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Recently in Salon Mothers Who Think

The hired men
When it comes to "the help," I need a guilt exorcism.
By Nancy W. Hall
[04/03/00]

I believed in the breast
And then the control freaks at La Leche League buried me in bureaucracy, bare breasts and too much LLLove.
By Sue Robins
[03/31/00]

No bottle feeders, no spankers
Attachment parents stick to their guns.
By Amy Brill
[03/31/00]

Daniel is good at not dying
A mother lives with the disciplined ambivalence of a do-not-resuscitate order.
By Elizabeth Halling
[03/30/00]

Life as a fate worse than death
A lawyer tries to prevent the ultimate abuse of a tiny victim.
By Beth Broeker
[03/30/00]

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From my mother's descriptions, I have developed a black-and-white photograph in my mind of that time in their lives: I can see my mother's 4-year-old face as she watches her mother walk down the Pontiac, Mich., street, small piles of dirty snow on either side, to catch a crosstown bus to clean a wealthy woman's house.

Also Today The hired men When it comes to "the help," I need a guilt exorcism. By Nancy W. Hall

As the Depression deepened, my grandmother had to take a job as a live-in domestic servant with a family who would not allow her to bring her 6-year-old child. And so for two years, until my grandmother remarried, my mother was sent to live with an aunt and uncle in a harsh, chaotic household where her brash and unruly cousin reminded her often that she was the poor relation. My grandmother visited every other week on her day off. According to my mother, their reunions were full of grief and my mother's anger at being left behind.

A half-century later, my grandmother, who outlived and outlaughed three husbands, was dressed in a simple violet dress and laid out in a shiny wooden casket. As my mother and I gazed down at her, our long, still beautiful fingers resting on the edge of the satin-lined coffin, my mother said little -- except to note my grandmother's hardworking hands.

Although my own middle-class childhood had no such hardship, I witnessed a scenario similar to that of my grandmother's unfold with our next-door neighbor, Mrs. O'Brian. One day after junior high school, after hearing Mrs. O'Brian call out to us through our back screen door, my mother and I rushed over to find her standing in her floral housedress, trying hard not to cry. Her 35-year-old husband, the father of her four children, had lung cancer. The pain he had been feeling in his back wasn't a strained muscle after all, but the result of smoking the Camels he kept rolled up in the sleeve of his work shirt. Weeping into her pressed handkerchief, Mrs. O'Brian asked, "What am I going to do?"

After her husband's death, Mrs. O'Brian, who had never been employed, came to our back door again to ask my mother for a job cleaning our house. While I don't remember their words, what they didn't say made a lasting impression: Mrs. O'Brian's embarrassment about having slipped out of middle-class respectability, and the fear that overwhelmed her pride; and my mother's resistance to hiring her, to being on the other side of the class divide from her own mother and from Mrs. O'Brian, who, after all, lived in a house identical to our own. But my mother, who had just returned to work, finally hired her -- combining charity with a thin belief in necessity.

The week she began working for us, Mrs. O'Brian passed down many of her own domestic responsibilities to her 13-year-old daughter, my good friend Mary. Unlike her older brother, whose after-school sports activities continued as before, Mary now had to clean up after her family and cook dinner instead of playing with me and listening to the top 10 on WKAR. As time went on, Mary and I grew apart. But out of the corner of my wide adolescent eye, I watched as she was undermined by the absence of her father and the weight she was assigned because of it. When Mary graduated from high school, she moved far away from her mother -- a distance her mother tried to bridge by weaving dark strands of guilt through love.

The change in Mrs. O'Brian's position from being our middle-class neighbor to the person who also cleaned up my family's messes made me dread the days she worked in our house. While Mrs. O'Brian was there, I felt a mixture of guilt that it was she and not I cleaning our house, pity as I watched her struggle to keep her family afloat without any support that I could see and embarrassment that, based on what I knew of the world, her status had been diminished. Rather than face her, I would often pretend to be ill or busy with homework and stay in my bedroom until she left.

My mother avoided her too. And when they did see each other, their encounters were stiff and cool. For my mother, there was always something done not quite right -- the ironing that had arrived too late, the residue of Ajax in the bathtub, the green and gold shag carpeting underneath the sofa left unvacuumed. As time went on, my mother claimed that she missed doing her own housework, that it was good exercise, and besides, she told me, it was wrong to have someone clean up after you, especially when they left their own children at home, unattended, to do it. Neither charity nor necessity could, as it turned out, trump this belief.

To my relief, the arrangement came to an end after a year or so. Although she continued to work full time for the remainder of my childhood, my mother never hired another housekeeper. Twenty-five years later, I reluctantly made a different choice.

Next page | Hiring a housekeeper is cheaper than divorce