You'll Clean What?

Yesterday I admitted I had interviewed a cleaning person. I don't know why this is such a painful admission for me - many, many of the smart, well-adjusted career women I know have cleaning services and don't feel one bit bad about it. In fact, most of the full-time working mommies I know have some sort of convenience service, be it cleaning, meal prep or what have you. However, I felt more than sheepish letting the purple-pants-wearing blond woman into my house yesterday to survey the goods.

As I led her through This Old House, with its cracked plaster and unscraped windows, I imagined what might be going through her head: "THESE people need a cleaning service? They need to slap some wood fill on that hole in the Overstock.com paperboard night stand, that's what they need to do. Or perhaps trim the huge snags in the apartment-grade carpet. It looks like a CAT has been playing with them. And speaking of cats, I wonder exactly what made that stain on the rug?"

I guess I always thought of people who had help with cleaning as being a) rich b) famous or c) executives. I fit into none of the above categories, so what was I doing trying to determine if the money was really worth not spending three hours a week disinfecting the little angel's environment? Perhaps there was also an eensy-weensy piece of me in dismay that I know in advance I will not be able to balance a full-time corporate job, a little angel, a three-year-old marriage and my dreams of getting at least one more short story published in a magazine with glue in the binding before I die with cleaning my ratty old house every week. Of course I always pictured myself being able to do all those things, but that was before I realized I have to spend at least fifteen minutes of every day watching the little angel's eyelashes grow and an hour of every day playing the game "Why Are You Crying?"

So I think I'm going to go downstairs and call Purple Pants back and tell her to start coming every other Tuesday. The little angel was born on a Tuesday, so it seems like an appropriate day.