Thoughts Happen

Cooking, Cleaning, or None of the Above?

"I wonder if there are people who hate to cook but love to clean?" I rather rhetorically asked my husband and daughter while we were standing in the kitchen waiting for the rice to be done in the Cinco de Mayo Skillet that was bubbling in a glass-topped pan on the stove.

My musing was motivated by good old-fashioned guilt, because I hate to clean. I'll clean because I have to, and admittedly I usually feel better after a cleaning chore is over, but I'll put it off as long as I can. I even finally hired a cleaning lady to help with the dirty work of keeping my house livable, but I still feel guilty about it sometimes, like I am shirking my responsibilities by outsourcing even a portion of the cleaning to someone else. 

But in a flurry of activity in the kitchen last weekend when I made Chicken and Dumplings while Daughter did the better part of putting together a Chocolate Beet Cake (you heard right), it occurred to me that I spend a fair amount of time domestic-chore-wise cooking and buying groceries, e.g. preparing to cook. And, for the most part, I enjoy it.

This made my spirits rise for a few minutes: I'm not shirking the entire gamut of household duties, just the ones I don't like. But then, who would like cleaning more than cooking? Surely I'm taking the easy way out. 

So when I casually pondered if anyone preferred cleaning over cooking, I was surprised to hear my husband answer right away.

"Do you remember Miriam?" he asked. (not her real name)

Now that he mentions it I do remember her — the ex-wife of the brother of a friend of ours. We sometimes all hung out together. 

"She never cooked. The entire time I knew her I don't think she ever cooked once. But she would do crazy shit like scrub the baseboards." 

Yes, it's coming back to me. Bit of a neat freak I thought. Who would go to all that trouble?

But of course, I go to the trouble to make my own chicken stock from scratch, freeze cubes of stale bread (from loaves I make in the breadmaker) to toast and then grind in a food processor to make breadcrumbs, and cook up my Halloween pumpkin for pies, which some might consider a bit much as well.  

However, Miriam's example is all I needed to convince myself that I'm not taking the easy way out — I just have a life. Can choosing to use it to do things I'm good at and enjoy be that bad? 

I'm also curious about you. Which would you rather do, cook or clean? Or neither? (Or both?)

Photo of Mr. Clean courtesy of elycefeliz on flickr via Creative Commons license

Whether 'tis Nobler ...

So I canned my cleaning lady yesterday. There are two reasons why I never thought I would hear myself say that: 1) I’ve never fired anyone before, and 2) I never thought I would have a cleaning lady to fire. In fact, until about a year ago, I always was very smug about not having a cleaning lady, and joked about being on the “no housekeeper workout plan,” although a writer friend suggested I dump the phrase when I included it in an essay I was writing. Thought it sounded a bit snooty. I suppose it did, in a reverse-elitist kind of way.

Somewhere along the line I internalized the idea that doing your own housework is noble, and hiring someone to do it for you is a cop-out. Where I grew up in eastern Pennsylvania, nobody I knew had a cleaning lady, or any other hired help for that matter. We and everyone else we knew did our own cleaning and maintenance because ... well, I don’t know why. Was it because it was noble or because we couldn’t afford any other option or because that’s just what people did?

Mom took care of home and garden, and Dad took care of the lawn and fixed anything that needed fixing. I don’t remember Mom cleaning all the time, but to be honest, cleaning was something we kids rarely paid attention to unless it was on our dreaded Chore List.

I have not-so-fond memories of cleaning the bathroom, my least favorite chore, being particularly careful to NEVER, EVER let the Vanish toilet-cleaning crystals touch my bare skin, as Mom put the fear of God into me that they were poison and would burn my hand if even so much as a grain dropped on me.

Although I never would have admitted it then, I’m glad that I was made to learn how to clean so I wasn’t helpless when I moved out, and I make sure Daughter also gets plenty of learning opportunities. (She’ll thank me later, I’m sure.)

But over the past several years, as I’ve moved my writing hobby into something more resembling a profession, albeit part-time, the idea of getting some outside help started to look more and more appealing. This is when I realized how deeply the Cleaning is Noble idea was engrained in me. I felt guilty about hiring someone to literally do my dirty work.

So imagine my surprise when I mentioned to Mom during a phone conversation that I was entertaining the idea of getting some help, and she not only did not look down on me, she thought it was a great idea. She then revealed to me that one of the main reasons she started working part-time as an inventory checker at the Broadway department store after we moved to Las Vegas when I was in junior high was so she could hire someone to do cleaning.

I remember a cleaning woman coming every so often after Mom started working, but I always assumed it was because she no longer had enough time to clean — it never occurred to me that the cause and effect were in fact, reversed.

So last year, after talking it over with my husband, I hired a cleaning lady to come once a month. Although it was awkward adjusting to someone else cleaning around me while I worked in my home office, it was also nice.

But after too many misunderstandings about when she was supposed to be here (and one horrifying moment when I caught her scraping the burners on the gas stove with one of my good knives), I gathered my courage and gave her notice. Then I turned right around and booked someone else to come next week. Nobility be damned.

Photo of cleaning bucket courtesy Katie Earley via Creative Commons