The Cleaning Lady

Zee (the best dog in the whole world)

I have a cleaning lady, and by most reasonable standards this should be the end of the story. She is kind, hardworking, and raising her daughter alone because ICE deported her husband. Every two weeks she shows up with a helper or two and, in about an hour, my house goes from looking like it was recently inhabited by wolves to something resembling civilization again. She doesn’t complain about the German Shepherd hair, which is impressive considering I own two German Shepherds and I’m fairly certain they shed their body weight every three days. She uses bleach, everything smells clean, and the house looks great when she leaves. She charges $100 to clean roughly 2,500 square feet of house, which, if you know anything about cleaning services, is basically robbery in reverse.

I realize this is a first-world problem and am actually disgusted with myself for this emotional turmoil. Why can’t I just be grateful and shut the fuck up?

So you would think this is where the story ends. A hardworking person does a great job at a bargain price, tolerates piles of dog hair and barking, and everyone should go about their day happy. Unfortunately, I come with baggage.

Part of the baggage is practical, and part of it is emotional. The practical part is that every single time she comes it is wildly inconvenient, and I hear myself saying that and immediately feel like someone who should probably cut her hair into a helmet and start yelling at teenagers in Target. The problem is that she comes while I’m working from home. Before she arrives, I have to declutter the house so that she can actually clean it. That alone takes several hours because my house seems to function as a staging area for dog toys, baskets of laundry in various philosophical states of existence, mail piles, kitchen clutter, and clothing that has entered the mysterious “in-between” realm where it is not quite dirty but clearly cannot go back in the drawer either.

Once she arrives, I have to move my laptop into the bedroom so she can clean the office. This means abandoning the giant monitors I can actually see and trying to do my job on a laptop screen the size of a Pop-Tart. The dogs, who normally follow me around like furry security guards, have to be locked in the bedroom so they don’t bark nonstop at her helpers, who are afraid of them. The whole thing only lasts about an hour, but during that hour the universe reliably schedules chaos. Someone on Teams suddenly needs something immediately. A meeting I forgot about pops onto the calendar. UPS arrives and needs a signature. A Walmart delivery appears. The dogs urgently need to go outside, the kitchen floor is wet, and I suddenly need to use the bathroom like I just drank unfiltered water in Mexico. Right now, to make matters more ridiculous, our porch is being renovated, so I have to sneak in and out through my tenant’s entrance like I’m escaping a crime scene.

All of this sounds ridiculous even as I say it out loud, which is why I keep telling myself to get over it. But the truth is that the logistical chaos isn’t actually the main problem. The real problem is the emotional baggage she unintentionally carries with her every time she walks through the door.

She was recommended to me by Trish. If you have read my post “The Sympathy Card,” you already know who Trish is. If you haven’t, the short version is that she worked with me for fifteen years and apparently decided that warning me I was about to be erased from my job would have required too much emotional effort. So every time the cleaning lady shows up, there is a small voice in the back of my head reminding me of that connection.

Then there is Zee.

Zee was my soul dog. She was the sweetest German Shepherd you could ever meet—one hundred and five pounds of loyalty and quiet dignity, with a bark that could make strangers reconsider their life choices. Her helpers were afraid of her, which meant when they arrived I would lock Zee in the bedroom. One day when they showed up, I was helping Zee climb onto the bed. Her front legs suddenly gave out. She yelped, cried, and everything went sideways from there. I sent the cleaners home, called my husband, rushed her to the vet, and she never really recovered.

Now let me be clear: I DO know this was not the cleaning lady’s fault. I know that Zee’s health had already been declining and that the timing was simply terrible. Rationally, I understand that the two things are not connected. Emotionally, however, my brain still sees her walk through the door every two weeks and thinks something much less reasonable.

You killed Zee.

Of course she didn’t. She is a hardworking woman trying to support her daughter while tolerating an amount of German Shepherd hair that could probably be spun into winter coats. She likely has no idea she’s starring in a psychological drama inside my head involving workplace betrayal, grief, and a dog who deserved to live forever.

To make matters more complicated, I recently realized that she had mentioned to Trish that my mother died. That explains the sympathy card that appeared unexpectedly in the mail. For a moment I thought my one remaining friend from that company must have told her, and I almost didn’t believe her when she said she hadn’t. Eventually it dawned on me that the information probably came from a Portuguese-to-English Google Translate conversation with the cleaning lady. It was probably innocent conversation, not malicious at all. But it meant that once again Trish somehow had access to my life.

And now I find myself in the ridiculous position of wanting to fire a perfectly nice cleaning lady who works hard, charges very little, and does an excellent job cleaning my house. My husband refuses to even consider it. From his perspective this woman is a miracle. She arrives, cleans the house, and he comes home to a gleaming, dog-hair-free environment. He does not experience the laptop exile, the Teams chaos, the locked dogs, or the emotional flashbacks. He simply sees a clean house.

Which means that somehow my cleaning lady has become a minor sore spot in my marriage. The worst part is that deep down I know I’m being a little bit of a bitch about it. Not entirely—but a little.

Because the truth is that she didn’t betray me, she didn’t fire me, and she didn’t hurt Zee. She is simply the unlucky person who happens to be standing there when several painful memories collide. Every two weeks she shows up with her mop and her bleach, and I try very hard not to blame her for everything else in my life that still hurts.