Maid Services Clean Up Ahead of Mother's Day

Forget about figuring out what women want. In view of the holiday this Sunday, let's focus a little more narrowly: What do mothers cohabitating with sock-shedding husbands, toy-tossing tots, and wet-towel-on-the-floor-totally-ignoring teenagers want?

They want (duh!) a maid — a person paid to do what they are unpaid to do. And increasingly, that's what the very luckiest of them are getting. (If you want to take that as a hint, dear family, four days before Mother's Day, which last year you pretty much forgot except for the cards the children were forced to make at school, one of which said, "Dear Mom, Thanks for making spaghetti, Sincerely, Morry Kolman," feel free.)

"Every year it's getting bigger," the district manager of Maid for You New York, Bill Weaver, said. His company sells hundreds of gift certificates this time of year, usually for $150. That's enough to cover a one-time cleaning of the typical New York apartment.

The maids come equipped with special whitener for graying grouting, chemicals to fight mildew, and instructions to bravely scrub anywhere any appliance meets the counter. "Those are the areas with a lot of crumbs," Mr. Weaver tells his maids, "and if you don't handle that …" Well, mother might need another present pretty soon. "And I don't know if I'd want to give my mother a rodent gift certificate," he said.

(Then again, it beats a Mother's Day card signed "sincerely.")

Other maid service agencies are also cleaning up this time of year. "We'll ask, ‘Do you want us to bring a dozen roses?'" the entrepreneurial accounts manager at ManhattanMaids.com, Philip Smith, said. But, he added, "Usually they just want the cleaning."

That's what the mothers want, too.

Jen Singer is founder of MommaSaid.net, a Web site that constantly surveys its readers. "The no. 1 thing they want is someone else to clean their toilets, mop their floors, and do their dishes," Ms. Singer said.

Don't forget laundry. And if you could get someone to sift through the children's backpacks, tossing out the furry sandwiches and uncrumpling the forms marked "URGENT," that would be lovely, too. But most lovely of all?

A sock sucker — someone or something to suck up all the socks on the floor.

"Everyone in the family except me takes off their socks when they relax," a mother of three teenagers, Lori Barrette, said. "You know how they just sort of curl up when you use your other foot to take them off? Somehow socks are always everywhere." And somehow her children and husband never notice them.

A maid would also notice parched plants to be watered, smushed Snickers to be extracted from the carpet, and, ideally, toy parts to be reunited with one another.

"The black knight goes with this toy and the jet plane goes with that one," the founder of MotherhoodLater.com, Robin Gorman Newman, said. "Why am I, miraculously, the only one who knows what belongs where?"

Why? Because you're a mother, of course. Here's hoping Mother's Day brings a maid to your door.

And it's not you.