Something Poor Kyle and I have been discussing a lot lately is when can we hire a maid.

Seriously, though. WHEN CAN WE HIRE A MAID?

I guess the all-caps make it look like our situation is dire here, like we’re suffocating under giant piles of filth and excrement or something.

Don’t worry; we’re not.

But it’s just that our house is never really clean. Never spotless. Never floorboards dusted or windows washed or blinds wiped down. It’s generally livable and tidy-ish and sort of presentable but it hasn’t been cleaned–really, deeply cleaned–in so many months that I’m too embarrassed to speak the number.

No I’m not: 10. 10 months.

I stay on top of washing the dishes and wiping down the counter every day (so Christal when I bring you your dinner you can rest assured my kitchen was clean when I made it), but I really don’t remember the last time I mopped the floors.

I stay on top of the laundry but only every 2 weeks. (Thankfully I have enough underwear to last me that long, barely.)

I stay on top of emptying the garbage but it’s one of my bigger challenges in life.

So truthfully, before you start thinking I’m some kind of hoarder-level slob, just know that it’s not that bad.

But it’s not that good, either, is what I’m saying.

You can eat dinner with us but you can’t put away the leftovers in our haphazard fridge.

You can use our bathroom but you can’t see yourself in the mirror.

You can come over and visit me in my fairly straightened up living room but if you are allergic to dust you will die.

The other day Poor Kyle said to me: “Imagine if our house was perfectly spotless all the time,” and after squelching my immediate defensiveness long enough to imagine it like he asked, there was no going back. I was completely mad for the idea: a maid!

I had never before entertained the literal notion of having a maid (though I pretty much daily dream about it in the maid/butler/personal hairstylist sense [and who doesn’t, am I right?]). But actually paying for someone to spend an hour or two every other week dusting and vacuuming and scrubbing my toilets? I honestly never even considered it a possibility.

I guess the reason I never thought about this is because…well, why? Why do I deserve a maid? I’m not wealthy. I’m not important or famous or the president of any nation, developing or otherwise. I don’t get special treatment anywhere–I barely convinced Fry’s to give me a VIP card. I don’t have a ______ person on speed dial (think “hair person,” “pool guy,” “nail lady,” “hit man,” etc.). (Although I do have a snow man which if you could please not judge me for, thanks.) There’s really no reason for me NOT to do my own housework, except for the fact that now I work full time plus part time and I really don’t want to do chores in the few spare hours I do have.

Which up until now has worked for me. Not doing chores I mean. I am one of those people who gets along just fine in a constant state of semi-clean.

But then Poor Kyle mentioned how nice it would be to come home to a clean–REALLY clean–house every day after work and I chose not to feel personally attacked by that statement and instead took it for what he meant: that both of us work really hard and neither of us feel like working even harder on housework.

And why shouldn’t I have a maid? I mean, aside from the mounds of socioeconomic guilt that would surely haunt me for it? But guilt is so easily ignored it hardly seems a real argument against anything anymore.

After awhile I did what I always do with quandaries of adulthood and called my mom for advice: Mom, at what point in my life can I rationalise hiring a maid?

Her answer: When you both work full time and you earn more money than you will pay the maid.

Check and check. (Though Poor Kyle and I have added being debt-less to that list because we are getting SO close and we can’t rationalise paying for housecleaning when we still have car payments.)

That was all it took for me to become a full-fledged convert of the idea.

The more I thought about my maid the more I grew to love her.

“What do you think she’ll look like, our maid?” I asked dreamily. “Do you think she’ll wipe out the fridge? Do you think she’ll scrub the grout in the shower? Do you think we can get one who uses eco-friendly cleaning solution? Would it be rude to ask her to do our laundry? How much should we give her for a Christmas bonus? Should we send her kid a graduation present?”

I looked down at the dinner table to see that I’d used the tines of my salad fork to carve a giant heart with the initials CPSF + M inside it.

“That’s okay,” I sighed, drawing my pinky finger lazily through the wood shavings, “the maid will deal with it when she gets here.”

You probably think I’m joking but I’m not: I’m getting a maid and I’m getting one soon.

And now to address the question I’m sure has been eating at you:

If you’re so busy that you can’t sweep or mop then how did you have time to write this post?

My answer?

Shove off.

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