Fellow mommies, it’s been a long, hard year for all of us—especially me. Timmée and Taylour have been home from school since the whole shut down and absolutely On. My. Ass.
Usually the little darlings don’t bother me at all, but since Sandra, our housekeeper-nanny-therapist, decided she needed to do all she could to “protect her mother” during what are her “last days,” things have been a wreck. As in, I’ve been driven to the bottle. Don’t worry, not in a life-down-the-drain save-me-now strap-me-on-a-gurney-and-ship-me-to-AA way. In a cute way. My kids even came up with a new nickname for me: Margarita Mom. But it doesn’t matter how girlboss my actions have been. Sandra hasn’t been as there for me as she could have been, so she absolutely will not be getting a holiday bonus.
When Sandra is around, she makes for me all these herbal teas infused with spices I didn’t even know my kitchen contained. Sometimes I even invite her to have one with me, which leads us to one of the reasons she will not be getting a bonus. She may work at the house from 7:30 AM to 7:30 PM, but she often wastes at least fifteen minutes of that period sitting at the counter, where I insisted she sit, and drinking a tea, which I insisted she drink.
Over these teas, I chat about some light stuff—the type of yoga I’d done that morning, the food I prefer in my keto bowls, the way my marriage is falling apart because for some reason my husband won’t go down on me and might have feelings for the teenage boy across the street—and whereas last year I found she would advise me, share coping mechanisms, validate my feelings, this year she has started to talk about herself. She disclosed that her mother has terminal cancer, then mentioned something about a potential leave of absence. I mean, did that not totally cross a professional boundary?
Listen, I’ll be the first to recognize that sometimes I give Sandra a hard time, but only because I love her and can’t live without her. That’s why I make sure to shoot her a text when I notice something like a crumb by the breadbox or a skidmark on the hardwood. But a few months ago, when I found fingerprints on the refrigerator handle and sent a picture with the message “Seriously?!?!” she got upset for some reason. Not bonus behavior.
Also not bonus behavior? That time she sat idly by with Timmée and Taylour when my mother visited and wouldn’t stop lecturing about the dangers of muffin tops. Instead of drop-kicking my mother on the spot then yelling “Your daughter is a size ZERO, Miss!” she just went on helping Timmée with math and Taylour with English. Oh, she wasn’t out of line? Well during this homework session she put her hands on Timmée (moved his wrist away from her arm during his innocent pinching phase). My mother was horrified, and you might guess how that went over for me. Wouldn’t have happened if Sandra had been busy drop-kicking.
Many might question why I even hired Sandra in the first place. My issue with that inherently anti-feminist question is that it presumes being a mommy is easy work. My husband has been shut up in his home office with binoculars; I’m a blogger at heart, so I need all the time I can get to write. I could never truly live if I had to clean up messes, do laundry, cook meals, keep the kids from killing themselves, keep the kids from killing each other, or keep the kids from killing me, if I didn’t have Sandra.
If she hadn’t chickened out about the virus so early in the year, this would have been a different blog post. I need her twelve hours a day, even when it’s her birthday or her mother needs a ride to the hospital. She knows that. That’s why it was so fucked up when she actually started her leave of absence on December 25th out of nowhere after her two weeks notice. To make matters worse, her mother died on the 26th and she wants off until the 28th. And so I come to you now, on December 27th, decided on the fact that Sandra, my long time housekeeper-nanny-therapist, does not deserve a bonus.
And with that, mommy-bloggers and mommy-readers, I’ll leave you to decide whether your housekeeper-nanny-therapist deserves shit for the holidays.
Tilly Carnegie-Rockefeller, signing off.