Many years ago, a therapist more or less wrote me a prescription to have a cleaning service. I didn’t feel safe or free when the house was dirty yet Nick and I didn’t have the bandwidth to keep the house clean. It felt extravagant back then, when we were on one income and paying for childcare to boot — but I was proud to carve it out of the budget. It felt very adult and future-minded to spend for my mental health, like how I feel when I get my oil changed and actually replace all the gnarly filters the technicians present to me with worried, paternal expressions.
I was supposed to cancel the monthly house cleaning last fall when we stopped being able to afford it but I kept forgetting. Once a month, I get a text from Christa — “me and Josie will be there around 9:30 a.m.!” — and I wince. I can’t cancel on them when I’m already on their schedule for the next day! I make a mental note to email and cancel services in like, a week, so it wouldn’t seem like an indict of the services received. A co-dependent’s favorite hobby, trying to rescue people from having negative emotions!
The mental note slips away, like all mental notes do, and the next month the same thing happens. The invoice arrives and it goes on a card. What’s another hundo stacked on our mounting debts?
(Do you see the class discomfort I’m tap-dancing around here, having to clarify that I medically needed an economically disadvantaged person, always a woman, to scrub crystals of dried urine from our toilets?)
I got an email a few days ago from the cleaning service asking about the March 31 cleaning they had on the books for me. Precautions were disclaimed but they were still able to do it, if I wanted. They also offered me the choice to cancel, or to pay now to help their cash flow and have it redeemed for a cleaning in a future virulence-free time, something I can hardly believe in anymore. I said I’ll pay now and forgo the service this month — I mean, clearly we’re not bringing a cleaning crew into our home right now.
I’m never going to try to cash in my “free” cleaning. It’s embarrassing enough for me to have a house cleaner, I would never be able to attempt to redeem a coupon with a straight face.
We live, regrettably, check to check. However, our privilege is vast and innumerable. To start with, we’re both still employed for now!! I mean, I was on an all-staff Zoom call last week where the top third of the college president’s head said the word “furlough” enough times to make my stomach flip. But today, in this moment, the paychecks arrive every other Friday in a predictable amount.
Maybe you have seen some of those Twitter threads going around by monied leftists (often, I’ve noticed, without children) scolding you to keep paying everyone as normal for services you aren’t receiving. It’s not that I want to secure my family’s comfort and safety at the expense of the comfort and safety of a poorer, more vulnerable family. But I think we’re all kicking a mental pebble into the canyon, to test just how far we fall if we fall. For now, we’re happy to do it and we’re able to do it. What happens when we can’t though?
It’s almost like
this is what
a government is for
so you don’t have a social safety net consisting of the widow’s mite
while billionaires post drone shots of their quarantine yacht from Tiffany-blue Caribbean waters????????
Where’s my guillotine emoji.
The email came on Friday that Jane’s daycare would be furloughing workers and that they were unsure about how April tuition payment would be handled. When all of this started, I was assured by the daycare director that the workers were salaried and everyone would be fine. But then the state of Maryland extended the school closure two more weeks, as most of us expected, and now they were looking at the first of the month arriving potentially without tuition checks. I had my first good cry in a few days over this email. Care work is intensely personal, and this one hurt.
The email linked to a parent survey, which depressed the hell out of me. We indicated that we would be willing to pay April’s tuition as a tax-free donation to the school, with other options being to pay April’s tuition and get a credit for a later month, or that we would not be able to pay at all.
I’d like to pretend that we offered to pay April tuition only because of ideological purity, because we’re class traitors in solidarity with the worker. There’s some of that, yes. I scroll through a mental photo carousel of the women who care for my baby and I feel like I can’t breathe imagining them in any kind of distress. However, a lot of it is fear and selfishness. I want the daycare to be able to stay open. I want it to still be there when all of this is over.
We live in a rural area; Maryland’s largest county by area but least populated. There are two daycare centers in our town and that’s it. (Many people use home daycares.) Like restaurants, childcare facilities have paper-thin margins. Over the years, I’ve known plenty of daycares to fold on a dime. A state inspector says the building needs mold remediation, they can’t afford it, it’s closed. The owner of the building decides to sell to someone who wants to convert it to office space, it’s closed. Someone who is good at early childhood education but bad at bookkeeping is in charge, it’s closed. How will these places outlast this?
Q. What wouldn’t I pay to be able to access daycare easily on the other side of this??
A. Well, not more than what we have, because we can’t.
yr mate,
Evie
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