It could be worse, she could have cleaned with the toilet water.

If the cleanliness of my house reflects the stability of my life at any given point, then this pandemic has, without a doubt, made me feel less stable!  Shouldn’t my house be cleaner because I have more time?  And yet, somehow, I cannot motivate myself to scrub anything. Instead, I tiptoe around nursing my fragile emotional stability.

I've been attributing my cleaning incompetence to the differences in cleaning products and the hard water.  But I felt horrible when I was whining about not wanting to clean when so many people were out of work, so I did something that I thought would help me and them. I hired a cleaning service. I booked a 3-hour time slot. I am not proud to admit it, but I stopped cleaning as soon as I booked the cleaning date. I just ignored the filth, telling myself that there was no point in cleaning it days before I was paying a cleaner to clean.

I made a list of my priorities and then asked the cleaning person to just go down the list until the clock ran out. The first things on the list were the floors and the bathrooms. I put all the cleaning supplies out with my list, then went out for a walk so I would not be underfoot.  When I returned, the cleaning person was bopping from one room to the next and the house was still dirty.  I didn't say anything, because clearly she was not finished.  Then she asked me to give her a 5 star review and she left.  My mouth hung open.  The house was almost as filthy as it had been when I left. 
She didn’t even clean the toilets!#$&*!  What cleaner does not clean toilets?  She did rearrange my face cream and shampoo bottles?!*#$?  The bathroom mirrors were streaked beyond belief. I wandered around the house thinking that this had to be a joke.   

The kitchen floor had not been touched, and it was covered with crumbs. There's no way she couldn’t have noticed. In the other rooms you could see where her mop had gone because she hadn't cleaned under anything, only around things.  I thought this is what it might have looked like if I had paid two 10-year-olds to clean the house.   My usual after cleaner leaves jubilant mood was nowhere to be found.  My joyful anticipation of smelling lemon scent and slipping on a well mopped floor turned into bewilderment, which turned into resentment. I went around taking photos of how bad it was, and then felt too embarrassed to even include them in this post or complain to the service.  My house was still an absolute disaster and I knew I would have to suck it up and clean it.  And so I did.