Confession Time: Housekeeping and the Proverbs 31 Woman

I have a house cleaner.  

This is a hard thing for me to say out loud, especially on a public forum like a blog.  I'm from self-sufficient Upper Midwestern stock, and having someone come into my house every other week to clean, much less admitting to it, is very difficult for me.  But I do it, because the alternative is either a very dirty house, or a house that gets cleaned under extreme duress.  I know I'm probably in the minority in feeling weird about this, as it seems to be something a lot of city people do without batting an eye.  But I feel that if I'm detailing our lives in the city accurately, I need to come clean (ha!) about this little fact.

That's not to say that I don't clean--I clean every day. (I am from Crazy-Clean Dutch stock after all!) But the sort of cleaning I do involves quick counters and stove top wipes, sweeps, hand-vacs of the floor, and picking up toys all the live long day. Blitz cleaning, if you will.  (Please, someone tell me that children get past the fill and spill stage of toys? Even if they don't, lie to me. Just for today, mkay? Thanks). Deep cleaning involves a bit more involvement from me, and with all our stairs and multiple floor levels, it just isn't possible to do the sort of cleaning that my cleaning crew does without leaving my fearless-climbs-everything-in-sight toddler unattended for long stretches of time. I'm doing well to get meals on every day without mishap, frankly. And then there are the allergy issues--dusting gives me headaches, literally, and I'm stuffy and miserable for hours afterward. My cleaning crew can do my whole house in 90 minutes, and do a better job that I can do on my own in several hours.

I think at the root of my discomfort are several things.  Mostly, though, it is a basic sensibility about employing others to do jobs I know I can do perfectly well myself (setting the economics of the matter aside). I feel less self-sufficient--like I should be able to do All The Things by myself and still put on heels and lipstick at the end of the day to welcome my husband home, when the reality is that my hair is usually standing on end, my make up long worn off, the kids are all shrieking and crying, toys are all over the living room floor, dinner is slapped together, and I'm waiting for my husband to get home so I can whisk myself and the baby upstairs to nurse her in peace while he eats dinner with the older kids. 

Not exactly the picture of a self-sufficient woman.

I read an excellent article last week about the myth of the Proverbs 31 woman, and how we must consider one of the great factors in her cultivation of virtue: servants.  She had them, had lots of them, and that is how she managed her day and her life.  And it wasn't strange because everyone had them.  We've come to this strange place in the Western World of Parenthood where women are expected to do it all: work, have children, raise children, keep the house, pursue virtue and self-actualization, and theosis all by themselves.  We live apart from our families, in busy communities where it takes a lot to maintain relationships, and wonder why life is just so hard.  It is unfortunate that my husband's job placed us in a city far from family, and while we are really starting to feel rooted here and have good friends in the area, it isn't a stand-in for help in the home on a day-to-day basis.  I love my mom friends, and rely on them for much emotional support in this mothering journey, but but we are all busy with kids and households and tend to be scattered around the city, so we aren't in much of a position regularly to relieve the physical burden for one another in this way.

So, I'm going to keep my cleaning help.  I'm going to keep my babysitters, and work on feeling grateful that we can afford it and not feeling guilty that I can't do it all.  Self-sufficiency is a myth, and frankly, pursuing it isn't spiritually healthy.  I'm not supposed to be self-sufficient.  I'm supposed to rely on the Body of Christ in my journey to theosis. My job is to figure out my place in the Body, and to do what I can with the gifts I've been given.  And that is enough.