I Hired a Housekeeper to Save My Sanity and Have No Regrets
Whether we’re stay-at-home moms, or working moms, or even work-at-home moms, most would probably agree that juggling parenting with our other responsibilities is hard.
There are laundry piles to tackle. Sticky dishes piled in the sink calling our names. Meals to cook that our kids won’t eat. We have school for our kids and extracurricular kid activities to cart them to, and our own work and activity schedules to consider.
Somewhere between scrubbing peanut butter off plates and dance class, our houses need to get clean. God knows, getting houses clean where toys, and goo, and who knows what else is continuously being spewed from small moving beings is no small feat. As fast as you can pick up a room, it’s messy again. And that’s just picking things up-forget actually scrubbing with cleaning utensils. Sometimes it feels like we’re cleaning more than we’re spending time with our kids.
Merely thinking about cleaning house is stressful enough as a mom. We have so much going on, but keeping a clean house is good for our kids and our sanity. There’s something about falling into clean sheets at the end of the day and taking a morning pee in a sparkling clean toilet that makes it all feel sort of manageable.
It’s nice when we can serve our kids breakfast in a clean kitchen, with minimal pancake batter on the stove top. Clean just feels good.
That’s why I splurge on hiring a housekeeper, and this small indulgence has saved my sanity.
When I say I hire a housekeeper, I’m not talking about someone coming every couple of weeks or even once a month. I call a housekeeper when the stickiness on the floors starts to feel overwhelming, and the bathrooms need a cleaning deeper than some sanitizing wipes and a quick scrub with a toilet brush. This usually works out to hiring a housekeeper every few months. I’d love to have someone clean my house every couple of weeks, but we just don’t have the money for that.
I realize that shelling out the $100-$200 or so for a housecleaning, depending on where you live, is cost-prohibitive for many.
And even with two working adults in my household, the expense of professional housecleaning is a stretch. But I’m willing to pinch pennies a bit in other places to be able to afford it.
It’s Totally Worth Every Penny
My love affair with other people cleaning my house started when I hired a professional cleaning service to do a move out cleaning as we left a rental house several years ago. The sheer level of grossness left behind when we hauled our furniture out of the house prompted me to call a housecleaning service instead of tackling it with my husband like I had in the past. We had a 2-year-old when we moved out of the rental house, and the amount of Cheerio dust on the floor, and the mysterious stains on the carpet were well above my level of cleaning expertise.
We paid a cleaning service a couple hundred bucks, and It. Was. So. Worth. It. Once our stuff was out of the house, we were able to move into our new home without going back and worth with cleaning products a half dozen times to finish the job with a toddler in tow. I’d seen the light, and I was never shutting that sucker off.
Now, with that then-toddler almost seven, and his four-year-old sister, I look forward to calling the housecleaners every few months with no special occasion. Unless you count as a special occasion the preservation of my sanity, and the rush of well-being I get when I only need to keep my kids busy upstairs while the downstairs is cleaned and vice versa.
The housekeepers scrub the floors. They get in the crevices around the toilet and wipe up all the pee that comes from living with little boys and men. They sweep the baseboards, and get the crumbs out from that little space in between the base of the stairs and the baby gate. Could I do these things myself? Sure. Am I going to? Probably not.
So, we eat out fewer times a month. I try and sometimes fail to hit up the discount stores. I realize that we are privileged to be able to afford a housecleaner on occasion. If you ask my husband, he’d say that we can’t afford a housekeeper and the money would be better spent elsewhere. But he’s not scrubbing around the toilets, so I take the liberty of calling the cleaners.
My anxiety level is less just knowing that when my basic wiping down and sweeping becomes insufficient to keeping our house sanitary, I will call the housecleaners.
I work hard. I mom hard. I hire housekeepers, and I’m not sorry.
