I am just really not very good at it and I don’t enjoy it. This is a very un-cool admission in the world of Martha Stewart, Parenthacks.com and Readymade magazine. My husband and I both work full time and we are not very tidy people. We can do our dishes and get our laundry done, but mopping the floors just rarely happens. Junk mail piles up. My husband cannot throw away stray papers and I have trouble caring about dust bunnies. We have a small house but it never looked good all over.

It got to the point that people disliked coming over, even when we didn’t have crap all over every horizontal surface in the house. I didn’t like the way I felt guilty for not cleaning even if I didn’t really care. And in 2006 it was still I, not my husband, who was judged on the condition of our home.

I tried first to take it all on myself and just clean the damn bathroom. But I started resenting it. I hated asking my husband to help me clean, partly because, like any latent control freak, he didn’t do it my way or on my schedule. We were both acting like martyrs and it was really unattractive. We never had fights about cleaning but I did feel resentful and put upon when it was 10 pm, the dishes weren’t done, and I couldn’t really depend on him to do them.

It didn’t help that we know we are lazy. His brother and sister-in-law love to come home after 12-hour days and get a good scrub in. My sisters would come over and start re-organizing my house and driving me to the container store. I have indie friends who sew their own clothes, knit their own sweaters, and clean their houses with baking soda and with pleasure, it seems. Well, I prefer to read and run after my toddler who has not learned to clean up yet.

Our kind neighbors asked if we were interested in hiring someone to clean because the woman who cleans their house was looking for other clients. Three weeks later I took a half-day off to meet L and she’s cleaned our house every two weeks. I am happy to pay for it. In fact, I am much happier paying her a high rate directly rather than going with a service. She works hard and I like to think every penny is going to her and not to a corporate overlord. I spend the half hour I have per day to tidy attending to dishes, laundry, and junk mail, and every other Thursday we run around like maniacs to make room for L to clean. She does a great job. One day I’ll even organize my files and throw out the bags of clothes from my closet I cleaned out with my half hour one night.

I try to remember what other smart feminists said: “You can have it all, just not all at once.” Since I love to cook, and I love my family, and my daily perusal of the New York Times is non-negotiable if I am to remain a sane human being (and I know these are the privileges of middle class women in this day and age), I have decided to outsource the thing I like least.