Having a maid is both a blessing and a curse, in my opinion. Of course, the blessing is that I don’t have to clean. I love cooking.  Love it. Love it. Love it.  I hate cleaning.  I think it’s mostly because cleaning is such an anti-social activity.  Nobody comes to hang out while you are scrubbing the toilet or digging out the muck in the grouting around the tub.  Washing dishes is by far the most social of the cleaning activities, which I don’t mind at all.  The Mister will sit at the island table in our kitchen and chat me up on the happenings in his life while I scrub away at the dried-on debris. I’m not against being clean, that’s for certain. I’m against being lonely.  For this, I’m more than happy to hand over the responsibilities of cleaning to my maid, feeling generous in creating a job for someone who otherwise may not find employment, and feeling quite pleased to sit in a freshly vacuumed, inviting front room that took no effort on my part.

There are, however, a few downsides to having a maid. I know. It’s shocking.  And much like you, before moving to the desert, I would have rolled my eyes at such a statement while making world’s-smallest-violin motions with my fingers as I mock-whimpered.  Downsides to having a maid?  Get over it, White Girl.  You have it made! (made… with a maid.  har har)  And, yes, the upsides definitely outweigh the downsides.  I admit it.  The downsides, though, don’t just disappear because the upsides are more dominant.

One downside is “everything in its place.”  I’m not sure if anyone else with a maid has this problem but my maid will sometimes make up a place for something that is not the place that I intend it to be.  When I start grumbling about how I can’t find something, I hear my inner mother voice saying, “Well, then you should have put it away yourself.”  I get it, that’s logical.  But it’s not helpful when I’m trying to find my card reader and it’s not in any of the places that I would deem logical.  My biggest source of grumbling is my plastic containers cupboard.  I would say Tupperware, but I don’t actually have that brand in my possession, so plastic containers it is.  I have a very straight forward system, in my opinion.  The smaller container lids are organized by size, largest to smallest, in one of the largest plastic containers.  You can clearly see the container when you open the cupboard, and one would think that the organization theory would be simple to understand.  I suppose it’s not as simple as I would like to think.  Maybe it’s a cultural thing?  I don’t know.  But as I pull down small containers and larger lids that don’t fit into the smaller-lid-organizational-system, I am constantly beaned in the head by a projectile small lid.  I mutter.  I grumble.  I pull down my organized box of lids, and shove the rogue lid back into it’s rightful (and obvious – duh!) place.

The one thing, though, that I can’t do is confront.  I have no idea why it’s so difficult.  If there is one thing that my maid, Blessing (as I like to call her to remind myself that, yes!, she is a blessing), wants is to make me happy.  She will bend over backwards to make sure that everything is to my liking.  Maybe that’s why I have a hard time telling her when I’m not pleased.  She always looks like she’s about to cry.  But is grumbling against her in private any better?  To be even more honest, am I even grumbling in private?  Be careful, for little ears they do hear.

The day that I heard my children grumbling about Blessing behind her back was a kick to the stomach.  A sick feeling of revelation that I was actually teaching my children the wrong way to deal with issues settled into my stomach.  I shouldn’t be stabbing blessings in my life with shards of metal and cut them with my words only to cower in fear and insecurity when I’m faced with a valid request.  Is it wrong of me to expect my plastic lids to be organized in a way that makes it easy for me to find when I’m quickly working in the kitchen?  No.  Is it wrong of me to expect that when I open the cupboard, things won’t fall out to injure me?  No.  Is it wrong of me to hurl insults towards someone’s back and belittle them in my mind because they aren’t living up  to an expectation that I’m too cowardly to make clearly known?

Yes.

Ouch.

So, after being startled by another plastic flying saucer, I hurled insults and muttered harsh words.  Then I turned around and saw Lola’s big blue eyes.  She was taking it all in.  Dang it.  I resolved to make it better.  When Blessing arrived for work, I waited for an appropriate time (rather than my gut instinct to rush at her as soon as she walked through the door), and showed her how I want things organized in the plastics cupboard.  The “confrontation”, if you will, went well.  She was attentive and responsive.  I have found a few lids out of place since, but it is definitely a marked improvement from before.  Then, I took time to sit with Charlie and Lola and explain what took place, the validity of needs/expectations, and the damage that harmful words can do, even when someone can’t hear them.  I know I’ll have to repeat these lessons to them more – it takes 10 nice words to erase one negative, right?  So that would be about 5, 349 more times to go, if I’m estimating correctly.

Maybe having a maid doesn’t have as many downsides as I thought.  And, maybe, she’s helping me to clean out more than my cupboards.