I have a confession: we have cleaners. And I love them.

A few years ago when I was still working full-time, it seemed like everyone we knew had cleaners except us, and our house was damn dirty. I was maybe getting around to cleaning the bathrooms every six weeks or so, and by then the shower was not in any shape to actually get someone who was using it cleaner than they had been before, and it required several hours of battle with many cleaning products and several refreshments and pep talks from Sir Monkeypants to get me through it. Likewise, Sir Monkeypants was barely finding time to push the vacuum around every couple of months, when the crunching under our feet became a tetanus hazard.

So we caved and got cleaners, and there was joy in the land. They dusted our ceiling fans. They cleaned the blinds. They wiped all the tile floors by hand. They even folded the toilet paper in our clean bathrooms into a little triangle shape. It was like living in the penthouse at Trump Tower. I’m surprised there were no mints on the pillow.

Now it’s been several years and we are talking about maybe giving up the cleaners…not now, but someday…and the thought fills me with a bit of panic. They were just here this morning and on top of their usual service, they vacuumed out the vents in every room, cleaned all the baseboards, and liberated our sliding door, inside and out, from thousands of tiny little handprints. If it weren’t for the dents in the floor and the pieces of Mr. Potato Head in every room, you’d swear it was a model house.

But still. They’re pretty expensive, and since we have a new house that needs stuff like fencing and air conditioning and landscaping, we sure could use the money for something else. Also our one set of hold-out friends explained recently that they don’t have cleaners, despite having one extra baby than us, because they want their kids to see them taking responsibility for the house, and to pitch in when they can. Damn them and their good example setting.

So someday soon when I go back to work I think we will probably strike out on our own, and I’m already making up a daunting schedule that I must stick to if I want to maintain anywhere close to the level of cleanliness our cleaners provide. It’s not really the work that I mind, though. It’s the bitterness that comes from not having your work properly appreciated. It’s not that I don’t think Sir Monkeypants wouldn’t give me a proper, “Go, Sweetie!” during the work process, and a hearty, “Thank you!” afterwards. It’s that, when you aren’t actually doing the cleaning yourself, you can be careless with the keeping-things-clean, something that really pisses off the main-cleaning-rep. Just yesterday, for example, I washed the screen for our fan in the bathtub, leaving it with sooty residue all over the bottom, but rather than clean it out, I just let the cleaners deal with it this morning. Someday, though, someone else in the family will be washing their camp gear in the tub, leaving grass and leaves all over it, and they’ll just ignore it because it’s my job, and…bittermaker!

I think this is the argument I’ll use on when the decision time comes. It’s for the mental health of our family just as much as the physical!