A Godsend

I am going to my brother’s house today for a barbecue. And I can go with peace of mind because of Blanca. Blanca is my cleaning woman. While I am at my brother’s house, Blanca will come in and feed my dogs, let them out, clean up their poop, give Jasper his pills, and love them like her own. She probably will go downstairs and fold a few clothes and empty the dishwasher before she leaves as well. Blanca has been in my employ for 15 years, but she is much more than my cleaning woman, she is a God-send and a gadfly.

To be perfectly honest, Blanca is not a very good house cleaner. She dusts around things, she doesn’t move things when she vacuums, and she always forgets to remove the nose schmutz the dogs leave on my glass door. Blanca’s value lies in all the other things she does: babysitting when the kids were younger and picking them up and driving them places, helping me move stuff out my grandmother and mother-in-law’s apartment, yelling at the Spanish workers in Spanish for me when they weren’t doing their job, fixing my vacuum cleaner, and the sweetest thing of all: visiting me at home every day after my surgery and doing a few things around the house just because she knew I couldn’t, and expecting nothing for it.

Blanca is wise and always feels free—sometimes too free-- to give her opinion: for example she would tell Briana to break up with her boyfriend so she could date a lot of boys. She would tell Samantha how lucky she is to have such a good job and she would tell Kara not to worry so much. Blanca lectures my mother about listening to me and yells at my husband for leaving a trail of shoes all over the house.

This past March I signed up at Hofstra for a 4 week class on excel. The first week went fine and I was actually pleased at how well I had kept up in the class. On week 2, I woke up to find it “raining” in my piano room and so I had to miss class to wait for the plumber--and I was annoyed. I hated missing class. On the Friday before my excel class on week 3, I got a phone call from Sam from the office. She was mentally fried—exhausted--overwrought from work. She had been working many long hours for many weeks. She needed to escape Manhattan. She needed to decompress. She wanted to come home. She announced that she would be on the 9 am train from Penn and planned on spending all of Saturday at home in Garden City with me. She spoke so quickly that I never got the opportunity to tell her that I had Excel class #3 on Saturday, and that if I missed it, I would never catch up.

Blanca was standing there when I hung up the phone with Sam. I told her my excel class/Sam coming home dilemma. She listened intently and simply said (in her El Salvadorian accent): You had your time. It’s not your time anymore. It is your daughter’s time. When they want to come home you never say no. And she walked away. Fine. I thought.

The thing is I knew she was right. And I knew it all along. I just needed her unfiltered view to lead me to the right conclusion. Clearly being home for my daughter was more important than clicking away at a computer—even though I really wanted to click away at the computer.

Socrates believed that everything that needs to be known is already known to you—nothing is learned, only recalled from the inner mind. Like a gadfly wakes a sleeping cow, we all need someone to wake us up sometimes. That’s where Blanca’s true value lies-it’s not so much as our house cleaner-the dust bunnies can attest to that---Blanca real job is to remind us what we already know to be true. Kind of like at the end of the Wizard of Oz when Dorothy realizes she had the power within herself to go home all along.  All she had to do was click her heels. And that’s what I do—I click my heels and ask Blanca for insight.