This post is a chapter of the book It Ain’t Gonna Lick Itself: Housekeeping In Spite Of It All) by Hanne Blank Boyd.
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You might not need to hear this, but then again you might: It is not shameful to hire people to help you do things that need to be done. Sometimes tasks are beyond us, for any of many reasons. Sometimes we could do the tasks, but we have other demands on our time and energy and since those things are finite, yet the things still need to be done, it makes sense to call in some assistance.
When something needs to be done but you aren’t in a position to do it, aren’t in a position to do it all by yourself, or doing it presents a risk to your well-being that you don’t want to take, and you are in a position to hire help so that it can get done anyway, you should do that.
Seeing to it that the thing gets done matters. Doing the thing is the priority. Making sure it gets done is having your priorities in order. Making sure it gets done is good decision-making. When necessary things must be done, paying someone to do them or help you do them can be a really reasonable investment.
If you’re too exhausted or overscheduled to cook and there’s no ready food in the house, but you and the other members of your family still need to eat dinner that night, it’s just not a big deal if you order takeout, get food delivered, or go out to eat. It’s not that you don’t know how to make dinner. It isn’t that you are incompetent to get food on the table. There are simply sometimes constraints on your resources that mean that dinner’s going to get accomplished less painfully and more readily if you outsource it to professionals whose job it is to feed people. It is a demonstration of competence to know a backup method to get this necessary thing accomplished and to know when you need to use it.
These days I pay a yard service every month to mow my grass, trim the shrubbery, and do other kinds of yardwork that I’m certainly competent to do myself, know how to do, and have both the tools and the time to do. It was hard for me to decide to hire a yard service, though. I was raised in an environment where the expectation was that homeowners would do their own yard work. I’ve certainly done a great deal of it over the years in other places I’ve lived.
But then, shortly after I moved to this part of the world, I was bitten dozens of times by fire ants, an irascible little venomous insect endemic to the region now I live in, while doing nothing more remarkable than trying to trim my azaleas. I was mostly incapacitated for days and miserable for weeks, between the reaction to the bites and my side effects from the drugs I had to take to manage the pain, swelling, and unbelievable, prolonged itching.
