The author of Maid finally hires one

IN THE SIX YEARS SINCE I PUBLISHED MAID, ALMOST every person who’s interviewed me has asked me the same question: Do I, a person who became kind of famous for writing about cleaning people’s houses, have a house cleaner myself?

- STEPHANIE LAND

The simple answer was no. But it was not because my house was already spotless. Far from it. The truth was, I just couldn’t bring myself to do it.

When I worked as a house cleaner, I spent hours dusting rooms with objects valuable enough to pay for a week’s worth of groceries I desperately needed. Everything I polished carried an invisible price tag with an obscene amount of money that had been spent. Receipts left on countertops for dry cleaning listed totals that were more than what I had paid for my car. A lot of the rooms I cleaned weren't even used regularly, so it became my job to dust closed-off spaces bigger than the studio apartment I lived in.

I worked for 9 bucks an hour, and my take-home pay was about 6. While the wages allowed me to barely survive, the work itself seemed so wasteful and unnecessary that I started to feel that way about myself. My clients were pleasant for the most part, but a handful of them weren't. Regardless, a power imbalance weighed on me whenever I had to get on my hands and knees to clean the floors and toilets. To hire a house cleaner myself would mean not only putting someone in that position, where they, too, might feel worthless, but also becoming someone I used to hate.