In this post, we will examine the fifth assumption we made about housework, namely that if we could afford to hire a housekeeping service that would take care of all the housework.
I would love to tell you that there is a pretty straightforward way for you to get what you want, and that your troubles could be solved if you could just hire other people to do what you and your spouse don’t want to do…but I can’t. There are things a housekeeping service can do for you that may help. A housekeeper can vacuum, dust, clean the bathroom, wash the dishes, and do the laundry. (S)he can even polish the silver, polish the wood furniture, and wash the windows. But if your house is in distress and there is stuff all over the floor and couches with no obvious “home”, the hired housekeeper will not be able to help you there. You may benefit from hiring a professional organizer. However, unless you are willing to let someone else decide what you need to get rid of and what you need to keep, you will be part of the decluttering and organizing process.
Hiring a housekeeper may help, but that is just the tip of the iceberg. There are a lot of moving parts to running a house. It really is very much like running a hotel. If you hired people to take care of everything related to the house, you would have to hire a cook, gardener, maintenance and repair department, housekeeper, nanny, chauffeur, interior designer, accountant, financial advisor, and professional organizer. Oh, and I forgot to mention a manager to be in charge of overseeing all these tasks. Even the smallest, simplest household requires quite a bit to keep it running.
At some point, we (as a society) decided that there really isn’t that much to running a house. You could do it after coming home from work armed with a dishwasher, washer and dryer and a few Swiffer dust cloths. We decided that everyone was tired of housework so we made it kind of “optional”. Reminds me of President Bush neglecting to put the cost of financing a pesky war into the budget. If we don’t write it down, we don’t have to deal with it. But of course, we do.
Possibly you and your spouse fight about housework because you think it shouldn’t be this hard and take this much time, etc. etc. I hope I have disabused you of that notion. In the following posts, we will explore practical ways of taking care of your house and your marriage. Don’t worry…even if you don’t know the first thing about how to begin, I’ll be with you to help. You’ve learned most of what you know now, and I have faith that you can learn this too.