I Wrote ‘Maid.’ Six Years Later, I Hired House Cleaners

In the six years since I published Maid, almost every person who’s interviewed me has asked me the same question: Do I, a person who became kind of famous for writing about cleaning people’s houses, have a housecleaner myself?

The simple answer was no. But it was not because my house was already spotless. Far from it. The truth was, I just couldn’t bring myself to do it.

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When I worked as a housecleaner, I spent hours dusting rooms with objects valuable enough to pay for a weeks’ worth of groceries that I desperately needed. Everything I polished carried an invisible price tag with an obscene amount of money that had been spent. Receipts left on countertops for dry cleaning listed totals that were more than what I had paid for my car. A lot of the rooms I cleaned weren’t even used regularly, so it became my job to dust closed off spaces bigger than the studio apartment I lived in.

Read More: I Left Poverty After Writing ‘Maid.’ But Poverty Never Left Me

I worked for nine bucks an hour, and my take-home pay was about six. While the wages from the job allowed me to barely survive, the work itself seemed so wasteful and unnecessary that I started to feel that way about myself. My clients were pleasant for the most part, but a handful of them weren’t. Regardless, a noticeable power imbalance weighed on me whenever I had to get on my hands and knees to clean the floors and toilets. To hire a housecleaner myself would not only mean putting someone in that position, where they, too, might feel worthless, but also becoming someone I used to hate.

My story is one of living in poverty, struggling to afford housing and food. I used to stay up late at night, hungry and exhausted, fighting to complete assignments for college, hoping that one day I could support my young daughter in a way that did not involve pulling hair from a bathtub drain. When my first book became a bestseller, my unexpected success skyrocketed me into a whole different class of society, namely one in which the inhabitants never had to worry if they would be able to pay the bill to heat their house. Suddenly, running out of shampoo was no longer a source of stress because I always had an extra bottle in a pantry. I had a whole shelf dedicated to toilet paper, something I used to steal from public restrooms because I couldn’t afford to buy my own.

When my husband and I moved into our house, I told him I wanted to replace all of the cheap furniture and dishes I’d collected over the years from clearance racks and donations. When I received a large check for the Netflix series based on my book a few months after we moved in, I used it to furnish my whole house, down to the rainbow-colored Fiestaware dishes and Le Creuset cookware on display on the open shelves in the kitchen. My children’s bedrooms were the parts I enjoyed being able to furnish the most. As a housecleaner, it pained me to know how other kids my daughter’s age lived, and now I was able to provide my own with a similar space, complete with bedding that matched and bed frames made from real wood.

Read More: We Didn’t Have Much Money. My Daughter Still Deserved Joy

But I couldn’t enjoy it, at least not entirely. My husband and I couldn’t keep up on the mess our dogs and two daughters created. We also had a conflict of what we thought a clean house looked like. He had grown up in a house that most would call “lived-in” where mine could have been described as a sterile museum. My family didn’t see the house as a never-ending list of tasks, but everywhere I looked, I saw work that needed to be done. My bedroom was over a crawl space, in which we stored junk we no longer needed but had not found the time to sort through, and I didn’t have to see the grime and clutter to know it was there.

It was difficult to explain why this gave me such anxiety. But the constant awareness of the tasks needed to be done made it hard for me to relax, to focus, to work. I would recall the scene in Anthony Bourdain’s Kitchen Confidential where a chef would press his palm on a cook’s cutting board, which was “littered with peppercorns, spattered sauce, bits of parsley, bread crumbs and the usual flotsam and jetsam that accumulates quickly if not constantly wiped away with a moist cloth.” He’d raise his hand, showing the cook all the debris he’d picked up, and admonish: “That’s what the inside of your head looks like now. Work clean!”

And still I resisted hiring someone to help.

It was four years before my neighbor convinced me to call a friend of hers who owned a cleaning company. Originally, I was just looking for deep clean of the whole house, but the more I talked to the owner, the better I felt about hiring cleaners to help us keep up on the regular cleaning, too. She paid her employees a living wage, and if a client canceled, she offered them the same number of hours on another job to make up for it. This had always been the most stressful part of the job for me—I relied on the income, but my clients would cancel their service on a whim, leaving me out the 30 bucks that I needed to pay my electric bill.

When I told the owner I’d once worked for a company that forced us to clean every hard floor on our hands and knees, using two rags in a “wax on, wax off” motion from The Karate Kid, she laughed and shook her head, saying she tried to protect her employees from doing repetitive motions all day. She also mentioned that her teams used all-natural cleaners because she didn’t want her employees to breathe in chemicals. I nodded and told her about the time I’d had to stop work and go to urgent care because I’d created a mixture of the wrong cleaning agents and accidentally inhaled a toxic cloud. “They tried to force me to do a drug test, too,” I said. “I forgot about that.”

A week after the walkthrough, a team of four cleaners spent five hours in my house. I’d spent several days clearing the counters of piles of papers, markers, and glue sticks to make it easier to wipe the surface beneath them and picking up my youngest daughter’s room as best I could. On the kitchen counter, I left a note to say thank you, and I tipped them all 50 bucks each. When I got home, my to-do list was no longer unending. I could make some adjustments – like putting away snow globes and other knickknacks that seemed unnecessary to be on display – but they were hardly all-consuming.

The company had a weekly spot available, so now I have two cleaners come to my house for two and half hours every Wednesday. I still spend part of Tuesday in preparation, making sure there aren’t any dishes in the sink and sometimes doing an extra deep vacuum. I leave the cleaners 20 bucks each for a tip and get everyone out of the house before they get here. Though one time I was running late and talked to the first one to arrive—he’d been with the company for 10 years.

Last fall my husband and I separated for four months, and my whole life was in a sort of upheaval. My 10-year old started sleeping with me at night, filling my bed with her favorite blankets and stuffed animals. Between work and caring for the kids, animals, and house on my own, there wasn’t much left for me. But one day I walked into my bedroom and saw the beautiful way the cleaners had made my bed and arranged all the stuffed animals. It made me smile, then brought tears to my eyes. It was the first time someone had made a lot of effort to take care of me in weeks.

I went to the living room and, for once, I didn’t feel the urge to scrub the whole place down. The work was done. I could breathe.

When I cleaned houses, I had just a few clients I truly felt I was helping. It’s only now that I’m a client myself that I can see the value of the work I did at my former job. I wonder how many of my clients were able to take a full, relaxing breath on the days I had been in their homes. I bet it was all of them. All these years later, aware of the immense respect and gratitude I have for the hardworking people who clean my house, I am able to better appreciate the person I was back then and be proud of the work she did to take care of others.

Maybe the work I did was not actually wasteful and unnecessary after all. Maybe I wasn’t either.

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