I just read an article that said people spend and average of 673 hours per year doing housework. No wonder I’m so tired! If you break it down it doesn’t seem like that much. It’s about 13 hours per week or 1.85 hours a day.
When you look at it that way, it’s easy to see where the time goes. When you come home from work the housekeeping begins, you check the mail, sort and deal with that, let the dogs out, start dinner, throw in a load of laundry, hang up the kids jackets, unload the dishwasher, help with homework, put dinner on the table, do the dishes, fold the laundry, sweep the kitchen floor, the list goes on and on.
It’s almost surprising that the average is only two hours a day. I think Monday thru Friday, after working all day I average an hour and a half to two hours but then on the weekends it’s always more. That’s when you break out the big guns and scrub the bathrooms, mop the floors, wash windows and do yard work.
The list is never ending. 673 hours works out to almost 17 forty hour weeks a year, working for free. I looked on one of the government websites for average hourly wage in the United States and as of January 2012 it was $23.29 ( I need a new job) so if we were paid for those 17 forty hour weeks we would make $15,837 extra a year.
I might not mind all this cleaning if I was getting paid for it. At the same time though most of this housework we do without thinking, like checking and sorting the mail. These are mindless tasks that make up our day, filling in the empty spots and giving us a little mental down time after the demands of our “real” job.
Please don’t think I’m saying being a stay at home mom is not a job, it is a job I could not do on my best day. Stay at home mothers clean much more than the average and get less respect for it, even from their friends and family. The really bad part is that while the rest of us get to shut the computer down and leave the office, for a stay at home Mom the office is still following you around at nine o’clock at night, tugging on your pant leg because it needs one more drink of water.
No, I wouldn’t trade my two hours of housework a day for the “luxury” of being a stay at home mom. What those women do in the first few hours they are awake is more than I do in most weeks. Suddenly my job and my housework seem much less demanding.