Kids hire professional cleaners to prove their mom’s complaints have nothing to do with actual cleanliness: 'Mom was a spite cleaner'

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  • Professional house cleaners vacuuming a modern living room during a residential cleaning service.
  • AITAH for hiring professional cleaners to prove my mom was a spite cleaner?

    My mom is what you might call a spite cleaner. She uses cleaning as a tool to control and nag and wine and whatnot. My siblings and I bore the brunt of it. Often she delegated cleanings to a saturday or sunday
  • which we called "h I day"), she would usually go out to buy food for the week/errands and leave us to it, and it seemed no matter how much cleaning we did she was never happy with the result
  • and the day would end with all of us arguing and upset. Sometimes we would barely do any cleaning since the end result was the same - her complaining.
  • Teen girl speaking with her mother at a kitchen table during a family discussion at home.
  • Venting to each other outside the house one day, my siblings and I decided to prove she was just complaining for the sake of complaining. We set up a
  • gofundme to raise funds to pay a local house cleaning company, posing it as something along the lines of 'help us get a professional
  • Family cleaning a living room together with kids wiping surfaces and a woman vacuuming the floor.
  • house cleaning to surprise our mom!' And we were able to raise a few hundred dollars mostly from family and friends (who knew our situation), which covered the cost (and a nice big tip for the cleaners from
  • what was left). So for one cleaning weekend when our mom had shopping plus getting the car looked at, we scheduled a local cleaners to arrive, they were 2 very nice
  • Kids helping with household chores by loading laundry into a washing machine in a family kitchen.
  • women who proceeded to clean the house till it was sparkling (we chatted a bit with them while they were working, one of the ladies had almost 20 years experience cleaning
  • homes, the other 8). With their consent, we filmed some clips of them cleaning, saying it was to surprise our mom.
  • So mom gets home with our uncle who was coming to dinner, and she's barely in the door, she's already started complaining about our "usual" subpar cleaning, that either I,
  • my brother didn't clean the surfaces well enough or that my sister didn't sweep one spot. These were repetitive complaints she often said.
  • Teen girls playing video games together at home while laughing with their pet dog nearby.
  • Long story short, we show her the footage, her face gets red and she proceeds to scream at us form embarrassing her in front of her brother, how dare
  • we hire cleaners and have strangers in the house, blah blah. We argue back that this proves she just weaponizes cleaning.
  • This is from a few years ago, but it's come up in arguments lately so I figured I'd get some outside opinions.
  • It's been a few years since then, after the big blow up she just did most cleaning herself does she never admitted to weaponizing it. It came up again recently as us "tricking" her and I don't think we did anything wrong. AITAH?
  • Majestic Disaster3977 hahah. This is a fun story. NTA. This would have ended one of two ways: - Proof that you and your siblings didn't clean good enough. - Proof that your mom simply complained for the sake of complaining.
  • RubyRaven907 NTA. Sounds like you deweaponized her and it still chaps. I'm sure she found something else in time.
  • plasticscoop You didn't trick her, you exposed her. Some times it's never good enough. Did anything else come from it? Did she tell her friends ornother family members how terrible her kids were for doing it? NTA
  • Oar_3421 NTA - if you wanna hire somebody to come clean my house I won't be upset even a little

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