Recently a well-to-do lady I know described someone else as "not some underprivileged drudge who can't afford help." Since then, although the remark was not directed at me, I've been unable to get that particular phrase out of my head. I'm an underprivileged drudge! I remark to myself as I haul my 400th load of laundry up from the basement. I'm an underprivileged drudge! I exclaim as I clean out the diaper pail and the cat box.
And most of the people I know are also underprivileged drudges! I've been trying to figure out what I can do with my wonderful new title. It's tempting to emblazon it on a t-shirt and wear the bold words, UNDERPRIVILEGED DRUDGE on my bosom. Or perhaps a new blog, underprivilegeddrudge.com, would be a gathering place for those of us who can't afford domestic help to share the trials and triumphs of our sorry little lives.
It reminds me that a while back I wrote a piece I titled "The Drudgery Report" and sent it in to Babble.com. The editor there said they'd had enough on housework (although she praised the title) back when "To Hell With All That" came out. (The book is about housework, primarily, but written by an at-home mom WITH a nanny and cleaning people, which certainly cuts down on her street cred in my book.) I wrote this back in November. In the last month or so I've had the house cleaned by someone else… TWICE. It's really golden! Now am I NOT an underprivileged drudge? I don't think so… because a real privileged non-drudge would have a nanny running after the kids all day and a housekeeper in here more like three days a week, not just once in a great while. A real privileged non-drudge would be able to get a pedicure and play tennis at the club, and have lunch with friends and go shopping. It's so nice to have the floor scrubbed and the toilets cleaned at least every other week, and now that we have a dishwasher life is a lot less hopeless, BUT there still are beds to be made, dishes, cooking, groceries, and lots and lots of laundry to do each day. I still find myself rather baffled as to how anyone else does this. … Anyway, here's the piece:
The Drudgery Report
I love my kids. Scrubbing toilets, not so much.
I’m tired. That special I-haven’t-had-a-good-night’s-sleep-in-five years, I’m-covered-with-mashed-avocado sort of tired. I have two exhausting yet beautiful children (Isaac, 5 and Elias, 1) and one beautiful yet exhausting house. I’m sitting here and wondering how it ever came to pass that child-rearing and home-keeping were combined into this single impossible job. There may not be two occupations on Earth that are less compatible.
When I focus on the house and actually try to keep it tidy and functioning, the children are huge pains in the ass. Elias is now a toddler, and so he can follow me: I put books on the shelf, he throws them down into a pile; I fold the laundry, he unfolds it; I wipe off the table, he climbs up and spills milk, peas, and applesauce all over it, and so on. Meanwhile Isaac is unattended: he’s decided to stand in the sink up to his ankles in soapy water and pee his pants. When not melting band-aids to hot light bulbs, he’s popping pomegranate seeds all over the dining room so that it looks like a scene from a Brian DePalma movie. With their help, I can clean all day and end up with a messier house than I started with. Did Sisyphus ever have it this easy?
When I focus on the children, the house is a huge pain in the ass. How can I take them to the zoo for an afternoon of fresh air and intellectual stimulation when the sink is full of dishes? How can I set up an interesting art project or science experiment when dinner is not made and no one has any clean clothes for tomorrow? Rest assured, I avoid many fun things that we would like to do because of the mess that would follow. Mothers working outside the home, I know, are subject to guilt on many fronts. So are those of us working inside the home. Even we can’t do it all. I submit to you that one of the easiest ways to keep a house clean is to leave in the morning, get everyone out, lock the door, and go away for 12 hours. It’s a lot harder if you’re actually using the house all day.
I read in a recent New York Times article that, in the 1960s, the average housewife spent 34 hours a week on housework, and 11 hours a week on childcare. This statistic shocked me—it made it seem as if the house were the point of the job, and the children mere adjuncts. The job title was “housewife” and I guess they took it literally. The children were apparently sent out to play, or if too young for that were parked in playpens. No one worried about infant brain development, or childhood abduction, or life-threatening injury. They would presumably come home if someone broke an arm or a creepy man offered them candy. The main goals of the housewife were apparently spotless whites, gleaming linoleum, lemony-freshness and wholesome, well-balanced meals. Betty Freidan was right about this—to think that this would fulfill anyone was really ridiculous.
