I am cleaning the kitchen again. We’ve only lived in this house for a few months, and I feel like I have already cleaned this kitchen hundreds of times. I’m not meticulous, I’m just doing it because I live here with another grown up, a toddler and a big dog. Sometimes, I clean when I am procrastinating a painting or deadline. Other times, I’m painting or writing because I’m putting off cleaning. The cleaning and the art blur.
These words I’m typing now are with fingers smelling strongly of the Clorax wipes I just used to clean the grime off the cabinet doors. I traced those doors, removing evidence of time and touch from them. It’s satisfying. It’s also shocking I never noticed how dirty they were. But mostly, it’s fucking boring. So here I am, telling you about it is after cleaning three of those twenty cabinets.
Often when I am doing a thing but also writing a thing in my head, I try to fast forward and imagine you, a reader, maybe sitting on the other side of a magazine. I don’t quite understand the social jiu jitsu required to get to you yet, but I also fear that if you are a man, you may have not made it this far anyway. I can see the words on the cutting room floor before they’ve even left my brain. So, on the kitchen floor I guess. How many billions of brilliant words have died on kitchen floors? How many women have great writing that they can’t write down, or do and self-doubt keeps it hidden. I suspect a male reader would move on. There have been a lot of words about cleaning on this page so far. A lot of hints that this may be about women or mothering.Your is hand making its way to the corner of the page, hovering before turning it. I imagine you flipping past this one, because cleaning doesn’t really interest you does it?
What I’m trying to say is it doesn’t interest me either. But I’m here to make sure my kid grows up in a somewhat safe space and to help out my husband since he works really hard and pays for everything and also I love him but he is just not on top of all the cleaning all the time. So it is part of what I do, but also what is quietly expected of me in the very unpaid and unspoken housework category of life. I can’t help but seeing you as a man, and thinking about the woman or partner who ironed your pants or wiped down your microwave last. Maybe if you are a man, and you are still reading, it’s because it was you who last wiped down the microwave in your home. Maybe you were the one to dust off the welcome mat, and to fold the laundry and put it away. If so, can I just say, thank you.
I don’t blame the reader who isn’t with us anymore for not being interested in my treatise on how the invisible labor of women has possibly paved the way for them to be carefree. Until now I wasn’t interested in the story of how a tidy and cunning woman paved the way for me, until I had my own house, had my own new reality come crashing down on me one counter wipe at a time.
Now I’m on the kitchen floor, scrubbing the goopy gray splotches of dust and peach juice and dog hair off the tiles under the high chair. It’s actually really beautiful down here, between the stools. Their legs remind me of the columns in huge gothic cathedrals, the light dappling them through stained glass, maybe in Tarragona or maybe in Reims. It’s late afternoon, and I hear a train. I’m having a romantic moment here on the ground.
My fear is that the written word can’t work well enough here. Like, I want you just here with me on the kitchen floor and just kind of talk you through it. But if you saw a video of a woman cleaning would you stay to hear what she thought? Would I?
When your mother told you “You’ll see what it’s like one day, you’ll see.” Did you also answer with certainty at least in your mind that you absolutely will not because “Mom, I HATE YOU. “
Cleaning work and care work is boring to even think about but I’d like for us to all go over the details together. I pay women to clean my house sometimes, to take care of my baby often. It’s because it is tiring work to watch a child, to keep it alive and fed and clean and dry and happy and rested but also exercised. Sometimes it feels like too much but really, I know that for me, it’s not enough.
But the words don’t make it off the kitchen floor and into your head without someone helping me watch him, someone else helping me clean. These are the invisible hands I wonder about now whenever I read an essay or a poem now. What actions were taken off your plate, so that you could speak to me?
Where they taken of that plate by a woman’s hands? If you are a white woman, were those hands brown? Were they young or old? Were they well paid and well fed? Well rested and safe? Would you know either way?