The Cinderella Contract

As a salaried employee when teaching, I was expected to sign a contract every year.  The contract delineated my pay for my responsibilities, both in class and extra-curricularly.  Somewhere, in fine print near the bottom, there would be a statement that said something like, "And any other responsibilities that are deemed necessary by the administration".  I called that the Cinderella Contract line.  Do this; do that; oh...and even though it isn't in your job description, if we need you to do blah-blah, you do it.  (You can grieve it later, but good luck with that.)

It has been somewhat of a family joke that, when I visit my family, I become Cinderella, doing the jobs that no one else likes to do.  Truly, I am never asked to do them.  I just do.  I do them to be helpful...to earn my keep while there...because sometimes I think I do them better than anyone else...or just to do something I can do while someone else does something that I can't.  Laundry, cooking, dishes and kitchen clean-up, shopping, mending, etc.  It's all part of the Cinderella thing.

Once in awhile, I feel abused.  Everyone gets up from the dinner table and leaves the dishes as they are.  Meg puts the food away, but the dishes sit there until Grandma feels like doing them.  That's generally okay with me.  The children are trained to take their plates to the sink, but I prefer to scrape them and stack them (takes up less space).  I guess it's all about organization...but when we get to the "let Grandma do it" stage, I balk.  Thankfully, that doesn't happen very often.

Same thing with laundry.  If I mention that I'm ready to do laundry, full baskets appear.  I make it easy on myself, knowing that certain things (like towels and bed linen) take up a lot of basket space, so I do them first.  Then I sort in order to make the hanging/folding easier on me.  In the end, the kids get better service than if they had taken everything to a professional laundry.  (I'm also a pro at stain removal and mending tears, etc.)  All of it is drone work, but it gives me a purpose other than just taking up space.  I like that.  I think my hosts do, too!

While I'm tooting my own horn here, I should probably mention that Megan (my daughter) spent the better part of an entire day working on paperwork for me--from cash distributions of retirement accounts to applying for my brother's missing DD214 (military service discharge papers) needed to order him a grave marker.  What she did that day--on the phone and online--more than made up for a few cooked meals and a few loads of laundry on my part.  Some of it, I had been struggling with for years, and some of it I had just given up on as something that gave me anxiety.  Thank you, Meg!

Cinderella eventually won the fair prince.  That ain't gonna happen to me, but at least I know that there are rewards for cleaning and cooking and sweeping the cinders off the hearth.  :)