Having house help makes me nervous

There are two wonderful people who make our ridiculous lives here possible: Mathilde, and Saidi. Mathilde is a big, beautiful woman whose smile you have to earn. She is funny, and she has a great laugh, a kind of voiced breath that crescendos in volume and pitch until it breaks into a cackle. Mathilde cooks for us four nights a week–I have posted a few odes to her cooking, and there are more to come–and does the dishes. As if that weren’t enough, she cleans the house on the weekends. She scrubs our bathtub–the absolute filth that has collected there by the end of the week is testament to how unlikely it is we would ever do it ourselves–and mops our floor. She cuts massive, cream-colored calla lillies and arranges them, with their ripply emerald leaves, in a vase on the coffee table.

She makes our beds.

(I’m not even kidding.)

Saidi is our Renaissance Man, though I don’t know that he’s any older than maybe 19. He is tall and thin and sweet-faced. He cleans the porch every morning, does our laundry, pays our electric bill (and pays enough attention to it that it gets paid, no thanks to me). He gathers the ripened amapelas into a bucket too full for any single household to consume and leaves them outside our gate for the children. If you need something, you can give him money and he’ll go get it.

I grew up in middle class America, and despite my parents’ best political intentions, I somehow became something of a feminist, which means the notion of having house help is culturally and politically uncomfortable for me. I’m happy to be able to help employ people, and as I become less dogmatically reflexive in my thinking on this, I’m happy, too, to have the help. But I bristle when I hear things like what I was told by a foreigner (not an American, I am proud to say (and no, not a Canadian either)) at a posh restaurant a few weeks ago: “Yeah, I definitely want to stay. The weather is so much better here, and the labor class is so much cheaper.”

“Labor class.” Are those…people?

Roommates in my home rotate with great frequency, and at the moment we’re a slightly-more-than full house. We represent 5 countries, which surely means 5 different takes on the “labor class.” I can’t speak for them, and I can’t even speak for America–I went looking for an article about this to give a more considered and researched impression of why many Americans feel uneasy about maids and such, but I didn’t find one (recommendations welcome)–but here’s my take on it:

Yes, Mathilde will do the dishes…do we really have to leave her every dish to do? She’ll clean the bathtub, but that doesn’t mean when it’s all skanked out that we have to just not shower till Saturday. Yes, Saidi will do laundry…but do we really have to have it every day? He’ll go get something if you need it…but I feel like that doesn’t mean that if he isn’t around to run your errand, or it takes longer than you’d like, you can be annoyed.

I think there’s a lot going on here–cultural differences, in addition to the potpourri of the foibles we share, to varying degrees: being absent-minded, being inconsiderate, being a little lazy. I am all of those things, and I have sympathy for others who are, too. What makes me uncomfortable is how easily it seems the feeling of entitlement can creep in…

Not that I’m the picture of sensitivity on this. Sure, I picked up a sponge and cleaned the tub today…but I still let Mathilde make my bed. She does it so much better than I do….she does it like my mom.

Meanwhile, this afternoon, when I offered Saidi some of the leftover soup I had heated up, he took it gladly, even though it had become a little cold, and about 20 minutes later, the emptied bowl and companion spoon reappeared in the kitchen–cleaner than anything I’ve seen any of us wash.