I spend most of my time at home, but I’m a horrible housekeeper. Always have been, and now that we have a wee one running around throwing food all over the place, I’ve lost what little interest I had in tidying up. Dishes are left in the sink for days, tabletop sticky, floor filthy. Forget neat, I doubt it’s even clean. I need a maid.

We used to have maids in the Philippines when I was growing up. Over there, middle class households can afford to have at least one maid. There’s always someone poorer who will do the housework in exchange for food, shelter and some cash. Growing up, I spent more time with the maids than I did with my parents, who both worked full time and had social lives after work. My mother was a picky bitch, for someone who spent very little time at home. She hired and fired our maids constantly, often several times a year. Whenever my mom would fire any one of our maids I would be in tears.

Auntie Lorna stayed with us the longest. She was our maid from the time I was nine till I was sixteen. She was young and pretty, but I don’t remember her ever having a boyfriend or a lover. She was from a small Southern town called Capiz, known for being haunted. She was a jumpy woman – any sound from outside the window scared her, which also scared us kids until we’re screaming and clutching her legs. In retrospect I wonder if she was just putting that on to keep us from being naughty. She was very strict, and when I grew older I came to resent her “cleaning” my room, which included throwing out pieces of paper on which I scribbled fragments of poems and notes from boyfriends.

On Saturdays we had an old lady come over to iron all the laundry. She was brown and wrinkled and smoked brown cigarettes with the ember side in her mouth. Back then I thought she just did that to keep the ashes off the laundry. Later on I saw other old people doing the same. That was wild!

At one point we had two lesbian maids who fought over the dyke who worked at our neighbor’s. They didn’t last very long in our home. We had a gay houseboy maid who kept the house very clean and tidy, but took forever with every task. We had an older lady I really liked but she eventually had to go back to her own husband and kids. When I was a freshman in college we had a girl who was just a few years older than me, and I hated her because she kept telling my parents whenever I brought Edwin into my bedroom.

There is a loss of privacy that is the price for having someone else tend to the housework. Aside from the basic level of trust in letting a stranger into our home, I’d also have to consider the effect of her presence on my and Jay’s creativity and sex life. I suppose I could hire a maid to come in to clean once a week, but that hardly makes a dent in the cyclical chores of daily life – dishes, cooking, cleaning after the baby – the mundane tasks that eat up so much time and rob me of my productivity. It wouldn’t be such a dilemma if I wasn’t a picky bitch myself. I need someone who will listen and follow my exacting demands, maintain confidentiality on anything she may witness or find in our home, and maybe even enjoy the quirky things that happen around here. In return, we will pay her well, treat her like a good friend, and share our beautiful home with her.

Would you like to be our maid? Do you know someone who would? Email me at maylingsu at gmail dot com. Have a great Sunday!