A friend came to our apartment the other day and said “Wow, your place is always so clean!”
I looked at her. “Well, I pay someone,” I said. “Duh.”
Until we moved to Abu Dhabi, I’d never had someone clean my house. I didn’t grow up with “help,” although I imagine my mother sometimes felt like the underpaid scullery maid. I went to a friend’s house for a holiday weekend once, in college, and when we got there, her mother said that if I needed something ironed, I should just leave it out “for the girl”. I was confused: the only other woman in the house was a middle-aged African American woman. I wore a wrinkled shirt to the party.
All of which is to say, until I hit forty-seven recently, I was my own domestic help.
Don’t worry, I’m not going to re-hash The Help; instead I’m writing about how strange — and dangerously seductive — it is to live suddenly in a world where “help” – and lots of it – is readily available, even to people like me, who in the scheme of things don’t make that much money.
Of course, compared to lots of other people here – like the woman who cleans my house – I make unbelievable amounts of money. And as I’ve talked about before, my kids are starting to ask questions about who has money and who doesn’t; they want to know if our cleaning woman and her family in her home country will be all right. Sometimes they sound like little Marxists in training, god love ’em, when they talk about how unfair it is that some guys ride rickety old bikes and others zoom by in their Maseratis.
But then sometimes, they sound like Rockefeller-wannabes: “Why don’t we live in a big house?”; “Why don’t we have a driver?”; “Why don’t we have a cook?”; “Why don’t we have a fancy car?”…the list goes on and on.
We live in a place where it’s almost assumed that someone will pick up after you: at the ginormous Ikea, for example, there are signs that explain not only how to clear your own dishes from the cafeteria tables but why. And at the university where I teach, the dining hall staff had to be trained to let the students pick up after themselves.
Labor here is cheap. Really cheap. Most, if not all, of the domestic workers and manual laborers are immigrants who get multi-year contracts or are sponsored by families; and mostly the government imposes regulations to make sure the immigrant population is treated humanely. Whether these rules are always honored, or whether regulations are vigorously policed…well, ask yourself how that situation gets handled in whichever country you live in. Sometimes, most of the time, yes. And then sometimes…no.
But back to my clean apartment. My friend was right. My apartment is clean. Really clean. Not the way I used to clean back in New York, where it was an occasional vacuum, some swabbing at toilets (a house of two boys and a husband, none of whom can aim worth a damn), maybe a swipe at the kitchen floor, but only if there were visible blobs of foreign goo on the tiles. So initially here, I started slow. A woman coming in to clean once a week. Then…twice a week…and now? Now, my friends, she irons. (I ignored ironing in my pre-Gulf life, but here, where I wear linen and cotton almost every day, it’s harder to do, even though I tell myself that linen is supposed to be rumpled, right?)
All this help – at home, in shops, at the mall – has started to feel…normal. I talked with a friend from here, who had also been in the States this summer and we winced at the fact that we’d each had similar reactions in a shop when we weren’t helped by a clerk right away. I mean, I’d stood at the counter for what, thirty seconds without being attended to? Appalling.
I laugh at myself, but at the same time, I’m watching my kids. They have chores to do; the tidiness (or pigsty-ness) of their room is their responsibility; they are expected to pick up after themselves. I wonder, though, what would happen if we live here for several more years? Will they start to assume that it’s someone else’s job to deal with the dirty work?
What about you…what is the norm around hired help where you live?
This is an original post for the World Mom’s Blog by Deborah Quinn.
Photo credit to the author.
I grew up with “help” at home. We had a nanny, a maid and a driver. When I moved out of my house in Mexico to study in France and later work in DC I was so happy to be able to do things by myself. After I got married and moved to Germany I truly enjoyed cleaning “My House”! Whenever I went to visit my parents I felt guilty having someone clear my plates off the dinner table or wash my clothes. Fast forward a few years, I have two messy little boys and live in Jakarta where help is affordable and reliable. We have three helpers at home and I’m just enjoying every minute of cleanliness until we go back to the US where I will be the cook, driver and on-call toilet cleaner…
I’ve also experienced both having and not having domestic help. My compromise is to have her come only once a week for the “heavy duty” cleaning and all the ironing. Even when my husband was retrenched and we had to REALLY tighten our belts, I refused to let her go. Of course we could manage without her (especially now that our kids are old enough to do EVERYTHING themselves) but she NEEDS the income that we provide! As far as I’m concerned it’s a win-win situation!
