Housekeeping My Way Through the Pandemic

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/27/opinion/coronavirus-housecleaning.html

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When my self-isolation began two weeks ago, I realized I needed to get honest with myself. I was not going to be a person who emerged from quarantine having discovered a new scientific theory or learned a new language. I could try to maintain some semblance of normalcy. I could write. I could cook. And I could accomplish something extra with the additional time at home. I could clean.

As a woman, as a mother, as a feminist, I have a lot of complicated feelings about housework. Part of me thinks that it’s sheer drudgery, mindless and thankless work that I am lucky and privileged enough to be able to outsource. So I do. Except then I feel guilty about outsourcing it, even though I pay my cleaning person fairly, because disrupting the binary of “real” work as men’s work and housework as women’s work should not involve merely relocating the burden of the so-called second shift onto some other woman’s back.

There is also is the small, secret part of me that kind of enjoys housework, the part that subscribes to Better Homes & Gardens and keeps a copy of “Home Comforts: The Art & Science of Keeping House” by her bed. I love my house. I love living in it and working in it. I’m happy to take care of it, to keep it tidy and put its rooms in order, even if the work is repetitive and exhausting. But I feel guilt for enjoying the work, because I worry that I’ve succumbed to the old gender constructs about housework being women’s work, or worse, that I’ve taken the bait of lifestyle gurus who’ve gotten rich by rebranding mopping and scrubbing and organizing as fulfilling and even aspirational — and still women’s work.

As I said, it’s complicated.

So this month, after Philadelphia’s mayor sent us all inside, I found myself the tiniest bit grateful that our current circumstances had taken the choice, and thus the conflict and the guilt, out of housework.

I would clean because I had to. I would use it as a chance to self-soothe, even to push myself creatively. (How to clean the very top of a soaring glass shower enclosure? Answer: Wrap Windex-soaked paper towels around the head of a Swiffer!) It was also a chance to introduce my children to the mysterious rituals of keeping house. For them, housework has mostly been invisible, something that happens magically while they’re at school. Thanks to my outsourcing, they believe, I sometimes think, that clothes wash themselves and beds make themselves, and floors and floorboards rid themselves of dust.

So I sent my cleaning lady a check (for four weeks, for the entire amount I would have paid her to come, and yes, if you can afford it, you should too). I looked up some spring-cleaning checklists online, found gloves and vinegar and baking soda, busted out the Pine-Sol, rounded up my kids and got to work.

On Day 1, the girls did not complain — at least not much — when we tackled the bathrooms. They moved everything off the bathroom counters, sprayed them, wiped them and cleaned the shower’s walls and the bathroom floor while I scrubbed the toilets. We played show tunes — they regaled me with “It’s a Hard-Knock Life” from “Annie” — and the time passed fast, and at the end of it, the bathroom sparkled. “Someday, you’ll do this in your own houses!” I told them, getting a little misty. They looked at me like the Lysol might have affected my brain. “No,” the younger one said, “we won’t.”

On Day 2, my older girl had online school. My younger one was mildly enthusiastic when I showed her how to sweep the kitchen floor and repeated Day 1’s counter-wiping. She was bemused when I told her to roll up the rugs and pile the chairs on the tabletops. She was not happy when I filled a bucket with warm, sudsy water, handed her a rag and told her to get to scrubbing. “Why are we doing this?” she moaned as I scrubbed alongside her. “It’ll just get dirty again!”

True. But I think there’s something rewarding about a job you can see, the tangible results of a floor that was dirty and isn’t anymore. Not to mention the soothing nature of folding warm laundry or wiping down doorknobs and banisters and microwave doors, the way housework keeps you busy and leaves you tired.

There’s even some science behind the notion that cleaning can bring peace and that if you try to be mindful as you wash and fold, focusing, for example, on the feeling of the water or the smell of the soap, you’ll feel less anxious and more inspired.

Then of course, there’s the virus. If food is love, right now so is cleaning. Just as a loaf of fresh-baked challah on Friday night says “I’m keeping you fed and full with this warm, delicious work of my hands,” a freshly wiped toilet handle says basically the same thing, substituting “healthy” for “fed and full,” and “safe” for the warm and delicious part. There’s something rewarding about a household working in harmony, where everybody pitches in and finds ways to help. There’s also the gratifying knowledge that my 16-year-old, who’s scheduled to spend a month in New York City this summer, now knows how to do a load of laundry, how to iron, how to cook a bunch of basic meals and how to keep a bathroom clean. If we all survive, if New York City isn’t off-limits and summer isn’t canceled, she’ll be fine.

In the Days of the Virus, where sanitation has become a matter of survival, housework qualifies as a love language, a way of telling those closest to us “You matter" and “I see you” and “I care.”

And if a day of scrubbing and straightening leaves you, as it leaves me, too tired to fret about a president who didn’t do enough to prepare and now wants to pat himself on the back and talks about packing the pews at Easter, that’s good, too.

Jennifer Weiner is a contributing opinion writer and the author of the forthcoming novel “Big Summer.”

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