She said she’d be there after her first house the next morning, sometime around 1, and I said that would be great. I told her I was glad, and said I’d text her the address after we hung up. “I had a client cancel her deep clean tomorrow afternoon, so this works out really good,” she said. I said whatever hours she could do were fine, even if she had to split them up. I’d told her in my message that I needed help as soon as possible in moving into a house. When she called me back that night, she sounded tired, but relieved. I called and left a voicemail immediately. Then I saw one with five stars, and a good number of reviews. I tried “Housekeeper” instead and found a few sole proprietors. My years of working for them still made me grimace every time I saw a little yellow car with “Merry Maids” written on the side. ![]() Cleaning companies often pay their employees less than a living wage and offer no sick days or health insurance. At first, a bunch of companies popped up, and I scrolled quickly past them. My shoulders drooped I would have sunk to the floor in complete defeat if it weren’t speckled with black grease and dust. Grabbing onto a stool to stand, I leaned a hip into the counter and typed “Housecleaner Missoula Montana” into the search bar of my phone’s internet browser. I tried kneeling, sitting, anything to get the layer of sticky black grime off the front of the cabinets and the floor, and no position was comfortable. I set out to deep-clean the kitchen-something I always do when moving into a new house-and a muscle in my back wouldn’t let me. Our first morning in our new house together, we all got to work unpacking and cleaning. I immediately knew this was going to be bad. By the time I lay down again, the numbness had begun. Mine happened that night, while lifting the 5-year-old into her bed. Make one tiny movement, and there’s a pop and a deep ball of dread in your gut. Those with back pain might understand the sordid pop that happens at an unexpected time. Years of pain, chiropractors, massage practitioners, and physical therapists for my scoliosis had taught me that. I knew I wasn’t supposed to be doing this. By the end of the day, I had the box resting on my left thigh, my leg doing the work to get it up the stairs. Somewhere inside me, I knew the ridiculousness of moving piles of rocks, so I stubbornly hauled them up the steep stairs myself. On moving day, I made trips up the stairs, hauling shelves and boxes of books. Besides, love is a rose-colored lens onto the world-including half a decade’s worth of grime covering every bare surface. We would make it ours, right? Our first home together. One reporter joked along with me, and then my eyes dropped down as I remembered the feeling of kneeling in front of a stranger’s toilet, and I said, “I could never ask someone to do that job.”Īfter months of searching, though, this huge house was the only one both available and big enough where the landlord actually returned our messages. “I don’t want to live in a house that’s too big for me to clean myself.” A few times I laughed and said I’d never be able to afford a housecleaner because I’d tip so much, leaving $20 bills scattered about the house: one on the back of the toilet, one in the grimy bathtub, at least two in my kids’ bathroom. ![]() “No,” I said, almost with my nose in the air. In interviews leading up to, during, and after the publication of my memoir, Maid: Hard Work, Low Pay, and a Mother’s Will to Survive, I was asked repeatedly whether I’d ever hire a housecleaner myself. “I’m going to have to deep-clean the place from top to bottom.” “I can’t walk around in bare feet,” I said. As someone who’d just published a whole memoir about cleaning houses, this description spoke to the level of grime, dust, grease, and dog urine throughout. “It’s worse than any house I’ve ever had to clean,” I told one friend. We were both full-time single parents-his kids 18 and 14, mine 12 and 5, with some dogs, fish, and a tortoise-moving into a house I described to acquaintances as “too big to clean” and to my close friends as, somewhat fondly, “a shithole.” Exactly one month before we got married, my fiancé and I made the final steps in combining our families.
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