I Used to Clean Houses. Then I Hired a Maid.

Exactly one month before we got married, my fiancé and I made the final steps in combining our families. We were both full-time single parents—his kids 18 and 14, mine 12 and 5, with some dogs, fish, and a tortoise—moving into a house I described to acquaintances as “too big to clean” and to my close friends as, somewhat fondly, “a shithole.”

“It’s worse than any house I’ve ever had to clean,” I told one friend. As someone who’d just published a whole memoir about cleaning houses, this description spoke to the level of grime, dust, grease, and dog urine throughout. “I can’t walk around in bare feet,” I said. “I’m going to have to deep-clean the place from top to bottom.”

In interviews leading up to, during, and after the publication of my memoir, , I was asked repeatedly whether I’d ever hire a housecleaner myself. “No,” I said, almost with my nose in the air. “I don’t want to live in a house that’s too big for me to clean myself.” A few times I laughed and said I’d never be able to afford