Housekeeping!

We have friends coming over for dinner Friday night.  Two couples, the women of both being former co-workers from our first ever corporate jobs. When we were young and single and on track to take over the world.

Because of their impending visit, I am in stress mode over the condition of my house. With two dogs who track a constant trail of dirt in through the dog door all day and the fact that my husband and I are clutterers and we both work a million hours a week, and because he seriously barely helps with day-to-day chores, my house is a damn mess.  How do other people do it?  Why do my friends' houses look so clean by comparison?  Am I a harsher critic of my own dirt?  Can I just see it more?  Do they all have cleaning ladies?  Are their husbands better?  Unemployed? Clean-freaks?  Gay?

I actually have discovered through taking stealthy surveys of my many friends that most of them do in fact have someone come in once a week to clean.  Several have mentioned that it has saved their marriages.  And so I decided that I am going to get myself a cleaning lady.  But, first, I have to talk P into it, as he is the boss of the budget. 

He is not the keeper of the budget because he is the man, or the breadwinner; we make fairly equal money. He is the keeper of the budget because if the budget were left to me, we would spend all our money at Crate and Barrel and Sephora and would barely have enough left to eat at the end of the month, whereas he has us on a steady but generous monthly diet of saving and paying attention to where our dollars go.  Smart, that one. 

However, as smart as he may be, he is still not smart enough to notice that when my house is sparkly clean, he gets sex every time, Pavlov having apparently dropped the ball on that scenario.  Seriously, for the low price of approximately $65 a week, he could have sex whenever he wants.  Seems like a good deal to me, in a perverse wife-housekeeper-husband-prostitution-love-triangle way or whatever. It's like the whole Arnold Schwarzenegger thing without the giant love-child.  I'm not even using sex as a bargaining tool, I am just honestly in the mood when my house is clean.  And when my house is covered in muddy little dog footprints and piles of junk mail and shoes, I feel unsexy, un-horny, and like I have no will to live. I also want to kill the man who thinks it is ok to keep bicycles and tools in the dining room and pile his dirty clothing in the hallway on the floor, mere centimeters from the opening of the laundry chute instead of get naked with him. If only he got it.

So because of the budget requirements, I told my husband that I wanted to trade my personal trainer budget allotment for some housekeeper dollars.  And then I told my personal trainer that while I was truly sorry, and although I am still on the chubby side, I would be upgrading from him to a housekeeper.  (I did it over email so I wouldn't have to face him with the bad news. Good plan, I thought)

And now, suddenly as I start researching housekeepers and asking all my friends for recommendations, I am feeling, first of all, a little skeeved out about having a stranger in my house when I am not home, and second of all like I have to do a shitload of cleaning before I even begin to let said person in and third of all, even though I bust my tail to make good money, kinda guilty about needing to hire someone to do my dirty work.  And now I am stressed.  And not feeling like it is saving my marriage.  And definitely not in the mood.

Meanwhile, in other parts of the world, people have real problems. Pass me the caviar, Buffy, I'm just too tired from my massage to get it myself.