Hiring just the right housekeeper can be life-altering for the busy family. Now this may seem to be a little over-the-top, but I am serious. Think about your life-whether single, a couple or a family-you have no time. No time to keep your home as organized or clean as you would like. No time to do the smaller tidying jobs that would make a huge difference.
“I am still learning about my home. If you can’t do it yourself, find good service people and treat them well.” — Terry (mom to our Human Resources Coordinator, Louisa)
Did you grow up with a mother, or someone like her, who walked the narrow aisles of your childhood repeating a sacred chant: Clean your room? Not a question, not a suggestion, more of a command. These matriarchs, practical, harried, often heroic became our earliest instructors in the domestic arts. Not in any official sense, of course. There were no degrees conferred, no ribbons awarded. Just gestures, repeated until they etched themselves onto our bones: the whirl of a laundry machine like a distant ocean, the clink of plates in hot water, the tug and smooth-down of bed corners like folding up the day itself.
So when we turned back to them, our mothers and the women who mothered, seeking advice, we should not have been surprised by what we received. They gave us truths wrapped in simplicity, like soap wrapped in brown paper. Practical, sweet, and persistent.
Most agreed on two or three main objectives: it’s critical to ensure everything has a home. Put things back the same way you took them out, and that your home should be a welcoming, peaceful, and relaxing space to return to, and invite others at the same time.
Hiring just the right housekeeper can be life-altering for the busy family. Now this may seem to be a little over-the-top, but I am serious. Think about your life-whether single, a couple or a family-you have no time. No time to keep your home as organized or clean as you would like. No time to do the smaller tidying jobs that would make a huge difference.
Do you ever casually go about your day, popping into the kitchen for a little peanut butter toast and then the next thing you know you’re turning over the toaster oven because it’s been so long and you just can’t take the crumbs anymore?
At the risk of sounding like a cloyingly optimistic Peppy Patty (which I can assure you, I am not), I never really understood all the pervasive hate for Mondays. I get that easing yourself from the freedom of the weekend into the structure of the workweek is a bit of a shock to the system…
