How I Lost My Cleaning Lady and Other PC Ways to Lose People in Your Life

By: Victoria G. Smith

 

I know, I know. Talking about losing one’s cleaning lady sounds too bourgeois as to appear ridiculous. Except if you hear me out, then you might decide it’s not. I suffer from a genetic bad back, you see. My father complained of the same since his fifties. I’m in my fifties, so there you go. It’s particularly torturous for me to clean bathrooms, especially ones with bathtubs. With all the bending and kneeling required for such chore, especially now that I’ve also a bad knee—well, you might as well put me on morphine drip afterwards. What can I say? Aging’s a bummer. Thus, I’ve always been grateful for my privilege of having been blessed with resources to hire a house cleaning crew. That is, until we moved to the island.

In our small island, the laws of supply and demand reign supreme. You feel their effects quite keenly. Low labor supply dictated by high real estate prices equals precious labor pool. When we moved here about three years ago, I told everyone of my need for a cleaning lady. One of our service providers liked us much from the start that he recommended his girlfriend who lived with him on another island, just one brief ferry ride away. We thought we’d try her, even agreeing to pay for her ferry tickets to sweeten the deal. She seemed to like us enough too as to have lasted almost two years until— well, until I blew it. Yup. I blew it by not shutting up when it was to my advantage to zip my trap. For barely two days after “the incident” happened, we found an envelope outside our kitchen door with our house key in it and a cryptic note stating she found working for us “challenging”. She didn’t even accord us the decency to say goodbye in person.

This was egregious to me because we treated her like all the people who work for us—we don’t consider them as working “for” us, but rather “with” us; partners in achieving complementary goals. We don’t view them as servants, but as professionals we respect as equals who only happen to work in another industry; in this case, residential cleaning. Many times, I refused for her to eat her lunch in her car, often inviting her to eat with us at our dinner table, partaking of our own food I cooked myself. For Christmas and other holidays, and after we return from trips, I’d always had gifts for her and her boyfriend. Even when she broke something in the house, or did not clean a room well, I never complained. I merely noted the fact with a friendly reminder to be more careful next time, accepting the loss as part of the collateral damage that comes with working with imperfect human beings who inevitably make mistakes. I’d learned young the art of patience and diplomacy with household help from my mother. Now, don’t get me wrong. We were poor. But in the Philippines, most everyone is poor so that if you think you’re destitute, you’ll find there are lots more people impoverished than you. Thus, my mother was able to afford live-in nannies and maids to help her with her ten children, recruited from the then stream of girls escaping the hardships of farm work, wanting to earn a bit more than peasant wages.

So what was “the incident” that was so horrible that drove my island cleaning lady away, you might ask. I remember that day as if it were yesterday. For it was one of those days when you clearly saw the fork on the road. Do you take the path most people took because it was the safest, or the one less travelled?

She won’t admit it if asked, but she started it. And I’m not being petty childish here. We were, as usual, sitting at our dinner table—my husband, cleaning lady, and I, enjoying lunch together like good, old friends. Then, she began another one of those discussions in which she’d shown earlier interest. Politics. I found this especially intriguing about her. From what she’d shared of herself, this much we’d gathered: although not college educated, she had an intellectually curious mind that perhaps allowed her to transcend the built-in challenges of her life, particularly of having had an absentee father who’d been in and out of prison. And she’d overcome them wonderfully, as proven by having single-handedly run a successful residential cleaning business for years, and an acute awareness of and concern for health and environmental issues that compelled her to use environmentally-friendly cleaning products, some of which she prided in making herself, and to eat mostly vegan and organic foods. My husband and I balked at the prices of organic foods, but she didn’t blink at them at all, often bringing her own home-prepared meals consisting of fruits, raw veggies, hummus spreads, and a litany of vitamin pills in their individualized pill box. Her discipline shamed us. And as she’d worked in Seattle a few years before, she often gave us recommendations for great foodie restaurants and other nice places to visit. Unusual, yes. In the right ways, I thought.