I am from Saudi Arabia where help is also readily available and affordable so everyone I know has always had help includng myself. There are a lot of simple things that I never learned how to do. Like iron. When I grew up and started travelling on my own I had to learn. I think it’s fantatic to have so much help. Especially with children around but I do think it makes it a million times more difficult to get my children to take care of their things. I make them clear up after themselves when they’ve finished playing, painting, eating a snack but I know it’s not enough. God knows where their life will take them and they need to be able to do it on their own if they need to.
Help is readily available and affordable in Malaysia. It’s actually more the norm than the exception to have live-in, 24-hour help. And I’m the exception. 🙂 People are always surprised when they ask whether I have a ‘helper’, and I say no, and they’re like, wow, you can manage with two kids? I can, I just don’t get to go out much!
Though, I do have a 2-person cleaning crew come in once a week to wash the toilets, give the floor a good clean, wipe the windows and fans and yes, IRON. I can only do so much basic cleaning with a toddler and a baby hanging off me.
I’m in Oklahoma (United States) and only the wealthy have “help”. We don’t call them help, they are cleaning companies. I actually worked for a cleaning company two sumers ago!! I was SO exhausted after cleaning these huge, huge houses ALL day long. It was nice having the extra cash, but I dont know how people can do it all day long for years at a time. Or people like my parents have a nanny, instead of using child care, they pay someone to come to their home and watch their children. I’m actually really good friends with my parents nanny. Cleaning ladies are expensive here and I could never afford one. As a full time student at a local college, a mommy to a toddler, and a wife, my cleaning lady when I need help is my husband 😉 Lucky guy.
I feel good after I’ve deep cleaned my home, thankful for my house and the things we have filled it with! Everyone once and a while it would be nice to just pay someone to clean it for me 🙂
Great post. I think it’s so interesting that when people from other parts of the world hear that folks (moms especially) in the US and Europe can’t afford house help and don’t have extended family to help, they scratch their heads and wonder how we do it. I think the answer is partly we have machines (washing, drying, dishes etc…) and partly that it’s effing hard and drives us nuts. Child rearing and housekeeping is a multiple person endeavor, of this I am convinced. Single moms are heroes.
And I don’t know what’s up with the ironing. I have help here in Kenya and no matter how much I insist that she doesn’t have to iron she does it anyway. There’s a lot wrapped up with looking clean and put together here though. I’m writing a post on that now.
Anyway, great to hear your thoughts on this and I couldn’t agree more with everything you said!
ha! I think, that if I had the money I would want to hire some to help me around the house. Not every single day, but twice a month would be pretty sweet 🙂
Here in New Zealand it was only wealthy people who had help when I was growing up. Now it is more common with two income families and women having less time to do their family chores. There are more men stepping-up and taking their share of the indoor stuff, but I would guess-ti-mate that it is still mostly up to the woman in most homes. Our boys all have their chores to do, including the three year-old and that helps, but I would love, love, love to pay someone to do all the mundane stuff that never goes away…
We never had help growing up, and my job was always to clean the bathrooms! When I got to college and was living with roommates, I always chose the chore to clean the bathrooms (they still make fun of me to this day!). It was what I knew, and I didn’t mind doing it.
Then when I graduated and was living outside NYC and commuting to my job on Wall St., my 2 roommates and I pitched in to have the house cleaned by someone else. For my married life, I have had periods of having a cleaner or not having a cleaner help out.
Jen 🙂
Enjoyed reading 🙂 Have always had a domestic help, my mom had one around, now I have a full time maid. It is quite the norm in India to hire domestic help,though labour is not cheap in cities, it is on the outskirts and in villages.