Why I'm Not Ashamed of Having a Housekeeper
The panic. The sinking dread. The cold sweat. For such a simple question, posed by a friend kind enough to drop me off at home who simply needs to answer the call of nature and would like a little act of generosity repaid in kind, my response is one of sheer incapacitating terror.
"Um."
"You know what, it's fine, don't worry about."
Guilt.
"No, no, no, of course, come in, of course you can use my bathroom." What kind of person am I?
The kind who hates — hates — cleaning.
It's not that I think other people love cleaning. (False: I have at least two friends who really, really, like to clean, but it's kind of an OCD thing for them.) It's just that, of all of the many, many things I can choose to do with my time, cleaning will come dead last.
"But everyone feels that way, it's just something you have to do!" I know. I know! But when I think about how I could be working, or reading, or relaxing, or in any other way self-actualizing as a human being, the idea of spending even an hour cleaning is anathema to me. I don't even like how much time it takes out of my day to keep my body clean! How is this body always so dirty?
And it's not like you do it once and then you're done for awhile. Oh, no. This isn't like buying a sofa — that's it, you've bought the sofa, and for a couple years you're satisfied that no matter what goes wrong, at least you've got your sofa issue handled. Nope. The very next week, you have to clean again.That week and every week thereafter for the rest of your life in perpetuity, you have to keep cleaning.
How do people even live like this?
And so it was that I would avoid allowing people in my home as much as possible, and on that rare occasion when someone wanted to come by, I would spend the entire day in a panic trying to Lysol wipe my way to a semblance of functional adulthood.
When I moved into my most recent apartment, I decided I had had enough of the tyranny of toilet brushes. I hired a housekeeper.
Now. Getting a housekeeper is all wrapped up in socioeconomic coding. I'm a single, childless, well-enough-to-do white woman with disposable income. Housekeepers tend to be the opposite. Anyone with even the slightest bit of cognizance of their unequal status would at least take a moment to reflect on all of that.
But at the same time, as a student of the social sciences and an observer of life, I also have to sometimes ask: WHY must EVERY life decision be some kind of overarching sociopolitical statement? What you eat and where you live and how you choose to spend or not spend your money, all of these daily decisions are fraught with so much self-reflective navel-gazing and outside condemnation, it's a wonder society continues to move forward instead of shuddering to a stop in social arrest.
I have the money for a housekeeper. Having a housekeeper affords me the time to make more money, with which I am even better able to afford having a housekeeper. It also gives me more time to read, study, and pursue other interests and continue to better myself and enrich my life.
I never again have to discourage friends from coming over because I'm embarrassed by how "dirty" my home is. (Confession: My "dirty" is another person's just-a-bit-dusty.) And while friends ranked lower in the tax bracket have a hard time understanding it, I shouldn't have to apologize to them for it either. My dirty little secret is that my home is consistently clean, #sorrynotsorry.
By Nicole Rupersburg
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