I had my apartment professionally cleaned for the first time today. This is something I thought I would never do. Right after I gave birth, five months ago, people kept telling me earnestly, “Don’t worry about the housework. Really, it can wait.” Clearly, these people had never visited my house if they thought I was concerned about the cleaning. It’s not like I’m growing penicillin in the kitchen (as far as I know), and that skunky smell in the bathroom is from an actual skunk who sprayed outside the window last night (I swear). I’m very neat, actually, and I’m great about doing the laundry. But the dust bunnies and I have a kind of tacit agreement; it’s akin to the “fish and guests start to smell after three days” axiom, except that the dust bunnies get to stay way longer.

I do have my limits, however. And last week I realized that maybe the advice about ignoring the housework no longer applies when your baby is taking consistent naps in that room with the cobwebs and rapidly advancing toward crawling on that unvacuumed floor. So I started cleaning. And very quickly, the gleaming bathroom sink started talking trash to the dirty floor and the streaky mirror and everything else surrounding it. “Don’t you wish you were clean like me?” it asked. I think the floor’s response pretty much nailed it: “Nah, I really don’t care. But Suzanne does.”   

Whose mojo?

This realization about how much needed doing, coupled with the large amount of time I now spend at home looking at (and hallucinating about) the fixtures, really dampened my mojo. Everything in my life started to seem overwhelming and stressful, from my part-time job to cooking dinner. This is how I came to the conclusion that I needed professional help. I asked around for recommendations, I scheduled the deed, and I instantly felt my mojo starting to rebound.

But then I woke up this morning with a little pit of discomfort in my stomach. The pit got a little bigger when the doorbell rang, it swelled while I sang “Baby Shark” to my son as the lovely young woman scrubbed my stove, and it’s still firmly lodged in my gut as I type this from my dust-free desk. The apartment looks fantastic, and I feel so much more calm and peaceful than I did yesterday. But the pit remains. What it comes down to is this question: Did the event that restored my mojo, take away someone else’s? 

I’ve always felt awkward about having other people perform services for me that I could do for myself. It has taken me years to get over my embarrassment at having a tailor hem all of my pants (and as a woman who’s 5’3 and doesn’t wear heels except to weddings, I do mean ALL of my pants). I had never had a pedicure until a few years ago, and even though I now adore having my feet pampered, I still feel uncomfortable about having someone wash my feet. (I mean, who do I think I am, Jesus?) On the other hand, I have no qualms about having restaurant staff cook and serve meals to me, even though I could and do prepare my own food at home. In fact, I have people perform all kinds of services for me all the time, from fixing my car to cleaning my teeth, and I don’t feel awkward about those services. So what’s the difference with having my house cleaned?

Considering the issues

There are a few distinctions, I think. One is about intimacy. Cleaning my home (like cleaning one’s feet) is a very intimate act, which, I could argue, is something that I should be able to handle on my own. Another distinction is about luxury and how we define it. In our culture, having one’s home cleaned is often seen as something that ‘rich’ people do. My choice and ability to have this done may influence the way that others see me, including the assumptions and judgments they make about my resources and priorities. Maybe I shouldn’t care how other people see me, but I would argue that sometimes their judgments are worth caring about. For example, I care that my friends and neighbors see me as compassionate, because I can’t make that compassion useful if others don’t receive it. I care whether the woman who cleaned my house while I played with my son sees me as a peer, because equality and mutual respect are central values of my life. 

But it’s the third distinction that’s really feeding that pit in my stomach: the question of whether and how the people performing the services have a choice. I don’t want to start casually throwing around words like exploitation, but I read Barbara Ehrenreich’s book Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America, and I know that a lot of people (usually women) who clean houses have few choices and often receive inadequate compensation for their work. When I hired a housecleaner, I made sure that the latter was not the case. But I don’t know how to ensure that the former isn’t the case. The woman who cleaned my house might go home at the end of the day feeling fulfilled by her work. Or she might not. Ditto when I get a pedicure from a woman who speaks little English and appears to be working for the family business (which is run by a man). She might love painting my toenails. Or she might not. How do I know? If I were to become a regular client, maybe one day I’d feel comfortable enough to ask, but right now, I don’t. And even if I did ask and got answers that satisfied me about her individual happiness, how would I know whether I’m contributing to a larger system that reinforces privilege for the few and inequality for everyone?

I know that my life is filled with things made, delivered, and otherwise supported by people (often immigrants) who don’t have as much choice over their work and lifestyle as I do; I can’t change that, at least without overturning the American economic system and the current world order (which is a larger discussion for another time and place...). But when I do have the chance to make ethical choices in my own daily life, it’s surely worth doing. The tricky part is figuring out what that means, and doing so in the midst of my quest for mojo and balance.

How do you keep your mojo while supporting others’?

These are complicated issues, which key into a lot of political debates (about immigration, distribution of wealth, etc.). But while we sort them out on a larger level, how do you deal with them on a day-to-day basis?

Owning Pink is a community about finding and keeping mojo, which is fully committed to helping each of us to not only find our own mojo but to encourage it in others. There are a lot of moments in our lives when there is clear and obvious synergy between the two. But when the synergy isn’t obvious… what do we do then?