Congresswoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz is cleaning less and enjoying her time more.
In a post for the New York Times' Motherlode column, the Congresswoman shared a diary of her weekend. She detailed her hectic journey home from DC to Florida, balancing her work responsibilities with her childcare responsibilities -- "I play basketball with our 13-year-old, Jake, with part of me feeling that I need to watch President Obama’s news conference on the Boston Marathon bomber capture" -- and the tensions she feels between her weekly life in DC and her family life in Florida. Her husband generally deals with the kids' day-to-day activities while she is out of town during weekdays.
She also discussed the "stress point" she and her husband recognized and how they alleviated it. Since Wasserman Schultz is only home for a limited amount of time, the couple decided to set money aside and pay someone to do their laundry. She wrote:
On Monday, our house cleaner will come and spend the entire day cleaning the house and doing all the laundry, including putting it away. While we certainly recognize that this is a luxury, we decided it was worth budgeting for. Laundry became a stress point for us. When I ran for Congress and gave birth to Shelby, our third child, I knew that there was no way I could come home from D.C. every week and spend the entire weekend sorting laundry, washing laundry, folding laundry and putting away laundry while arguing about how much of it Steve and the kids could have done while I was away. Steve resisted at first, but it was one of the best decisions I ever made, because it gave me some of my most precious commodity: time.
Though having a house cleaner is obviously an extra that many families cannot afford -- a fact that Wasserman Schultz recognizes -- many women likely have tasks that they've stopped trying to accomplish on their own or are trying to hand over to someone else. According to a 2012 survey conducted by Real Simple and the Families and Work Institute, half of American women say they don't have enough free time, yet they also tend to resist delegating household and childcare tasks to others. What's a responsibility for which you've decided to either lower your standards or ask for help?
Head over to Motherlode to read the full diary.
[H/T The Cut]
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