The Swiffer WetJet's Last Good Day

The Swiffer WetJet arrived in a box that promised everything. Lightweight. No bucket. No wringing. Just snap on a pad, spray, and glide. BW read the back like it was scripture. I watched her set it up in the kitchen with the kind of hope people usually reserve for lottery tickets.

It worked. For exactly four days, it was the best thing in the house. The kitchen tiles went from gritty to shining. The child stopped leaving footprints that looked like a crime scene. I told BW it was worth every penny. (It wasn't that much money. But I was trying.)

Day five, the Swiffer made a sound. Not a mechanical sound. A wet sound. Like something inside had given up on structural integrity and decided to become liquid instead. BW sprayed the solution bottle. The Swiffer wheezed. Actual wheeze. The spray nozzle had broken somewhere between kitchen and hallway, and now the solution was leaking into the handle where no solution should ever go.

I told BW we could fix it. We could not fix it.

The Swiffer sat in the corner of the mudroom for two weeks. Not broken enough to throw away. Not functional enough to use. In that liminal space where most of my possessions live. I moved it once. Then again. Then I just stopped moving it and accepted it as a permanent feature of my life.

The child found it last Tuesday. She had a Sharpie. (She always has a Sharpie. I don't know where they come from. They multiply like the Tupperware.) By the time BW caught her, the Swiffer's handle had been renamed SWIFTY MCJETSTERSON in permanent black marker, and someone had drawn what might have been a face on the spray trigger. Or maybe just chaos. With the child, it's hard to tell.

BW was not upset. She was the other thing—the one where you're too tired to be upset, and the tiredness comes out as a low sound in your throat that means you've accepted that this is your life now, and this Swiffer is part of it.

It's still in the mudroom. Sometimes I think about taking it apart and trying to salvage the parts. I have not done this. The Swiffer WetJet sits there in its marked-up glory, next to the snow boots from last winter and the Amazon box from something I ordered and forgot about. It was supposed to make things easier. It actually made them simpler—just harder to admit.

BW doesn't use it anymore. She went back to the regular mop. No bucket either, it turns out. She just uses the sink.

If you liked this story about the Swiffer WetJet, you can buy your own on Amazon. Remember, we're BFF if you do.