Genius Toiling in Obscurity

The Dirt Cycle

When my son was about six months old, I slipped into a post-partum depression. Mine was pretty mild, and I recovered from it fairly quickly because, as a former consumer of various mental health services, I knew what resources were out there and I knew they could help. I joined a PPD support group; I called up my old therapist and squeezed into her schedule; I called up my old psychiatrist and said, "Do you think meds would help? Because if you do, I want a prescription now." But when I am asked to name the single most helpful thing I did to treat and overcome PPD, I say, "I hired someone to clean my house."

When we moved to a much smaller house five months ago, jettisoning much of our clutter in the process, I imagined I could do without a housecleaner. But what I learned from my efforts to keep my own house clean was that, as I told my therapist, a housecleaner is not a luxury for me. Even with someone else doing the deep cleaning, I still do a lot of housework every day: sweeping floors, cleaning the kitchen, load after load of laundry. I do the shopping, and if anyone in the house cooks, it's probably me. But the deep cleaning is beyond my capabilities. I don't enjoy it, and I'm not good at it: I have high standards, but lack the patience and skill to meet them. Hence the housecleaner.

We are lucky, at the moment, to have the world's best housecleaner. Every payday I write her check and put it on the fridge, where it waits some days for her, and every payday it seems like a lot of money. And then, on alternate Tuesdays, she shows up in the late afternoon and transforms our home into an oasis of order and cleanliness. My son's neatly piled toys make colorful reflections in the gleaming wood floors; the bathroom tile is so white that it actually generates light; even the stairs to the basement are free of cat hair, dog hair, parrot feathers, mouse parts, and the other detritus of life with nine pets and the occasional interloper. And I know then that she would be cheap at twice the price.

This radiant moment is the apogee of an orbit I call the Two-Week Dirt Cycle. For the first week after the house is cleaned, it stays clean. I sweep every day in the living room, dining room, and kitchen. I don't sweep behind things, I don't move furniture, but I get up all the hair and feathers and bits of bird food that drift into the open, and all the bits of people food and trash that fall to the kitchen floor. But at about the seven-day mark, this stops being sufficient: the dirt-catching corners have accumuluted enough that things look a big dingy even as I'm sweeping my pile of dirt into the dustpan, and by Day 9, fresh balls of hair and dust have drifted out into the middle of the living room by the time I'm back from hanging the broom in the hall.

Undaunted, I keep sweeping every day, though by Day 10 things are getting ahead of me and squalor is imminent. That's when I give up. "What is the point," I ask myself, "of sweeping, when the job can't be done properly without moving the furniture, and our cleaner is going to be here to do it properly in just four days?"

By Day 12, I'm not even bothering to wipe up kitchen counter spills. "Our cleaner will be here in just two days," I tell myself. "Wiping the counter now is just wasted effort on my part." Days 10-13 are not pleasant from a hygiene point of view, but I experience them as a welcome vacation from my daily round with broom, dustpan, and dishrag.

And then Day 14 arrives. I pick up a little to make the cleaner's job easier, and then I get out of her way. She White Tornadoes her way through the house, plucks the check from behind its fridge magnet, and departs. And the Dirt Cycle begins anew.

Posted by Su Penn at May 20, 2003 11:05 PM | TrackBack