What a Life!

They have an interesting discussion going on over at MDC in the SAHM forum about having a housekeeper to clean your house – how much they charge, what they do, etc. It seems that some SAHM’s are on top of the housework and some aren’t. Sometimes I wonder if anyone has ever done a study to see if keeping up with the housework after children correlates with keeping up with the housework before children…but I digress.

I had a housekeeper who cleaned my house every week when I was dating Steve. Then she wanted more money (fair enough – she was good) and we had just gotten married and dear Steve didn’t think we needed someone else to clean our house so I lost my housekeeper.

Now that I’m a SAHM, as I devote more and more time to my Mary Kay business, I often wonder if I should hire someone to clean. On one hand, in Mary Kay they teach us to delegate everything that doesn’t have to be done by us. If I was working full time plus doing Mary Kay fifteen hours or more a week, I would certainly either get a housekeeper or make Steve do the cleaning. But that isn’t my situation.

I’m a SAHM. I’m home all day, practically. If cleaning was something I absolutely could not do with Ben around, that would be one thing. But he loves to watch me clean. He is obsessed by it. Granted, it takes me twice as long when he is “helping” because he always stands right where I want to clean and then walks through my dirt a million times. But he loves to watch me clean, and I think that’s good for him.

I mean, I don’t want my children to grow up not knowing how to clean or, much worse, thinking cleaning is something we have other people do for us. Can you imagine what their dorm rooms would be like at college? You don’t need a maid when you’re in college, and I certainly won’t be paying for them to have one. So they need to know how to clean, and they need to know that it is something they can do themselves, not something that they need to find someone else to do.

And in addition to that, cleaning doesn’t take that long. I spend an hour on regular cleaning every week, at most, and then about the same doing extra stuff from cleaning out closets to dusting the ceiling fan blades and vacuuming under the beds. My house is pretty clean, and it’s not consuming a great deal of my time. No one’s complaining that it isn’t clean enough.

Furthermore, cleaning is something I can do that is a “quick win.” The results are always very positive – a clean house is much nicer than a dirty one. It doesn’t take long. It gets me up and moving around. It’s one of those great tasks that you can do, feel really good about yourself, and then have the confidence and energy to move on to more challening tasks that might tend to empty your bucket rather than fill it.

So why would I want to have someone else clean for me? What would I do with the time I would gain? I would have to have at least two hours of work for them to justify them coming all the way out to where we live, and I might have to pay them more than I did when I was in town. If I really got that busy with Mary Kay, I’m sure Steve wouldn’t object to my hiring someone. But cleaning is kind of like exercise – it makes everything else go better too.

And so I wonder if I will ever give it up. Do I love scrubbing toilets? Not really. Do I like having a clean house? Yes. Quite frankly, I think if I were to hire someone to help me, I’d hire them to do stuff at the computer long before I’d hire anyone to clean my house. I get tired of sitting in front of the computer, and I would happily delegate the Mary Kay busy-work to someone else if I could.