrol at all times? My feeling right now is no. But at this point I don’t even know what to reply to the text.

Okay, I have replied thanking her for offering to go through the trash but saying we have already done so, and that the money is gone. I added that it was lucky someone had found the license. I don’t know what else to say, but I feel like I have time to think: it is two weeks before their next scheduled visit.

One thing to think about: I don’t know if I should mention to her that this is possibly the second time this has happened, given how uncertain that first time was. (At the time, I thought it Absolutely Could Not Have Been the cleaners—not that it was logistically impossible, but that they Never Would. It’s only the second disappearance of cash and gift cards that made me see the first time differently; plus, that the housecleaner mentioned that yesterday’s sub was the same one we had this past summer.) (But we don’t know if the money/cards disappeared at the SAME TIME the sub was subbing; and it took us an unclear amount of time to notice they were missing, which makes the timeline even more uncertain.)

Another thing to think about: whether there is any way for me to, like, still have the main housecleaner and any cleaner/helper who has been coming all along, but NOT the one who is stealing. I think that the only way for that to happen is for the main housecleaner to say to herself “Oh no. It’s So-and-so who is stealing,” and then say to me that she thinks she knows what happened, and that that person will never come back into my house. And that does not seem to be the way the conversation is progressing so far. So far she seems to be going with the idea that yes, it makes sense that a box fell into the trash, and that the money somehow disappeared in this process, but that none of her workers were involved. (I did tell her how much money was involved. She must know that $300 does not accidentally fall into a trash can and vanish.)

[Edited to add:] She has now sent a text asking if we know how much money it was (so she must have missed that part in my earlier text; perhaps she has been imagining a child-sized amount of money, like $10), saying she will reimburse it because it was her responsibility. Do we think this indicates that she has been processing this information and has realized that the money must have been taken?

I find that thinking of “getting the money back” helps almost zero. I need to know that the person who took it will not come back into my house. But I can’t expect her to KNOW who took it. And so I am still uncertain what to do next.

I am going to tell you an appalling story with, as far as I can see, very little hope of any good ending, and I will hope against hope that this is like the time I could not find my new kitten anywhere, and I told the internet and the internet said “One time I found my new kitten asleep in a closed drawer,” and I thought, “Psh, there is no way!”—but I opened a closed drawer, and there was my kitten, asleep.

Here is the story.

The housecleaners came today. Our usual cleaner (who seems to own the business, which may or may not be a formal business) (we did not hire her ourselves; we were passed on to her by our previous cleaner, who quit the business; this is why I am so vague/uninformed) is out for medical reasons, so she sent her helper plus a relative she said she had used as a helper before.

When I got home, on the kitchen counter was a plastic bag containing some miscellaneous items, one of which was Edward’s brand new driver’s license, so I left it on the counter to ask him about. When he got home and saw the bag, he went running upstairs. He came back down to say that those items were the contents of a box in which he keeps his money, and the box was gone. He’d had approximately $300 in the box. He knows it was in there as recently as yesterday, because he took some out to buy something.

(Edited to add: the plastic bag in question was…out of the trash. It was a packaging bag we’d thrown away in the laundry room which, to be fair, is 99% dryer filter fluff, so pretty clean.)

We went out to the garage, where the cleaners always leave a bag of trash. We searched the bag of trash; no money. We found the cardboard box Edward had been using as a bank—not in the trash, but sitting with the cardboard. No money in it.

Here is the thing: There is no universe in which the cleaners would open a cardboard box, take out the things inside, put them in a plastic bag on the counter, and put the box out with the recycling. And it’s not, like, a tattered shipping box with flaps flapping open: it’s cardboard, but it’s small and tidy, and the lid is attached to one edge and closes neatly, with little side flaps that tuck into side sockets.

Another thing: There is no universe in which anyone who stole money would carefully draw attention to that by putting the OTHER items from the money box on the kitchen counter, and leaving the empty box visibly in the garage.

Another thing: It is my understanding that hearing “Um, hey, some money is missing” is way up there at the top of the list of Housecleaner Nightmares. I don’t see how I can even ASK. Or rather: if I have to ask, it seems like I am at the point where I am ending my relationship with the housecleaners—or they are going to end their relationship with me, because I have accused them of something, and they can’t keep working for me after that. Or if they do keep working for me, their heart will be flattened and all the joy/satisfaction of the work will be gone, which is how I would feel in that situation.

The impossibility of any situation in which they took the money is leading me to reach wider and wider with my theories of how the money could be gone. For example, I asked Edward was there ANY CHANCE AT ALL that he had recently moved the money. (But…even if there were no money in the box, they would not have taken the items out of the box and put them into a bag and disposed of the box!)

We have looked anywhere that immediately came to mind, and Edward is continuing to look obsessively in places the money just CAN’T be (the housecleaners would not have taken money out of a box and put it in his bottom bureau drawer), but I understand the impulse. We have a large jar of coins in our bedroom; I looked there. I looked on our desks, and on the bureaus in our room, in case a cleaner thought “Whoa, this money shouldn’t just be sitting in a cardboard box.” I looked on the counter where they’d put the bag. I looked in the bag. I’m not finding it anywhere.

I checked my texts and messages, just in case there might be an explanation there. Nothing. After I post this, I am going to go back to roaming futilely around the house, trying to think of anywhere at all the money could accidentally be. (I also think there is a small chance of hearing from someone: it could possibly be that neither cleaner speaks English, and that something has happened that they will tell our usual cleaner, who will then contact us, and that they specifically left the items on the counter as a sign that a story would be forthcoming. But…the box is undamaged.)

