HOW DO YOU DO LAUNDRY FOR FIVE KIDS? - HINT, MAYBE YOU DON'T
On Wednesday’s we do Laundry!
I stand drinking my tea (coffee is an after the kids are gone activity) in the front landing and holler up and down the stairs simultaneously (5 kids means we store some of them in the basement rooms, my wife @declaredominion is scandalized by this, this is what I call not being independently wealthy while having 5 children) “IT’S LAAAAAWWWNNNNNDRRRRRY DAY, BRING FORTH YOUR DIRTY UNDERWEAR!” And they all come like aunts with trails of dirty socks following behind them.
Every time this scene unfolds a smile spreads across my face and I feel proud. Proud because my kids are just straight up CUTE! ( Even the moody preteen. ) Proud because they are being active participants in the caring for of their things. That they understand that clean clothes take work from someone, they don’t just magically appear clean and folded in their drawers each day. Proud that they aren’t whining about it, because they realize they like being a part of the team. And proud of myself because although I’ll start the first load of wash to get the day going, I won’t be the one washing it.
This is where things get scandalous!
We have a personal assistant.
She does 80% of our laundry, grocery shopping, errands, puts away the halloween decorations and does the oh no our kid needs this art supply for a project, Michael’s run. You know, basically the grown up stuff that has to get down but we just don’t want to do.
I was recording an interview just this morning with a podcast devoted to helping creatives juggle their roll as mom & their roll as artists and business owners & when I proudly fessed up to the fact that we don’t do our laundry, they were blown away. It had never crossed their mind to outsource laundry and cooking, but they were willing out outsource their editing, aka creative control of their art. How backwards is that!
The truth is that most households with a mom in them are blown away by this super awesome amazing thing that Katherine and I have going on.
But if a house with two dads and no moms, where both parents worked had an assistant would you be scandalized. Probably not.
Truly.
Stop for a second & put my awesome assistant through the lens of a 2 dad, or single dad household. It seems pretty smart & reasonable right?
The patriarchy strikes again!
“Dad only household” is a lens I like to run all my thoughts through these days as an experiment!
So now, instead of spending 6-10 hours a week doing laundry, grocery shopping etc. I spend it with my kids, like actually hanging out.
Our assistant Lori is how we get to play Go Fish for longer than I EVER THOUGHT HUMANLY POSSIBLE with Wilde and Mayhem. She’s how we have dance parties and family movie nights and time together at the dog park, she’s how we had the 3 hours on a Saturday afternoon to bake a cake and talk about kindness with google last week. The $400-$500 we pay her every month is worth every penny for those moments. And yes we are in a place of privilege to be able to afford Lori. But we also make choices to be able to afford her. Like the fact that we are a one vehicle family. Or that our big family vacation the past 3 years running has been camping while other families head to Mexico or Hawaii.
How does our assistant feel?
Well, I don’t know for sure, but it seems after 3 years that she feels pretty great about it. She works when her kids are at school, we understand when kids get sick, and she’s doing all these things for her own family all the time anyways, it feels nice to be paid and appreciated for them from someone else!
For us, Lori, our family hero, and camping, make way more sense than a car payment, and Mexico, for you it might not, there might be some other ways you want to get creative with your time and money instead. But the important thing in my mind is that we stop pretending that we can do it all, and being instagram worthy parents of the year while simultaneously looking cute, ‘cause that’s setting us all up to fail. Instead let’s start celebrating where we are lucky enough to have help.