My Blog

All of my life growing up, we had a maid for house cleaning. I know that conjures up images of rich folks with staff limousine drivers and summers in the Hamptons. That was certainly not us though. Our 4/2 ranch was modest and large. With 3 kids though, and 2 working parents, it was hard to keep up with. When we were young, my parents realized that their time was more valuable. Their time could either be spent barely keeping up, cleaning on the weekends, being embarrassed when company stopped by unannounced—or use a house cleaning service and spend more time being a family. The family story is that my father gave this as a gift to my hardworking mother for Mother’s Day, because she was too proud to allow him to hire help (“Don’t be ridiculous, I can handle keeping this house clean and working 35 hours a week, my friends would never let me live it down to have a maid, we’re not RICH, Frank!”) When it became a gift for 3 months, she got used to it and realized that there were still plenty of house cleaning chores for us all to do.

Now once the family got used to employing a weekly cleaning service, we did tend to get a little lazy. We’d leave small chores end of the week because Gladys came on Fridays. (Gladys owned her own house cleaning business, but as she grew, she always did our work personally, and still sends me birthday cards) This meant Thursdays were pretty grody at our house. And the value of chores/allowance was skipped over at first. So as we got older, we were assigned chores on our own: some of which we could have used the maid service for, such as an extra vacuum during the week. But most were standard household chores that a maid did not typically do: folding laundry, cleaning windows, mowing the lawn (though my mother eventually treated my father to lawn service too) We were not spoiled. And we were not rich. And we still did not always have a clean house. But we learned a valuable lesson about time management. The truth is, it is a practical sound way to spend your money, and although I am on a tight budget now, I know that once I get my degree, my time will be more valuable. This concept runs deep: if I can spend those 4 hours a week doing something to make more money, or refreshing so that I am sharp when I need to be, then it is worth every penny.