My work as an anthropologist is aimed at enlarging our understanding of the ways in which poor and working class kids of color engage with consumption — and to challenge popular stereotypes. But turning the tables is also important. For about six months, I have been working on a journal of my own consumer life, which I’m calling “My Life with Things.” This week, you’ll see five entries from that journal. The project is highly personal, but it has a purpose that goes beyond self-documentation. As someone who has long studied consumption and is deeply critical of it, I’m painfully aware of my own deep ties to the world of consumption. Ultimately, it is my hope that this intensive self-observation can serve as a springboard for further exploring contemporary commodity consumption in all its aspects.

Wednesday, 17 Jul 2002

LOS ANGELES, Calif.

You need it, my friends tell me. You deserve it. Here’s her phone number. The number of a nice Mexican lady, maybe an illegal immigrant, who surely will charge far too little to clean my home. But I deserve it.

Somehow, this is the last frontier for me, to have someone in my home (I’ve already got underpaid Mexicans cutting my grass, to my chagrin) to dust and mop and swab the toilets and do all that other stuff that I can never get to.

How on earth, though, can one person deserve the labor of another? I mean, my child deserves my labor on her behalf, but does my Ph.D. earn me the right to have someone do the dirty jobs in my home? And why is it — or is it — so different to have guys working outside in the yard? I can’t imagine how I’ll deal with it; I think I’ll have to run out of the house so that I don’t witness this person doing what I think I should be doing: cleaning up the family mess, sweeping the dust bunnies, spritzing handprints off the walls and toothpaste spray off the mirrors. It’s much too intimate. And a lot of what makes me uncomfortable about it is important to me: I don’t want to lose my discomfort with the idea. At the same time I want my house to be cleaner than I can get it unless I spend a lot of time doing it myself. Maybe I should care less about those little details.

But I’ll come home and the house will be magically clean. Maybe if only I didn’t have to deal with and get to know a real person I’d feel less guilty, maybe if I went with some big, corporate rent-a-maid service it would feel less exploitative. But if I’m going to do it, I feel obligated to have a personal relationship, to force myself to witness and acknowledge what is happening.

It’s a little bit like the way I feel about eating meat. Basically, if I’m willing to watch it die, I’ll eat it. Not in every single instance, but I’ve seen chickens and fish being killed, and I think it’s really important to see that there’s life attached to that thing on the plate. It has to be acknowledged. Same thing with work: People do it; don’t pretend it’s not the case. If you can’t handle how the magic happens, don’t get attached to the magic.

Now, I already purchase labor from other people all the time: my daughter, Benin, is in preschool, and that certainly costs money, and frees me to spend many hours in the office. They care for her, but it’s not the same. Then there’s all that indirect stuff — interactions with cashiers, for instance — but it doesn’t have that aspect of making me feel, well, guilty. Benin was just in the hospital with pneumonia, and I was grateful to pay doctors and radiologists to figure out how sick she was, to dose her up with expensive albuterol treatments and steroids, to attach her to an oxygen flow.

Why is paying the doctor so different from paying a maid? Is the difference obvious or not? The power differential is clear: When you’re a patient, the doctor has the power. With a maid, you have the power.

When I was a teenager, I had a job for a while cleaning the house of some friends of my mother’s. Down in the basement I’d do the laundry, put the shirts up on the hangers just the right way. Vacuum the stairs, dust, dust, dust. Can’t remember what else I did, but I do remember that after about the third time I was unbearably bored by the whole thing. Vacuuming the damn stairs again. The woman I worked for fired me because I did all the appointed chores but didn’t take the initiative to clean the coffee pot. She told me I wasn’t mature. Really, I was born a 40-year-old in too many ways; I was plenty mature. But I was so bored.

These days I don’t find housework as boring as I did then — there’s actually something a little restful about it, at least the usual stuff — but what just sends me off the deep end are all the messes my husband and godson leave around. Even after they think they’ve cleaned up. The dried dribbles of piss on the underside of the toilet seat. The splatters of spaghetti sauce behind the stove.

So I stomp around cursing and feeling put upon, cleaning and dusting and vacuuming and washing floors and wiping up spills that seem to be invisible to everyone else but if I didn’t intervene we’d be living in an absolute hellhole. It’s like swimming against the tide of indifference; I’m yearning to live in a lovely setting, with everything just so — a warm and inviting jumble of color and texture that’s homey and nice and clean — but I don’t think they care about it at all. So while they’re in their socks and sweats eating chips and watching the game on TV, I’m scrubbing mildew out of grout, putting stuff down the pipes so the drains won’t clog, and trying to decide what color to paint Benin’s room. They would never do these things. And sometimes I hate them for it. I really hate the way that they feel entitled to leisure and I don’t, which is clearly my own problem — but there’s the mildew and the dust bunnies and all that.

Maybe that’s part of what I’m thinking about buying — someone else who cares for and cares about my living space. I won’t be alone any more. I can complain to her and roll my eyes about them. She can say, “Tsk tsk tsk” and put on the gloves and whip out the comet and maybe I’ll feel happy and free.

It’s not much of an overstatement to say that I really do fear that my marriage will fray rather too much if we don’t get help in the home cleanliness department. And the reality is that a maid is a lot cheaper than therapy, but maybe it shouldn’t be.