BOUGHT ME SOME TIME (AKA "A CLEANER")

HANDS up if you have a cleaner? Ah, I thought so. Since I started hunting about for a cleaner a few weeks ago I’ve learned many of you al...




HANDS up if you have a cleaner? Ah, I thought so. Since I started hunting about for a cleaner a few weeks ago I’ve learned many of you already have one or have thought about employing one. Here was me wrestling with my guilt and flaying myself for not being able to manage all life throws at us, and now a near-to four-hour daily commute, to boot.

It would seem almost every working woman I’ve asked about a cleaner either has one, has had one, or wants the heads up should I find one. Well I did find a cleaner and thus far it’s been a dream. The bathroom sparkled just the way I like it to sparkle and the floors were vacuumed AND mopped. I didn’t ask for them to be mopped, my cleaner did it to fill in the two hours I’d contracted her for. Bless her. No, really. Bless her.

Don’t get me wrong, I haven’t just come into money ... my new job has come with a small pay rise but it barely covers the cost of my weekly commute. It’s true, I did feel all bourgeois and la-dee-da at the thought of contracting a cleaner but let me tell you, if thinking about taking on a cleaner, there’s an underground network of working women discreetly passing slips of handwritten phone numbers and a name, usually only a first name, to female colleagues and girlfriends. I had no idea. You are not alone.

So, in the time this weekend I haven’t spent scrubbing tiles and vacuuming and mopping, I’ve made dinner for friends, whipped up a meal in advance for through the week, baked, arranged flowers for the living rooms and generally nested. Yes, I could have done those other pesky chores myself, but, oh, not to have them hanging over me on a weekend has been well worth the dosh spent.

Do tell, are you part of the underground network of working women, or men for that matter, who have handed over cash for household chores and a break from domestic duties?

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