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

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[03/30/00]

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Before my husband and I had children, housework was rarely an issue between us. Now there was an unspoken assumption, perhaps on both our parts, that the trail of chaos created by our children was somehow more mine than his, sort of a continuation of being in labor.

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

"Sweet," I would hiss at him on a typical Saturday, "after you play with the kids, would you please clean up your mess rather than just moving to another room?"

Later in the day, perhaps after walking into our kitchen, hours after an "experiment" that involved dropping large marbles into a pile of flour and coffee to demonstrate how asteroids make craters in the moon's surface, the yelling would start: "Isn't it nice for you to be able to have fun with the kids and then assume that I will clean up after you like your servant!"

"What's the big deal?" he would say. "Relax."

During our inevitable late-night kitchen table powwows, I came armed with managerial chore charts and my late 20th century pitch for fairness; he came armed with 10,000 years of entitlement. When I insisted he take more responsibility for household tasks, he resisted: He was tired (true), overwhelmed (true), made most of the money (true), did more around the house than any man he knew (sad, but true). By the end of our summit, he would grudgingly agree to my requests. Days later, I still had to ask, remind, manipulate.

Most of my affluent friends, who had long ago lost the sock war with their husbands, had made the decision to hire household help. But I resisted. It seemed to me that, rather than working out a more equitable arrangement with their husbands, they had hired housekeepers, in part, as an escape hatch, a way of contracting out the conflict in their marriage about the "second shift." I viewed this as one more instance of "trickle-down" feminism -- in this case, slowing the movement down by alleviating the pressure on men to make changes in the division of domestic labor.

Although my life included more than one pair of Ferragamo shoes I kept wrapped in their boxes like jewels, I was certain that I was but two steps and one husband away from having to clean someone's house to survive. And exhausted though I was, I resisted the idea that someone else should clean up after me and my family. As it turned out, this exhaustion gradually eroded both my political and my personal ideals, and I reluctantly decided to attempt my friends' more pragmatic perspective.

Maria forgot to show up for her first interview, then showed up two hours early for her second interview. I hired her anyway. She had a buoyant charm that, during the interview and for months afterward, lulled me into ignoring the red flags that waved softly between us. When I asked about her housekeeping experience, she told me she was educated and had worked as a teacher in Nicaragua, but that two years after she married her husband, an underling to a powerful politician, the political winds shifted and they were forced to leave their country. After she arrived in the United States, she quickly discovered that her professional experience had no market value and so resigned herself to becoming a housekeeper. She never got around to telling me much about her housekeeping experience that afternoon. Charmed and desperate, I let it pass.

Predictably, once Maria started working for me I avoided being in my house. I was glad when she arrived late and asked to leave early. I couldn't stand the guilt I felt when I saw her taking care of the messes my family made, after having dropped her kids off at a day-care facility where I would not have been comfortable sending my own children. When I issued instructions, I was unable to meet her eyes or to be specific about how or when I wanted things done.

I would often arrive home to a sink full of dirty dishes to discover that she had spent her time doing something like organizing my underwear drawer or reorganizing my husband's wardrobe: Suits and shirts were lined up by color, underwear and socks rolled into complicated balls, and his favorite ratty sweat pants thrown on the heap of giveaway clothes in the basement. With each new discovery of chaos or mismanagement festering in our house, she would shake her head, cluck her tongue and say: "Pamela, how can you live like this?" If it involved a mess my children had made, she would add a deep sigh and murmur, "The children, the children ..." -- as though they were guests who had overstayed their welcome.

With each "discussion" we had about my need to have her follow through on the things I asked her to do, she shared another sad piece of her life with me. After she ruined a cherished hook rug in the washing machine, I learned that her husband had abruptly left her and their two young children for another woman. The morning she spent hours on the phone making it impossible for me to give her an important message, she explained that she was upset because her husband had recently returned to Nicaragua with his mistress, to live in the house that she had been given by her parents. The afternoon I discovered her sleeping, she confided that her husband had begun divorce proceedings and was attempting to cash in and take the whole of his small, but to her, significant, pension fund.

The longer Maria worked for me, and the more she told, the more her life story became tangled up in my mind with those of my grandmother and Mrs. O'Brian, along with the feelings their experiences had evoked in me. My desire to rescue her, and my tendency to ask less of her, grew stronger with each sad tale.

One morning, about six months after she began working for me, she announced she had to go back to Nicaragua to care for her sick mother for eight weeks. She assured me it was no big deal, that eight weeks was not a very long time. When she saw the sharp look of skepticism on my face, she looked at me, woman to woman, through her tears and asked, "You would do the same thing for your mother, wouldn't you?"

After she left for her trip, my home and work life quickly returned to a chaotic juggling act, requiring reserves of energy I just didn't have. Realizing that I needed to replace her, I called Maria in Nicaragua, offered her a month's severance pay and said goodbye.

One afternoon, a few weeks before Maria left, I walked into the bedroom of my then 6-year-old daughter, where I found the devastation of Hurricane Barbie. Strewed across the floor were at least 10 dolls, clothes and accessories for every occasion and a crashed Barbie car with the one-legged Ken at the wheel. Anticipating resistance, I took a deep breath and told my daughter and her friend that it was time to clean up. "But Mom ... why can't Maria do it?" my daughter protested. Her friend Susan, the one with the trampoline in her backyard, wholeheartedly backed her up.

I try to visualize my daughter 20 years from now: bright and educated, with a career, a husband, children, a house. As she confronts the inevitable issues of child care and housework I wonder what she will see: a labor market full of women with broken dreams, a sad but useful tool for feminist progress? Will her husband, part of a more enlightened generation of men, "get it," or will the war over the second shift rage on? My hope is that she will understand and appreciate the circumstances that differentiate her life from lives of the long line of women on whose shoulders she stands.
salon.com | April 3, 2000

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