Do it yourself

I got another add from a company that wants to clean my house today. Sometimes the idea appeals to me. I adore clean work and living spaces, but it's almost impossible to achieve unless I'm constantly running behind my two little mess-making cyclones (read: children).

So what's a girl to do?

Well, there's nothing wrong with cleaning your own toilet. I think it keeps you humble ... in a good way. Do you think Mark Sanford would have had time to run around with his Argentine hottie if he was busy cleaning up his own messes? It's a funny idea.

But on a serious note, my real resistance to hiring a cleaning service—beyond cost—is guilt. A few years ago, I read Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America by Barbara Ehrenreich. The premise is fantastic. Barbara takes a series of minimum wage jobs to demonstrate how people can't survive on minimum wage. One of the jobs she took was with a cleaning service.

And we should all be ashamed. These (mostly) women are hardly more than slaves, just so everyone in America can afford to have someone else wash their floors and wipe their windowsills.

So I say, "No thanks." I'd rather scrub my own floors. It's character building, right? That's what I tell myself. At the very least, it keeps me humble.