Black Women Deserve Luxury

By Kee Smith

Black women are superheroes. I mean that literally. You know it, and I know it. We know it because most of us grew up watching the matriarch of the housework an eight to twelve-hour shift and then go home to handle all of the housework, manage the children, cater to the husband, play personal assistant to everyone in the house, be a chef, a tutor, a hairdresser, and countless other roles. It seems like it is or was one of many reasons we have our magic. As we grew older and became the matriarch of our households, we mimicked all of the magical superhero qualities we saw as children with or without a partner and children. But what if I told you that there is still magic in delegating some of those tasks to hired help? What if I told you that it doesn’t make you any less of a superhero and wouldn’t decrease your magic if you stopped trying to handle everything on your own and paid someone to help you? Listen, I know life gets pricey, but if you can hold off on a few Amazon orders, you may be able to live a life of luxury. Sometimes luxury doesn’t mean designer clothes and foreign cars. Luxury can mean hiring a maid service once a month to deep clean your home so that you can kick your feet up after work a few more times out of the week. Luxury can mean paying a hairstylist to do your hair once a month so that you can spend the damn near twenty-four hours it would take for you to do it yourself, reading a book instead. Luxury can mean that you hire a chef or meal prep service to prepare your meals for the week so that you aren’t so frustrated trying to make sure the food doesn’t burn while you read the same word problem to your child for the fifth time. Hell, luxury can mean hiring a tutor so that you don’t have to read word problems at all. Luxury can even mean sending your laundry to a wash and fold service to utilize the time you would’ve spent on laundry to work out. If you’re anything like me, washing and drying the load is easy. It’s the part where I have to take the load out of the dryer and fold each item that gets me.

We’ve all been conditioned or conditioned ourselves to believe that one, we have to do everything on our own because that’s what makes us so incredible and two, that doing things like hiring a nanny, chef, maid, or tutor is too luxurious. The thing is that if we outsourced even just one thing a month, or every other month, or however often your bank account will allow, we might increase that black girl magic. You know why? Because it would free up a block of time that would let us do something for ourselves. Even if doing something for yourself means doing absolutely nothing, you’d give yourself the luxury of doing that by paying for the help. It would take such a load off of your already heavy shoulders. It would give you a second to breathe, love, be loved on, create something, or bask in the glory of being able to be. Often we forget that self-love includes making your life easier when and how you can. Having a maid service clean my house once or twice a month is a crucial portion of my self-love regime because not having to clean often gives me time to sit down and watch a movie with my daughter or go to bed an hour earlier. Ultimately, it leads to me being in a better mood because my mind is that much more at ease when I know that something on my to-do list has been checked off, and the only thing required of me was having Siri auto-fill my information at check out. It may require a bit extra budgeting at first, but you deserve the luxury of delegated tasks and peace of mind at the end of the day. Use your free time to sprinkle your magic elsewhere, Superwoman.