Since finding the Daily Cleaning Routine checklist I haven’t been able to stop thinking about cleaning. I know, right?
I used to have a cleaner – Gina. She was a very lovely lady who came with her non-English speaking husband every second week to sort-of clean my house. Not a scrubber, our Gina, but I could never let her go because unlike me she never, not even once, cried inconsolably when she saw the state of the girls’ bedroom*. She would fold clothes and endlessly put all the little bits of little bits back where they went without comment or judgement (at least not in English).
Then Gina had to go back to Korea for back surgery (I felt so guilty because I didn’t even know she had a bad back) and we have floated along ever since, clean enough, but somehow untethered.
Gina offered her friend up as a consolation prize when she had to go, but I said we would be fine. Truth is, I didn’t want to have to tidy up for a new cleaner. I knew Gina’s agreeableness to endlessly tidy and then sort-of clean was unusual and difficult to replicate. My friends had never heard of such a thing – a cleaner who tidied? When I told them that she would also strip the beds and put a fresh set on they practically frothed at the mouth.
“But she doesn’t do a particularly good job in the bathroom,” I reminded them.
“Oh,” said the friends. “Well, I couldn’t have that.”
To be honest, the house is probably cleaner on a day-to-day basis sans-Gina. Like most things in life, when no one has your back, you get on with the job with a greater sense of purpose and responsibility. Without a Gina, I live with the knowledge that no one is going to do it except me so I may as well get on with it.
But I do miss the reset that Gina gave me once a fortnight. Everything sort-of cleaned by someone else is way better than properly cleaned by me. It was one day a fortnight that I didn’t have to worry so much about it all – which doesn’t really seem like a lot, when you think about it. It’s just that one day, isn’t it? An hour or two in a week at most. We couldn’t afford someone weekly and our house couldn’t possibly last the distance for a fortnight, so I would clean two or three times between Ginas anyway.
I just can’t decide if it’s worse when the house is trashed an hour after I’ve cleaned it or an hour after I’ve paid good money for someone else to clean it. I think the latter and something in me rebels against paying someone else to clean up after me anyway. Part of me thinks that if I can’t find the time and the stoicism to do my own housework, there is really something wrong with me. Everyone knows cleaning is mindless, awful, drudge work – but why not me? Why someone else?
* That’s their ‘desk’ up there a day after they ‘cleaned their room’… sigh.