I am sitting here at our kitchen table. Georges has gone to work, and the kids are at school. The nanny hasn't arrived yet with the baby from next door. Still, I am not alone.
We have a femme de ménage... a cleaning lady. She's the wife of the man who owns the épicerie (small grocery/convenience store) next door and is the mother of two very sweet young children; her oldest goes to school with the Little Guy. She's a very lovely girl, very friendly and she works hard on her two half-days a week with us. Not only does our house get cleaned regularly but she irons Georges' shirts, a task I would be sending out to the dry cleaners if it were left up to me. So her being here is a wonderful thing.
We're not made of money, don't get me wrong, but Georges doesn't see this as a luxury, he sees it as a necessity and says as long as we can afford it, we'll always have someone. He prefers to be able to put his (and now my) time into other things, like spending time together or with the kids, or doing other projects around the house that need to be done. (We're still trying to find the perfect storage solution for the piles and piles of sheet music we collectively own.)
I see his logic. And not being so domestically inclined myself on top of having just merged my life with a family of four other people, I am thrilled that I did not have to take on all the cleaning for all of us. I love that she comes to clean our house.
But it was a strange feeling at first, sitting here in the house watching some other woman do the dirty work. I don't picture myself as a lady of leisure, supervising the hired help but not wanting to chip my nail polish. Sure, I do laundry. I do dishes a LOT as our dishwasher is broken (I think it's being replaced soon, though), and as Georges does most of the cooking I think this is fair that I do most of the cleaning up afterward. I do the bulk of the food shopping now because I've got more time to do it (except for buying cuts of meat or certain kinds of fish... that's Chef Georges' domain). I've been known to change sheets and scrub a toilet when it's needed without waiting for the cleaning lady's arrival. And I am not above taking out the trash, the recycling or even (on occasion) changing the kitty litter when the stench gets too strong. I don't love housework and will often let things go for a while, but I am no prima donna either; I come from families that worked.
In the beginning I felt a tiny bit guilty, having her here and watching her do the things I would have had to do if she weren't here. And then... I didn't any more. Feel so guilty, I mean. She comes in, asks me if there is anything in particular that needs to be done, and if I can't think of anything she looks around and finds something. She just chided me for washing the dirty dishes that were in the sink, that she would have done them, and I said "But NON, these were our dinner dishes from last night!"
So just now, as I saw how much time she was spending cleaning our bedroom (I thought she was just going in there to change the bedding and I had told her to leave all the piles of crap on the side table because it's mine and Georges' problem to organize that) I felt that tiny pang of guilt again, and a bit of embarrassment that someone else knows how dirty our house gets. Then it went away, that guilty feeling, because really it's very nice not to have to do all that stuff.
And then I felt guilty about not feeling so guilty any more. It's that American "gotta work hard all the time" thinking again, the part of me that still has trouble completely relaxing and who couldn't even finish a 5-week course in meditation/relaxation yoga because I couldn't be still for 15 minutes.
Which makes me wonder how long I'll have to live in France before I can embrace the philosophy of "how sweet it is to do nothing and then rest afterwards".