The Right To Relax

My property management business overlapped with my slowly winding-down cleaning business. I was taking fewer and fewer cleaning jobs. When employees left for other pursuits, I didn't replace them, knowing I didn't want a future on that path.

By that time, I'd listened to so much NPR, the intellectual part of me was begging to get used. The constant hum of thoughts churning inside my mind was almost distracting.

I cleaned my last unit. I didn't know it was my last, I just had that insistent feeling during the many hours I spent there that it might have been. My lunch with a friend cinched it.

This friend and I had met in Real Estate school years ago. We'd had big plans for making the bucks, back in the day. In a beyond-strange twist of fate, both of us wound up divorced single moms, cleaning for money instead. We both eventually laughed and many times nearly cried about that fact, jokingly coming up with useful cleaning tips like, "If you do have to cry, do it over the commode...the salt in your tears acts a natural and effective cleaning agent." On this day, we'd both been discussing doing something (almost anything) other than scrubbing to earn a paycheck. My friend suddenly leaned over the cafe table and looked directly into my eyes.

"Raise your right hand and repeat after me," she firmly told me. Then she said, "NO BLEACH."

I laughed and agreed, mostly because I rarely used bleach in my cleaning solution, but I got her point. It was time for both of us to move on.

After that last unit, whenever a property manager called, I'd tell them that I was sorry, I couldn't help them that time. And the time after that, and the time after that. Putting into words that I was closing my business was still not something I found easy to do, and I never did. Eventually everyone stopped calling, which seemed right to me. (Yet admittedly not fair to 'them'). A gradual and natural death. My brain found it hard to believe that after more than two years of wearing myself out to get the cleaning business going, after the marketing and the advertising and the building up of reputation as a competent cleaning service...that I'd just let it go. My heart, however, was joyous.

Since property management is a sporadic thing (the renters need something when you least expect it, and usually when it's the least convenient time, like midnight), I found that many of my days were oddly wide-open. I didn't feel comfortable puttering around the house while my self-employed husband worked eight-plus hours in his home office down the hall. I still had it in my head that I needed to be 'worth my keep.' A carryover, I'm sure, from my bio-father, who regularly used to say to us, if he happened upon us lounging, "Why don't you go make yourself useful?"

Tired as I was from two-plus years of the intense housecleaning of some of the filthiest properties on God's green earth, I didn't feel I had the right to slow down, nor did I give myself permission to do so.

I started to desperately clean and organize my own home, hoping that my thoroughness and organization would get me accolades from all who dwelt within. They noticed, and probably appreciated it, but no one went wild with the praise. No one ever said, "You clean baseboards better than anyone I've ever known."

So I canned salsa and peaches and dried fruit and cooked fantastic meals. Again, appreciated but not ultimately fulfilling. Many times when I'd need validation, I go out to the shelves in the garage and just stare at the rows of jarred tomatoes, pears, and pickles.

I shifted to outdoors and cared for the lawn, planting flowers and rearranging landscaping. I became the one to depend on, running household errands or doing the banking for my husband, since he was busy and hard at work. Were I to have stopped whatever I was doing to have remained stationary long enough to write for hours on end, the guilt would have no doubt consumed me.