Thu 21 Sep 2006
After three months at home (during which Husband and I continued to work full time), Minor is now going to our babysitter three days a week. I just wrote the first set of checks for all of our childcare arrangements and blanched at the total. It’s not a lot of money for someone to make, but it certainly is a lot of money for someone to pay. And I’m going to be paying in full for two more years, until Aitch is ready for kindergarten. Thank Dog he just makes the age cutoff for school in fall 2008.
Has anyone else out there with two kids in day care thought about the relative windfall that will result when both are finally enrolled in public school? On that longed-for day in…fall 2012? (!)…when I get to stop writing those checks, it will feel like I’ve won the lottery. What will I do with my money when I stop spending it on daycare?
I fantasize about hiring a housekeeper, and I’m not talking about a bi-monthly cleaning. I want Alice: someone to cook, clean, do laundry, go shopping, and pick up the detritus strewn in our collective wakes every day of our lives. This is the stuff that kicks my ass, stresses me out, and drains my time. This would make me happy.
Then I had a radical thought. Why wait for 2012? If I took the time I spent picking up each day and devoted it to work, I could bill enough to pay for the housekeeper, and then some. But I couldn’t just rush out and place an ad on Craigslist as soon as it occurred to me. I was pretty ambivalent about the concept of having a maid.
Americans have a funny attitude toward domestic service. Many middle-class people have a cleaning person who comes in periodically, even if they have to cut other luxuries to afford it. Relatively few people, though, have someone cleaning up after them daily. Money is a big reason, of course, although it’s not the whole reason–plenty of people spend the equivalent on travel or nice cars or stereo equipment.
I think it has more to do with our work ethic and class structure. Hiring a maid seems like an admission of extreme laziness or as a pretension to a social class occupied by Hiltons and Buffetts. I think most middle-class Americans would feel strange hiring someone to pick up after them on a daily basis because they secretly know that they should be doing it themselves. Having a maid is undemocratic.
It was not always thus. In the nineteenth century, if novels can be taken as evidence, even the lower middle classes employed daily servants. (Remember Hannah in Little Women, in which Jo and her sisters were always decrying their poverty?) In England, at least, middle-class homes employed servants right up to the World War II years. By the ‘fifties and ’sixties, when the women were back at home and labor-saving devices made homes easier to run, the practice was falling off a bit (although the Bradys still had Alice). By the ’seventies, though, more women were entering the work force; in the ‘eighties, with all that disposable income, the pendulum should have swung the other way, but it didn’t.
I’ll be in the vanguard of the domestic outsourcing revolution. The lazy, wasteful, undemocratic domestic outsourcing revolution. I’ll let you know how it goes.
September 21st, 2006 at 1:50 pm
I hear you loud and clear on the maid. If I have to pick up the dumped-out bucket of Little People more than three times a day, I am ready to shoot myself.
DH spent some time in India and noted that no job was too small to hire two people to do it. Where he stayed, they had a crew of people with little garden shears to cut the grass manually instead of using a lawn mower. In India, it appears that many middle-class families consider it their civic and social duty to hire as many servants as possible in order to reduce unemployment and spread the wealth. I like that attitude!
However, I am a blue collar girl at heart and could no longer justify a house cleaner once I began working from home and was present when they cleaned; even when I had an infant at the breast and another in the oven, I felt enormous guilt and embarrassment when someone else was scrubbing my toilet. Maybe I should stick to scrubbing the floor and instead hire someone to do my job?
September 21st, 2006 at 7:12 pm
Momby wrote: Maybe I should stick to scrubbing the floor and instead hire someone to do my job?
Interestingly, I read a (probably apocryphal) posting online where some tech guy, who worked largely from home, outsourced himself to India. New work would come in from his boss, he’d ship it to his counterpart in India (whom he was paying like $10/hour to - or whatever), and then go golfing.
You’re not in tech, are you?
October 5th, 2006 at 10:29 pm
Another 19th century literary example: in Jane Austen’s Emma, Miss Bates and her mother are in very straitened circumstances, living in just a few rented rooms and relying on the kindness of Mr. Woodhouse to get enough meat in their diet. They are so very poor that they can only afford one maid, the beleaguered “maid of all work.”