Letting somebody else clean your house? It’s complicated By Debra-Lynn B. Hook Tribune News Service
I
never knew what a bad housekeeper I was until I let a good one clean my house. I never knew my formerly white bathtub could still be that white. Or that my living room curtains, circa 2007, could be washed right in my own washer. And then ironed. I never knew a cuffed sheet could be folded to look like a ream of Xerox paper. Or that the inside of a refrigerator could look like a Hallmark card. At first I felt guilty when my friend Paula, a professional house cleaner, came to do the basics. There I sat on the couch, incapacitated with a leg injury, while she expunged the viscera of my toilet. Next was shame, especially when she said: “I would have vacuumed your room except it took me four hours to clean your stove top.” Then, like a small child who’d never had sugar before, came a newfound dependence, bordering on mania, for all things sparkling clean. “Wow, after you do the bathtub on Monday, could you come on Tuesday and dust-mop the walls and on Wednesday, vacuum the basement and then on Thursday, wash the windows?” I said from my perch next to my crutches. As time went on and even the top of the fridge got cleaned, I was hooked. Funds earmarked for Christmas were given to Paula as I came to forgive myself for not wanting to get on my hands and knees with her. Some people got the deep-clean gene. As for the DNA my mother passed along, unless she was having a dinner party, she also didn’t support scrubbing kitchen cupboards, sucking up cobwebs with her Kirby attachment or dusting.
When in doubt, blame your mother. Also Netflix, which is infinitely more alluring than dusting window screens. That, and gender equality. Ever since Betty Friedan, surveys have continually reminded us that even full-time working women still do more household chores than men. Y’all aren’t going to spend all your leisure hours perfecting the home? Me either. Let me, by the way, say here I’m not a total slob. I adhere to minimum standards of order and cleanliness. I vacuum rugs and wash dishes. I take out the trash and clean the toilet. It’s only if you were to take a white glove to the top of the door jambs that you would know. And who does that, except for holdovers from the 1950s when Mr. Clean was getting paid to make ads to guilt women into polishing their faucets? It’s not so many generations ago that women’s identities were tied to the beauty of their homes. As for me, thanks to Paula, I have successfully moved through the multiple stages of letting somebody else scrutinize the gunk in my bathroom tile grout. Like Elisabeth Kubler-Ross’ stages of grief that end with acceptance, I have moved into the joie that can only come when I wake from a nap to find my bed has been made around me. Like all good things, of course, this one had to come to an end. As the crutches went, so did Paula, who is not a line item in the budget. Which leaves all those cobwebs, heretofore unseen by me, now utterly visible to my more attentive eye. I can only invoke what I know. I am considering taking a broom to the ceiling and sweeping them all under the bed. Debra-Lynn B. Hook of Kent, Ohio, has been writing about family life since 1988 when she was pregnant with the first of her three children. E-mails are welcome at dlbhook@yahoo.com. 2020 SPRING CONTRACTORS GUIDE
|
23