Also, it is worth noting that the language barrier involved is considerable: two Christmases ago, I left them the usual check and also a cash tip for each of them inside holiday cards, and they never cashed the check, but refused to take a replacement check because they said they HAD cashed the check (they had not), and so the only conclusion I could come to is that they thought their divided-into-holiday-cards Christmas cash was the payment? or something? and just recorded it as “paid” without keeping track of whether it was cash or check? and, coincidentally, lost the check for the first time ever? It all seemed impossible—and on that occasion, the impossible situation was against their own interests.

[Edited to add:] I have had another terrible thought. William lost a bag of Christmas/birthday cash and gift cards earlier this year. I completely assumed he had misplaced it. I told him that the ONE thing I knew could NOT have happened was the cleaners taking it. I told him I was CERTAIN it would show up among his things. But when our housecleaner mentioned we would be having a sub, she said it was the same sub we had this summer while our housecleaner was on vacation. I don’t remember, unfortunately, when exactly the bag of cash and gift cards disappeared, but our cleaners started back in May. I have a sick sinking feeling that yesterday’s situation is not the first time, and may not even have been the second time. And I don’t think I can have any housecleaners in the house anymore.

I am feeling good right now because I took my Christmas-Card Photo Fretting, plus your input/advice, plus a rare moment of calm motivation, and I butter-churned it all into ORDERING COLLAGE PHOTOS THAT WILL BE HERE NEXT WEEK.

I went into it thinking I wouldn’t necessarily CHOOSE anything, just sort of play around with some sample photos to get an idea of what my options were. I combined that with an attitude of “Who really cares? No one, that’s who!” and also an attitude of “Don’t spend too much time on this: just sort of PICK some photos and be done with it.” I didn’t worry about whether I’d already posted that photo on Facebook so everyone’s already seen it, or whether it was the BEST or MOST REPRESENTATIVE photo of each child, or whether the photos were cropped/color-corrected ideally, or whether each child was in the exact same number of photos. And I know I talk a lot of smack about Walllmart, and I intend to CONTINUE to talk smack about Walllmart because there are many levels on which they fully deserve it—but I will give credit where credit is due, and in my opinion their photo-collage-designing-and-ordering process is easy and good and well-priced.

Normally we take a photo at Thanksgiving, along with what is apparently the entire rest of the country, because it is not uncommon for me to place the order and have a delivery estimate of mid-or-later December, as I panic about getting the photos into the cards and still having time for the cards to arrive before Christmas. So having the photos instead arriving in early November feels like a COOL BREEZE—especially THIS year when concerns are already ramping up about shipping delays, and LAST year cards were already taking weirdly long amounts of time to travel, and that pinehat in charge of the USPS has only done more damage since then.

So now my NEXT task is to haul out the Christmas cards and see if I have enough scraps left over from previous years or if I need to buy some more, and then I am ACTUALLY GOING TO ADDRESS AND SEND MY FEW INTERNATIONAL CARDS ON TIME THIS YEAR!!!! ONE DREAM LEADS TO ANOTHER, BABY!!!

I have a book to recommend, especially if you and/or someone on your holiday shopping list is into sci-fi / speculative fiction of the sort NOT written by middle-aged mid-century heterosexual white men:

The Space Between Worlds, by Micaiah Johnson (Target link) (Amazon link)

I am pretty sure I read about this book on one of the blogs I follow, but can I figure out which one? Can I hell! So if it was you, give a little wave and I will link to your post [found it! reviewed by Shelf Love], because it got me to add the book to my library list, and it turns out it is just EXACTLY my thing. It is one of those plots where there are a bunch of different parallel Earths, with a version of each of us on each Earth. Travel between Earths is possible—but only if your equivalent is no longer alive on the Earth you travel to. Which ends up meaning that educated/advantaged/well-off people are not able to travel. Our protagonist is someone who has been born into such disadvantaged circumstances that she has died on almost every Earth.

This was a book I kept wanting to get back to, and kept thinking about. There were a few good twists/reveals of the kind that left me blinking as I brought the new information on board. I am very much hoping for a sequel—and/or for anything else by this author.

This reminds me to report on a couple of other books. First:

Anxious People, by Fredrik Backman (Target link) (Amazon link)

I went into this fully expecting to take a long time to warm up to it: A Man Called Ove and Britt-Marie Was Here both started, as I remember, with a thoroughly unlikely character doing cringingly unlikeable things, in a way that made me think I did not want to read ANYTHING MORE about them, before evolving gradually into books/characters that made me weep with love. So I was BRACED, but I was not sufficiently braced. There is a series of interviews, and each of the interviews is so MADDENING, and each person being interviewed is so MADDENING, that I don’t know why I kept reading as long as I did. But I did, and I felt it was well worth it. But I would not put this on a gift-recommendations list, I would put it on your library list.

Next:

Early Morning Riser, by Katherine Heiny (Target link) (Amazon link)

(It seems weird to me that, at time of posting, all of these hardcovers are less expensive than the paperbacks. It makes me want to buy a stack of hardcovers.)

Several years ago I read Katherine Heiny’s book Single, Carefree, Mellow and LOVED it. And what’s funny is, I had the exact same thing happen with Early Morning Riser as with Single, Carefree, Mellow: I saw it at the library, found the cover appealing, read the book flap, rejected it; and then someone else recommended it (in this case Nicole) (HI NICOLE) and I thought “FINE I WILL TRY IT”—and I got it from the library and I loved it. LOVED it. Wished it would not end.

It’s a little hard to say what it’s about without making it sound boring. It’s kind of about ordinary life, but also there are plenty of unusual things, and there is a protagonist who takes them in stride in a way I aspire to—like how I aspire to being a brilliant trial lawyer, or Julia Sugarbaker: no hope, only aspiration. Now I’m reading Standard Deviation, and so far, so good.