And today I did not work at one of them.

I paid for my teenage fashion habit (and some of my family’s living expenses) by cleaning timeshares on the weekends and during the summer. Eventually I worked up to cleaning private houses. While my friends spent their days at the beach, I scrubbed toilets. But I had way better shoes than they all did.

When the Kid was still in preschool, I worked as an admin 40 or 50 hours during the week and went back to cleaning houses on the weekend. I have no idea how I got through those years without breaking. I never had time for anything fun that didn’t involve being covered in child detritus and unknown sticky food substances.

For a while, I cleaned my brother’s house every week. That was actually all right.Of course he didn’t know that it took me less time than he thought it did to clean his house,especially when i was cleaning it weekly. But I also did all his laundry for him while I was there, so I didn’t feel too bad about it. I made 75 bucks for 3 hours of work. Not bad.

But today I promised to help out a friend cleaning one of the houses he rents out. I was just to clean the stove and the bathroom fan. It was supposed to be an easy hours worth of work for $20. The bathroom fan took 15 minutes and a screwdriver to clean all the gook off of it. Not a big deal. But my hands still ache from the hours I spent on the stove. I was there for 3 hours. I still only made 20 bucks, I told him that’s what the job would cost and I stuck to it. That is less than minimum wage in WA state. I don’t think the thing had been cleaned since it’s original installation many many years ago.

I am lucky. Cleaning houses is something I do as an extra. It is not my only job skill. So normally I can negotiate my rate and walk away if the pay is too little or the job is too hard. I am also a citizen. So I don’t have the fear of deportation should I complain. Struggling home exhausted on the bus today after working and I thought about all those women who do the same thing I did today everyday. Coming home so tired i can barely see straight, I think about those women with little kids who will have to come home and cook dinner and give baths and read stories still. I, thankfully, have a child old enough that i can ask him to throw something into the oven and who longer needs (or wants) a mom to make sure he washed behind his ears or tuck him in.

Once. long ago when the Kid was still tiny and I worked all those hours both during the week and on the weekend, back when AOL was the online community of non-geeky types, I got into a discussion with someone who condescendingly told me to stuff it about the class warfare stuff. They told me the trick was to work smarter, not harder. Today I’d like to kick that dude in the nutsack. Work this hard should be paid like construction work or any other job where you spend your time breaking your body with hard labor and toxic chemicals. The fact that mostly women do it (and do it for free in their own homes) is why the pays sucks. Though we would never expect a dude who can fix his own plumbing to be content with minimum wage or less.