Those of us relatively affluent, well-educated women who make up the opt-out revolution call ourselves “at-home moms.” Which is to say, it’s not about the house. The house is a mere adjunct. It’s about the kids. The kids are our full-time job. Unlike the cleaning, the kids are not menial. They are not a waste of our talents and education. The kids are important and a labor of love. But who—I ask you—who is supposed to take of the house?
My husband Ben works, of course, to bring home the bacon. Cleaningwise, he pitches in when he can, but there’s not a lot of time in the two waking hours between dinner and bedtime, and he really needs to focus on our boys. On weekends he likes to tackle bigger projects like cleaning out the garage. He’s a great neatener, a great cook, and all around a lovely man, but there’s a sharp limit on what he can really do, simply because he’s not here. (I’ll leave the gender politics for another essay.)
We used to have a cleaning service, actually, and all this was a lot easier to manage. (Although there was still much that they couldn’t do.) But this spring we bought a new house, moved, and have yet to sell our old house. The squeeze of two mortgages in a horrible housing market, and the pain of two sets of repairs and utilities, have combined to make it impossible, for now, to pay anyone to help. No childcare, no cleaning people. Just me: mano a mano with a mountain of laundry. With two kids velcroed to my legs or loose in the house creating more and yet more chaos, I find myself wondering, how in the hell does anyone DO this? And I have it so incredibly easy compared to most. I know that. I’m not a single mom, for Pete’s sake. I have a stable marriage and financial security. I only have two kids—what if there were seven? What if we lived in the olden days? Yet I feel set up for failure. I feel that there’s no way to actually succeed at doing these dueling jobs.
Don’t they nap? You’re wondering. Well, Isaac is in school full days and it’s about a 45 minute drive round trip, twice, to drop him off and pick him up. So Elias tends to sleep in the car. When we get home, there are rare occasions when I can get him into the house still sleeping, or get him back to sleep. But we’re talking about maybe an hour that would qualify as child-free cleaning time each day. I often clean like a dervish during these times. But it makes me feel like Cinderella after the sisters have left for the ball. Sometimes I really wish I could sit down and have a cup of tea.
My friends who work outside the home look at me and say, “You must have so much time for making cupcakes and knitting!” And I look at them and say, “I never even get to go to the bathroom by myself! I consider myself lucky if I get my hair brushed at some point!” From where I’m sitting, the freedom to have a half-hour lunch and read the paper, or to think your own thoughts on the bus on the way to work, look pretty luxurious.
Maybe is the problem that the expectations for our interactions with our children are so much greater than they once were. Every hour of the day must include sensory stimulation, language development, fine and gross motor skills and intellectual growth, so it seems. The first three years are so important! And since raising the kids is “all” I am doing, I feel determined to do it “right.” The guilt I feel for parking the boys in front of a DVD is extreme, even if I must in order to get the dinner started. (NB: I’ve been steadily bribing him with raisins so that I can write this.)
How do others do it? Pay someone? Reduce your standards to the barest minimum? (Trust me: I’m not a neat-freak.) Put the house before the kids and just let the fend for themselves? (When they’re older, maybe?)
Lately I’ve been trying an experiment that seems to be at least reducing some of my frustration and bitterness. When I put a stack of folded laundry in my son’s drawer, I say “I love you.” Because that’s the point, isn’t it? That he’ll have something clean and comfortable to wear to school, and that providing it for him is a loving act? When I wash the dishes or make the beds, I try to think of it as a gift to myself. Later on when I come in and find that work done I think, “Thank you, me from three hours ago! That looks terrific!’
It seems to be helping a little bit. But I’m still open to suggestions.