This year for my 45th birthday, I received a most unexpected surprise.
Usually after having a certain number of children, most women find themselves with a sense of completion for their family. They say, “I am done.”
For us, there has always been someone missing—a void in our family of five that we’ve always yearned to be filled.
And that someone’s name is Svedka.
Svedka is a Swedish cook and housekeeper that we’ve been fantasizing about since 2006. She’s supposed to live in our finished basement, with its private entrance and full accommodations, and in return, she’d serve delicious home-cooked meals and complete all of our household tasks so that we could finally enjoy life to its fullest.
Doug is the one who named her. I can imagine that he had his own separate fantasy about what Svedka would look like, but I never bothered to ask.
Every time he’s stuck in the kitchen cooking dinner, he pines, “Where’s Svedka?”
When he’s up to his elbows in a sink full of dishes, he stares longingly out the window, and I know who’s starring in his daydream.
When I came home from work at 8:15 p.m. on my birthday, after a long night of parent-teacher conferences, I discovered that Svedka had finally arrived.
“She’s here! She’s here!” The children danced around me.
“Did you miss me, my babies?” I beamed.
But they weren’t talking about me. They were talking about our new robot vacuum cleaner.
She came chugging around the corner, charged directly at me, and stopped short at my feet. She sniffed around my ankles, made an about-face, and headed back for the living room.
“What’s that?” I asked.
“It’s your birthday present!” Doug announced with pride. “It’s Svedka!”
My husband bought me a vacuum cleaner for my birthday. It doesn’t get much more Donna Reedable than that.
But the more I thought about it, it was a nice gesture. Each week, fifty-two times a year for two hours at a shot, he hears me complain about my Number One dreaded task in our house. I hate vacuuming cleaning. With three cats and a dog, you can imagine the hair that settles between the cracks of each plank in our wooden floors, which extend throughout the house. Being the obsessive personality that I can be, I vacuum each square foot of the house plank by plank, hunched over so that I can hover inches over the job and get the satisfaction of seeing every particle get sucked up into vacuum Neverland. It is back-breaking, thankless work.
Often times, gift-givers have selfish ulterior motives, and this might have been one of those times. Maybe Doug just got tired of hearing me complain. Whatever the case, Svedka could potentially add 104 hours to my year and save me from my fate as becoming the next Quasimodo. I decided to give her a chance.
The next day, I came home to discover her back at it again. All the chairs in the house were on top of the tables, all cords removed from the floor. Svedka was happily toiling along without complaint, gobbling the dirt, hair, beads, and tiny Styrofoam balls that Eva has been using to add texture to her slime, from her path. All three cats and dogs eyed her curiously, one of them gaining the courage to paw her as she dutifully strode on by.
Eventually, her motor stopped, and she poked around as though trying to reorient herself, found her way back to her charger, backed in like a car reversing into a garage, and fell asleep.
“Look at the way she just does her job, then goes back into her corner without a word,” Doug marveled.
I didn’t think he was funny. Maybe it was because I now have more time on my hands to overanalyze. Maybe I should have been counting my blessings. But something wasn’t settling right between me and Svedka. I felt like I was being replaced. Point blank, in every sense of the word, Svedka sucked.
“She missed a spot,” I pointed out. “In fact, she missed the entire kitchen.” There were bits of cardboard under the table from the cats’ scratching boards. There were tumbleweeds of fur under the heaters.
“She needs her rest,” Doug fussed, checking her position in the charger like a mother checks her baby’s breathing in a crib. “After an hour, she needs to recharge. Then she’ll finish the kitchen.”
He might as well have set up a table of hot towels and essential oils next to her charger and massaged her feet.
After a brief nap, Svedka yawned and stretched, emerged, and picked up exactly where she left off. When she was finished, there wasn’t a speck of tumbleweed or cardboard to be found.
Doug tenderly scooped the hair, dirt, cardboard bits and particles from her belly and made me look at it.
“Look at all this!” he gushed. “We’ve been breathing this stuff in for fifteen years!”
“You don’t think I’ve vacuumed the house in fifteen years?!?” I gasped so hard I’m sure I inhaled any last particle of dust that Svedka miraculously left behind.
That was on Friday. It is now Sunday morning, the time I’m normally hunched over a vacuum cleaner, peering between those wooden planks. Instead, I have a steaming cup of coffee beside my laptop, and I’m writing stories again. It’s a like my old world has been resurrected from beneath my fingertips.
Svedka is sleeping soundly at my feet. She’s kind of cute when she’s sleeping, I’ll admit. She looks like a little waffle-maker, with “CycloneForce” stamped across her face. Her indicator reads “FULL” at her chin.
Periodically, the kids pop their heads in the doorway one by one. “I’m hungry,” Eva announces. Anna follows her in. “I’m bored.” Tyler says, “Can we finish your birthday cake for breakfast?” They watch me type with impatient expectation.
All the while, Svedka sits quietly, asking for nothing.
When no one is looking, I kneel down beside her and lovingly stroke the shiny, chrome perimeter of her face. “Welcome to our family,” I whisper. “But Bitch, you better watch your step.”
She hums from her charger, ready for her next mission.
I think Svedka and I have an understanding. And we’re going to be just fine.