In 2020, my mom moved a few hours north of where she raised me to be closer to my husband and I. We knew we wanted to have children in the next few years and when the time came, she wanted to be close to us. My mom always said her goal in life was to be the best mother she could to her kids—and oh my god, she was—and now she lives two minutes from us, and she’s every The child’s grandmother.
My husband and I both work full-time, and after our son was born, we had a hard time. We started outsourcing a lot of the household chores we didn’t have time to do. We had groceries delivered to our door, hired a cleaner to come once a month, and used a laundry service to pick up and drop off our clothes, freshly laundered and neatly folded in small canvas baskets. We thought we’d only use these services to get us through the sleep-deprived first year, but it turns out the need for two working parents doesn’t go away when your baby becomes a toddler.
Then, when our kids were about three, my mom retired. She quickly decided that she wasn’t ready to completely call it quits, and in the process of considering options to make some money, I realized I’d rather pay my mom $15 per load than a stranger on an app ( Plus tip).
I think I pitched the idea to her, but she said she first broached the subject with me after seeing a laundry app branded gift basket sitting on my front porch waiting for pickup. My mom and I are very close, so the conversation wasn’t weird at all anyway, money is often the way things are done with family. All I know is that I absolutely hate doing laundry, a chore you have to touch a million times to complete, including collecting, sorting, washing, drying, folding, pairing socks, and then putting them all away. Mom, on the other hand, doesn’t mind any of this at all.
Regardless of how things turned out, here we are, in this wonderful arrangement, where I regularly pay my mom to do laundry. She’s been known to refuse my money when she knows I’m paying off home repair bills, but overall it makes me happy to pay her. It felt like an acknowledgment that, yes, this is work, just like it’s always been work.
For me, being behind on household chores, having a truly family-oriented husband, and only having one child felt a bit humiliating at first. But my mother didn’t see it that way.
I leave it at her house or take it with me when she drops by to give my kids a treat, but my piles of clothes make it to her house anyway. It’s usually four loads or so, stuffed into the travel basket we left over from our last service. Mom always brought them back folded, sorted, and hung on hangers, and bless that woman, my husband’s work shirts came home ironed. (I told her over and over that this was beyond the pale, but she said she found ironing meditative. I’d rather eat iron.)
Not long ago, when I was fretting over the cost of doing the family’s laundry, I admitted to friends that I had completely given up on trying to pay my mom to do the laundry. They asked her if she would provide her services to them. So now, two of my closest friends—who are also working moms—have her come over on set days of the week to clear out their piles of laundry.
I often hear them say how much they admired her, organizing the drawers when she was gone, and sorting out our toddler’s closets when she found them too small. She’s even been known to drop what she’s doing and bring her children’s forgotten lunchboxes to school while their moms are in meetings. A friend said my mom saved their lives. Another even hired my mom as a personal assistant on an hourly basis to help her with various household chores while she started her own business.
My angel mom has cried more than once as she said how much she loved being everyone’s laundry fairy, especially us working parents. Her ex-husband, my father, of course never deigned to get involved in the household, which meant my mother worked full time, and everything For her two daughters. For me, being behind on household chores, having a truly family-oriented husband, and only having one child felt a bit humiliating at first. But my mother didn’t see it that way. She said she just didn’t want us to do all this like her. So it warms her heart to help us now, and it warms my heart to pay her for it.
