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sarah hampson's currency

Do you pay someone to clean your dirty bathtub?

Some people can't bring themselves to employ a cleaning lady. "It would make me feel that I am employing my mother," a friend of mine once said with a cringe and a shudder.

Even if you do employ one, you practically clean the house, and especially the bathroom, before she comes, don't you?

Embarrassment over letting others see how you live partly explains the habit, sure. But let's be honest. That she is called a "cleaning lady" suggests an overcompensation for the discomfort in paying someone to do a job many consider demeaning. By ennobling her, we demonstrate respect, and thus, cleverly polish up the whole messy transaction. You wouldn't call her your maid now, would you?

How we feel about paying others to do certain tasks - if we can bring ourselves to ask - and how we ourselves feel about accepting compensation to do some things are reminders that money is not just paper and coins. In different circumstances, it can connote respect, absolution, laziness, lack of responsibility, insult, incentive, reward and punishment, and that's just a partial list. It's a wonder the stuff fits in a wallet, it's so thick with meaning.

In one of his lifestyle experiments, A.J. Jacobs, the best-selling author of The Year of Living Biblically , paid a team of outsourcers to handle various aspects of his busy life. Not surprisingly, he experienced a range of emotion.

Paying someone to handle disagreements with his wife and worry for him (a book contract was taking a long time to resolve and his outsourcer simply e-mailed him to say, "don't worry. I will") was not a problem.

But, he admits in a phone interview, "I absolutely felt guilty about paying someone to read bedtime stories to my children." He was experiencing what many working parents do, especially mothers: the feeling that if you were a truly good parent, you would not be paying someone to raise your child. You both made the baby, and you're asking someone else to take care of the consequences. And that, in turn, is why parents often feel that if they pay a lot of money for childcare, they can allay the guilt and worry over not doing it themselves. (Not true, of course. But good try.)

James Gottfurcht, Los-Angeles-based psychologist, coach and president of Psychology of Money Consultants, has seen many examples of the fraught relationship between task and money. One of his clients described how she felt unable to ask her housekeeper to sweep the leaves from the front of the house after the gardener had neglected to do it.

"To ask her to sweep outside even though she sweeps inside was considered too demeaning," he observes. "In my experience, it comes from what we learn in childhood. Maybe there was negative meaning attached to certain tasks, and class issues," he explains. "Some tasks are considered lowly. Or perhaps they saw that gardeners or janitors were not treated respectfully," so they don't want to ask others to do their jobs.

Of course, if someone does ask another person to do a job she considers lowly, she is making a comment about that person's socio-economic status and level of need, even desperation, for money.

The homeowner who ended up sweeping up the leaves on the porch herself was suffering from a problem of "under-entitlement," according to Dr. Gottfurcht. She is the employer but nevertheless, she did their job for them because she didn't value her own worth, he said.

That may be true, but when he told me that story, I thought, well, she's doing what all employers sometimes do. They end up taking on the grunge work not because they don't value themselves, but because they do. They are secure enough to know that cleaning up a mess in the kitchen or in the bathroom does not define them. They are paid enough to rise above the few occasions in which they have to work beneath their title. Besides, it's easier to do it yourself than risk suffering the huffs and sighs and rolling eyes of an employee who thinks only in terms of the parameters of her job.

But if certain jobs can be too demeaning to do for money - the ol' attitude of you can't pay me to do that job! - sometimes the offer to pay someone for a task can demean not only the value of the effort but the person. Volunteers donate their time for a reason.

"If you do something gratis, you feel better as a person. You feel more connected," explains Dr. Gottfurcht. "Generosity is a very empowering experience, and so when you receive money for something you wanted to do without pay, money can taint it. It can feel like an insult."

And when something is done for another out of affection, the offer of money to the person who made the effort is a form of rejection. Imagine a woman telling a man who is interested in her romantically that she insists on paying him for the time he took to repair her fence, say, or bring her the firewood she once happened to mention that she needed. It's a clear message of expectation - in this case, don't have romantic ones, buddy. And imagine if your adult child left money for you after you had helped him with a project for work or school. Money as slap in the face. Denying someone the chance to perform a task out of love is a form of unspoken punishment.

My use of money as language is as complicated as everybody else's. I have paid my children, when they were young, a dollar or two to do certain things - go fetch some milk from the corner store down the street, for example. It was a way to let them know how useful and grown-up they were. But if one asked to be paid to walk the dog or clean his room? Forget it. That's a responsibility, and much of what we have to do in life doesn't come with financial compensation. Not paying them was a lesson.

As for my cleaning lady, well, I happily pay her to clean my already-scrubbed bathtub. And I praise her for the good job she does in my house, too. I want to make sure she doesn't drop me as a client. I have to earn her loyalty, you see.

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