I suppose her natural acumen led her to be likewise curious and concerned about community issues and local and national politics. Although she’d sometimes displayed a slant towards conservatism, I’d enjoyed our conversations, for the teacher in me never forsakes a chance to delve into historical, philosophical, spiritual, and political discussions relevant to our times with whomever is interested. And she thanked me for our discussions, even saying more than once what a great client I was, and how thankful she was for our graciousness and generosity. All these, until that last day we saw her when she expressed concerns about the increasing numbers of Guatemalans and Ukrainians moving to her island who she claimed were causing a lot of the peace and order problems there. She was understandably concerned, considering that as of last census, the white Anglo-Saxon Protestant (or, WASP) population on her island (and she was a WASP) was a whopping 93.5%. When you’re the overwhelming dominant tribe, and you observe other tribes seemingly moving in your territory, I can see how that might scare you. At first, I tried not to react. I asked myself, do I let this go. In the end, I couldn’t resist the opportunity to offer another perspective.

This is what I ended up saying to her—not word for word perhaps, but pretty close: “I understand why you’d feel concerned, but I urge you to avoid lumping people into groups and assigning behaviors and character traits to those groups. I’m sure that for every Guatemalan or Ukrainian who commits an offense, there are many more who do not—who, like me, are immigrants who are productive and law-abiding members of American society. Because, you see, this is what gets us into trouble, what leads us into racist thinking without realizing it. Then before we know it, we’ve condemned an entire people because of this. I’m sure you didn’t mean it this way. I only want to help you see this kind of generalization for whole communities of people doesn’t help us see our real problems, which therefore prevent us from crafting the right solutions. Immigrants, like the Jews, have historically been exploited as easy scapegoats for national and global problems for which there are no easy answers.” What I must admit I also wanted to say, but decided was probably not a diplomatic thing to say was, “I mean— hello, lady! Aren’t I the immigrant here, for goodness’s sake? And am I not also the one who’s provided you with a good job at top rates?”

But what I actually said apparently wasn’t diplomatic enough, too honest. For she got up from her chair, speechless and hyperventilating—her chest and shoulders heaving up and down as she glared at me from her little, oval-shaped eyeglasses with eyes so big and round, it was a toss-up between she being livid or simply shocked. I could see she was trying to process what I’d just said but was unsure how to take it because her emotions were getting in the way. So what did I do? I got up from my chair as well, walked over to where she was, and—hugged her. I told her how much I admired her for her interest in current events, for caring so much about her community that she took time to explore its issues. I encouraged her to continue studying what affects our local and national politics, and thanked her for sharing her thoughts with us, to stay in the honest dialogue that we so badly need as a nation. She managed an awkward smile. And when she left that day, she seemed back to her old self when she said, “See you in a couple of weeks!” And thus, when we saw that envelop with her short note and our house key in it on our doorstep two days later, it came as a surprise to us. But not totally. Some people truly aren’t capable of being shaken out of their comfort zones. I apparently rattled hers, and paid for it by losing an otherwise great cleaning lady.

The next time we got a cleaning lady, she worked for us almost a year until she went for her dream of opening a storefront business on the island. We were happy for her when she did. But I still suffer from not having had cleaning help since. I console myself with the thought that those were all politically correct ways of losing one’s cleaning lady. The first, because she was not ready to leave her comfort zone; the second, because she left her comfort zone in order to fulfill her dream.

The harsh reality of truth is that it both liberates and divides, depending on whether we’re willing to see it and be changed by it. I think of the times I’d lost friends and family because I spoke the hard truth as I saw it. That’s always been my problem. I could never shut up when I see something’s wrong. And when I was younger, I was feistier and wasn’t always diplomatic going about it. Yet I hang onto the conviction that each of us could be agents of positive change if we could only plant those seeds of change in none other than the very people in our everyday lives, one person at a time. This explains why in some of my public political debates on Facebook, I could be annoyingly patient and diplomatic in trying to convince the other side of the justice of the position I advocate through logic and facts, long beyond when others would have simply happily called the other side “stupid”.

(To be continued in the next issue)

(All rights reserved. Copyright ©2020 by Victoria G. Smith. For more on the author and her literary works, go to VictoriaGSmith. com. “Like” her on Facebook at Author Victoria G. Smith. “Follow” her on Twitter @AuthorVGSmith)