In 2020, my mom moved a few hours north of where she raised me to live closer to me and my husband. We knew we wanted children in the coming years, and she wanted to be close to us when the time came. My mom has always said her purpose in life was to be the best mother to her children as she could – and my god has she been – and now that she lives just a two-minute drive from us, she is also the grandma of every kid’s dreams to my son.
My husband and I both have full-time jobs, and after our son was born, we were struggling. We started outsourcing a lot of the domestic tasks we just didn’t have the time for anymore. We got our groceries delivered, hired a cleaner to come once a month, and used a laundry service to pick up and drop off our clothes, freshly washed and neatly folded inside little canvas hampers. We imagined we’d only use these services to get us through that first year of no sleep, but it turns out the demands on two working parents don’t disappear when your baby becomes a toddler.
Then, around the time our kid turned 3, my mom retired. She quickly decided she was not ready to be done working entirely, and somewhere in the process of mulling over her options to make a little money — delivering for Uber Eats, maybe house or dog sitting — I realized I would much rather pay my mom that $15 a load (plus tip) than a stranger on an app.
I think I pitched her the idea, but she says she broached the subject with me first after seeing the laundry app’s branded hampers sitting on my front porch, awaiting pickup. My mom and I are super close, so either way, the conversation wasn’t weird at all, the way money tends to make things with family. What I do know is that I absolutely loathe doing laundry, the chore you have to touch a million times to complete between gathering, sorting, washing, drying, folding, pairing socks, and putting it all away. Mom, on the other hand, simply doesn’t mind it all that much.
However it unfolded, now we’re here, in this wonderful arrangement where I routinely pay my mom to do my laundry. She has been known to refuse my money when she knows I’m paying off a home repair bill, but in general, it makes me really happy to pay her. It feels like an acknowledgement that yes, this is work, just as it has always been work.
For me to fall behind on chores, with a husband who truly shows up at home and only one child, felt a little shameful at first. But Mom doesn’t see it that way.
I drop it off at her house or she takes it with her when she stops by with a treat for my kid, but one way or another, my heaps of laundry make it to her house. It’s usually four loads or so, crammed into the travel hampers left over from our previous service. Mom always brings them back folded, sorted, on hangers, and bless that woman, my husband’s work shirts come home ironed too. (I have told her again and again that’s going above and beyond, but she says she finds ironing meditative. I would rather eat the iron.)
It wasn’t long before, while bitching about keeping up with a family’s worth of laundry, I admitted to my friends that I have wholly given up trying and pay my mom to help instead. They asked if she’d offer her services to them. So now, two of my closest friends — also working moms — have her come over on set days of the week to keep their laundry piles at bay.
I hear from them constantly about how much they appreciate her, organizing their drawers as she goes and sorting out too-small sizes from our toddlers’ wardrobes when she spots them. She has even been known to drop what she’s doing and run a kid’s forgotten lunchbox to school when their mom has a meeting. One friend says my mom has saved their lives. The other has even taken my mom on as a personal assistant, complete with an hourly wage, to help her with all manner of household tasks while she launches her own business.
More than once, my angel mother has teared up talking about how much she enjoys being everyone’s laundry fairy, specifically for us working parents. Her ex-husband, my dad, certainly never deigned to pitch in around the house, meaning my mom worked full-time and did everything for her two daughters. For me to fall behind on chores, with a husband who truly shows up at home and only one child, felt a little shameful at first. But Mom doesn’t see it that way. She says she just doesn’t want us to have to do it all like she did. So, it warms her heart to be that help for us now, and it warms mine to pay her for it.
