The Task I Outsourced and the Guilt That Followed

We got a cleaner. I felt guilty about it for approximately three weeks before I stopped.

The guilt was about several things, not all of which were clearly about the cleaning. Some of it was about whether paying someone to clean your home means you've failed at something. Some of it was about what my mother would think (she wouldn't say anything, but I know what she'd think). Some of it was about the feminist complexity of one woman paying another woman to clean her house, which I've thought about a great deal and come to no comfortable conclusion about.

But most of it, if I'm honest, was about the invisible load.

Because the invisible load around cleaning isn't just the cleaning. It's the deciding that cleaning needs doing, the assessing of which parts need doing and in what order, the tracking of whether it's been done recently enough, the mild anxiety about whether the house is at a standard that I — and I alone, apparently — have set for it.

Outsourcing the task didn't outsource the standard. I still hold the standard. I still assess whether the cleaner has met it.

What I've been working on is outsourcing the standard — letting go of the specific version of clean that lives in my head and accepting that a different version is fine. Not worse. Different.

This is, it turns out, much harder than hiring someone.