I have a cleaning lady. This is a luxury I never thought I'd be able to afford once we had kids, but fortune smiled, I sold a big magazine article, and that's what I did with the money. Now I think I'm gonna have to fire her because she is just too much work.
In anticipation of the cleaning lady, I go around the house and attempt to Clear the Decks so that she can reach various surfaces to clean them. This leads to things like: where to put all the CDs and DVDs floating around here? Naturally, this requires a trip to Target and the purchase of two CD racks, one for each daughter. Then I have to assemble them, which any five-year-old in Singapore could do (after all, some five-year-old in Singapore probably made them) but which I can't--not until I have made two trips to the trash pile to inspect the picture on the box to see how the HELL they managed to do this. Then there is matching up the videos with their appropriate covers, and where the **&SS is that cover to "Madagascar"? This begins to obsess me, and I start pulling videos and CDs and DVDs etc out of the so-called "entertainment center" (a piece o' junk we bought from Ikea eons ago, cardboard masquerading as furniture) trying to find this item. Wait! What's in the VCR right now? I hit "eject." A blank tape. This will require extensive research, not to mention a sticky label and pen when I figure it out. Or I could throw it on that pile of similarly unmarked videos we have around here somewhere and maybe some night we can have a Surprise Movie Night. But I am digressing....I'm supposed to be getting ready for the cleaning lady. What else? Oh, Christ, the laundry. She doesn't do laundry. I do laundry. I will be doing laundry at my funeral someday; they'll have to halt the procession out of the church so I can get out of the casket and go fold another load. This means going up to my older daughter's room to play Find the Dirty Laundry game, and while I'm there I might as well pull some clean sheets so the cleaning lady can change the beds. This requires actually finding the sheets. I cleaned out the linen closet three months ago and gave away two entire garbage bags full of perfectly good double-bed sized sheets I cannot use any more and still the linen closet is crammed with....stuff. Getting ready for the Cleaning Lady also means loading the dishwasher, since I trust my dishwasher's cleaning methods more than her hand-washing methods (my cleaning lady does not "do" dishwashers, for some reason), but first that means unloading the clean dishes that are already in it. Then I start to notice little things, like the fact that the Tupperware drawer won't close all the way, which is due to a plastic lid being stuck in there crossways, which requires some rearranging of things, and then--oh God!-the drawer handle itself is sticky. The cleaning lady will never notice that; I'll have to wipe it myself.
And on and on....
The problem with cleaning ladies is that they give you a distant, brief glimpse of perfection. Without them, you could just say, What the hell. With a cleaning lady, you begin to entertain delusions that your house can actually be kept clean--a fixation I have been unable to rid myself of, even though I have seen a full day's hard labor by my cleaning lady get wrecked to bits within 10 minutes of my kids walking in the door. Last night my five-year-old said, "Mommy, can I build a pillow fort in the living room?" and I found myself saying, "Not until tomorrrow." "Why?" she wanted to know. "Just humor me," I said. Is it too much to ask--24 hours with the cushions actually ON the sofa? I can dream...