chapter 36
outsourcing care tasks is morally neutral
if you can afford a housekeeper, even once a month, and you do not have one, you must ask yourself why. Do you think you deserve one?
Why not? Housekeepers are not moral and therefore are not something to be deserved. If you are in a season of life when there are simply more care tasks to be done than time or energy available to you and you have the means to afford help, it is the most functional thing to do. Does embarrassment stop you? “I could never let a housekeeper see the state of my home” is about as logical as “I could never let a doctor see the state of my health.” And so what if the housekeeper judges you? It is not their mental health you are responsible for but your own. One route that I might suggest is to skip the cleaning services and instead find an individual through a website like care.com or a local Facebook group. When you work with an individual, you have more control over what you would like to have done and how much time you want them to spend doing it.
For the first several months of my youngest daughter’s life, I was completely underwater with quarantine and postpartum depression.
When she turned eight months old, I made the decision to get some help. I hired a grad student to come clean a couple hours a week for an hourly wage for about two months. I told her frankly that she may walk in some days to everything being a disaster. I said what I needed might change from week to week. I told her she may not even finish some weeks but that making a dent in the mess would go a long way. When she arrived, I had her fold the mass of clean laundry on the floor that had piled up during the week (this was before my no-folding system), then clean either the upstairs or the
downstairs depending on what I felt I needed or wanted that week. It was the best experience with a cleaning “service” I ever had. In the past when I had a cleaning service, I would feel stressed out at having to pre-clean and pick up before they got there. Knowing I didn’t have to do that took so much stress away. Because I knew she would be there for a set amount of time, every week I found myself taking the time to pick up and doing a little cleaning so I could get the most out of her help. Interestingly enough, the subtle shift from obligation to option created motivation for me.
If you cannot afford to pay for help with care tasks, consider asking family or friends. Sometimes just having someone to keep you company while you complete tasks is helpful. If you have a friend who struggles with certain care tasks, you can form a little co- op where you go to your house one week and help each other clean or do laundry and then do the other person’s house the next week.
Sometimes we come from a cultural-familial background that says only pretentious people hire help for those sorts of things. The truth is that it’s no more pretentious to pay someone to clean your home than it is to pay someone to change the oil in your car. If it’s something that would make your functioning easier and you can afford it, that’s the only criterion. Whether it’s hiring a cleaning service, meal delivery, curbside groceries, or using a wash and fold, as long as you treat people with respect and pay them what they are worth, it’s all morally neutral.
Remember, feeling ashamed to pay for help is often directly related to the idea that care tasks are moral obligations central to your worthiness as a human. Paid domestic help is not a prescription. You don’t have to meet a diagnostic criterion to deserve to hire someone to help you with domestic tasks any more than you have to meet a criterion to not have to churn your own butter or knit your own sweaters.
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