I’m not rich. But reallocating £40 from a takeout for two, into a deep house clean has been transformative for my mental health. It’s even improved my marriage.
I’ve swapped my Friday night takeaway for a full house clean. A cleaner isn’t necessarily in the budget, but we’ve made room for it by sacrificing the £40 we would normally spend on takeaway food. And I don’t miss it.
For £40 I get a two-hour clean, and a weight off my shoulders. I get an evening with my husband, and our family can spend the weekend together. By booking the clean for a Friday, I still get that “treat” feeling.
It’s something to look forward to. Only without the MSG hangover in the morning, and the immediate regret and shame which follows. So instead of sitting on the sofa with our go to order – we sit in an immaculate and deeply cleaned home.
We aren’t stressed. We aren’t pretending to be relaxed. We aren’t cursing the floor as we hobble over rogue lego pieces hidden in the shag rug (total passion killer).
We’re not mentally tallying up who will do what on the weekend, or how many hours it will take, while also trying to keep the romance alive. Getting a cleaner is an act of self care, but one I used to feel a little shameful about. Having a cleaner is a luxury service.
So is paying for someone to prepare your food. I feel slightly guilty about one and not the other. Why? I guess because people will say you’re lazy if you have a cleaner.
We’ve had it all drilled into us. Sloth is a deadly sin, or “cleanliness is next to godliness” – which basically means you have a moral duty to keep your home clean. There’s a sense of inadequacy if you can’t manage it.
These beliefs are ones we’re raised on culturally, and filter into our patriarchal, capitalist society, where we wear the term “burnout” as a badge of honour. Our value, our worth, derives from how much we do. So it’s easy to understand why we feel so bad about not being able to keep our home as organised as it was, before we had a toddler in it.
In our twenties in a one bed flat, cleaning wasn’t even a discussion that needed to be had. We just cleaned up after ourselves, and we owned half the things we do now. There was so much less stuff.
There was less cooking, which means less washing up after. Everything just seemed to work out on its own. It was a different life.
Becoming parents was a shock to the system. We don’t even remember what we used to do with all the time we had on our hands. Now, there’s always work to be done.
On top of paid work, there’s childcare, extra cooking, endless washing and drying, and ironing for three people, and toys to put away. The kitchen worktops have to be cleaned daily, and the handles, because I’m terrified we’re all going to get sick if I don’t do it. We never seemed to get sick before.
And it’s not health anxiety, it’s just the reality of being a parent to a small child who brings home a new virus every week. You do not know fear until you’ve experienced diarrhoea rip through a family of three with two toilets. At some point this year, I gave up trying to do it all and hired a cleaner.
Alex said the constant clutter was affecting his mental health , but he didn’t have the time or energy to tackle it. Neither did I. The only thing to do was pay someone else to take it off our plate.
And it didn’t just remove the burden of cleaning. It lessened the mental load, and the idea that I had to do it all. That I had to be perfect.
That I needed to be a cook, cleaner, wife, mother, maid, nurse, teacher, and writer, somewhere in between. While it wasn’t something I could easily afford, I couldn’t afford to be chronically stressed and on the brink of burnout either. Anna Mathur, psychotherapist and author of The Uncomfortable Truth , says she’s given up her “supermum era” too.
“I have a cleaner, because we can not do it all. We pay somewhere. We either pay the cost of doing it all, we pay with our mental health.
Or we pay financially. But we have to pay somehow”. Read Next We tried the 5:1 relationship trick - it helped us reconnect “I don’t think we get enough support as women, we don’t get a lot of help, and we fear judgement if we do get it.
A lot of people have help, but aren’t honest about it. I think there should be some kind of amnesty of honesty about the amount of support that we do have”. She’s right.
The amount of trad wives on my TikTok feed making videos of themselves cleaning make me feel awful – even though I know it’s not real. They have childcare help to be able to make them. It’s not their everyday, it’s just content.
I spoke to four friends about the issue and they all have cleaners. I had no idea. But it makes sense now – they all seem so much more together than I am.
It’s because they have cleaners. As of 2023, 17 per cent of UK households pay someone to help with their home cleaning, a 70 per cent increase on the number of households doing so in 2018. I can see why.
The way we live today, with two of us working from home, we’re creating an extra two wash cycles – with breakfasts, lunches, coffee mugs, cups, and snacks to tidy. In 2018 we went to work from 9-5pm so there was no one at home messing the place up. We’d be up and out and that was it until dinner time, if we chose to eat in.
My advice to any mothers who are struggling to keep on top of it, is pay for the help. Don’t put yourself in the red, but if there’s something you can financially sacrifice to make it affordable, you will not regret it..
