I am feeling a little robber baron-ish right now. I finally hung up my cape and decided to stop being Super Woman. What that means in practical terms is that I hired a housekeeping service to clean my house. (It's The Cleaning Authority, if anybody is looking, and they're FREAKING FABULOUS). They came today for the first time (right after the landscaping team my daughter calls the Lawn Fairies) and spent 5 and a half hours doing a spring clean of my house.

It's amazing. My house looks like it's brand new. The pugs went to the dog resort this morning since we're heading to Sea World Orlando tomorrow, and I think there isn't a dog hair left in my entire house. It's astonishing. Base boards. Sinks. Floors. Blinds, my friend. Even my BLINDS sparkle.

Wow. It's wonderful beyond all reason, and yet, I feel . . . guilty. Inadequate.

The problem, of course, is that keeping a home clean is all tied up, for me, with notions of what a wife and mother should be able to accomplish, brilliantly; effortlessly; wearing pearls, even. My mother's much-talked-about "floors you could eat off" during my childhood must have made more of an impression than I thought. (Of course, Mom never held down a full-time job until I was 16, so she had more time to clean floors, do laundry, and be a Domestic Goddess. This is, after all, the woman who sniffed the interior of my refrigerator every time she came to visit for the first decade after I moved out of her house.)

I will have more time to write now, more time to plot and plan and create the worlds and characters I see so vividly in my mind, when I'm not worrying about mopping floors or dusting furniture or cleaning bathrooms. That was the goal, and I'm happy to have achieved it. So, tell me: why do I feel so guilty about it?