I have committed to cleaners for years.
Every week, they come along and do what we dub a ‘surface-level clean’ of the whole house.
This means they clean my whole house (not the kitchen surfaces) in two and a half hours.
Every time they come, it feels like a tending.
I started this just before lockdown in 2020, when cleaning was triggering the fuck out of me around three very small children.
Then we moved and renovated—no point in a cleaner then.
After six months, we started with cleaners again.
After going through three lots of cleaners, I landed on the one my friend had been recommending for months.
They run a team of women, mainly Bulgarian, and they are just so wonderful.
I am ever so grateful for their tending over the years.
As I write this, my eyes well up, feeling their love—their ‘no worries’ approach and their arrival through my door.
It always feels like an exhale.
As I have women who come through my home for 1-1 holding, I felt like it was a business expense and thus always saw it as a necessity for myself and my work.
The thing is, it’s quite the outlay. It’s not huge, but it feels huge every month.
Since switching to a home-ed life and changing my approach, cleaning the house with an external person doesn’t feel necessary right now.
The other week, we all chipped in. Give a child a Henry and a duster with some beats on Spotify—they did a pretty good job.
They were occupied while I cracked on with the rest of the house.
It was a collaborative process.
And I don’t hate cleaning. I used to clean a school as a job when I was a teenager and help at my mother’s cleaning jobs.
The whole vibe of our home ed: we are a family rooting together, and what does this look like every day?
Whether it’s baking, tidying, playing games, or creating—together we create this space we dance in.
So to clean together—though we all know their enthusiasm will wane over time—seems part of the week.
And because we are at home a little more, we can’t always ensure we’re out when the cleaner arrives, so we end up trying not to be in their way.
The money will now be used towards my vision for our year ahead.
The plan is to grab the children’s passports—the twins have never had one.
To make our way around Europe here and there, and maybe even further afield, to house-sit for others.
This is the vision for for our year ahead.
I’m on call rn. And will be back off call and closing our gorgey postnatal space towards the end of March. I plan to be worldschooling more.
However, when I messaged the women to say I needed to park my weekly clean, I cried.
Tears of loss for the weekly tending and mothering I received.
Maybe, to some, that sounds ridiculous.
But to have never received mothering as a mother from my own family—not even once—well, for another motherly figure to come to my house, slide off their shoes, say a quick hello, and clean my whole house... well, that’s been fucking welcomed.
Never once did I take that for granted.
A gift.
Naomi x