Salute to house helps for making our lives bearable

house help

The fact is that there is nothing as tiring and thankless as housework;  you toil all day long for 365 days a year yet you have nothing to show for your sweat at the end of the day.

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A couple of days before Christmas, a friend on Facebook wondered how she would cope in the absence of her house help, who had travelled home for the holidays. Her help, she wrote, had been away for only two days, yet she was on the verge of breaking down with exhaustion.The housework, coupled with looking after her three children, was too much to handle. Her post elicited lots of comments, most of them from women reassuring her that she was not sailing on that boat alone, that they too were counting the days before their help returned.But there are some who wondered why we glorified house helps for work that they get paid for anyway. Having been in the position this Facebook friend was in twice a year for the past 11 years, I was appalled by the comments.Serve supperThe fact is that there is nothing as tiring and thankless as housework;  you toil all day long for 365 days a year yet you have nothing to show for your sweat at the end of the day, nor any testimony at the end of the year, never mind the never-ending backbreaking work you had to do for 12 months.Other jobs have tangible results, and once you complete one task, you move to the next, never to repeat it again, and if you do, it will offer you a different experience altogether, hence no monotony. If you ask me, there isn’t pay that is good enough for housework.This last December, the extremely patient and good-natured woman that looks after my children when I am away took two week’s leave to spend the holiday with her family. The timetable that structures her day with clockwork precision promptly went to the dogs right after she left.The following day, the family had breakfast four hours later than they normally do because I could not bring myself to wake up at the ungodly hour she wakes up. After that it was all the way downhill, managing to serve supper a few minutes to 10pm, when most of my neighbours had long gone to bed.I cannot count the number of times my children walked up to me and announced that they were hungry, lunch or supper having been unusually delayed. By the time she mercifully returned two weeks later, my pampered nails were broken to bits, my hands looked like an old woman’s and my creaking bones were on fire.Petty fightsMy poor feet also ached from the many hours of walking and standing as I washed never-ending dishes and washed a mountain of clothes. To make matters worse, my mind was reeling from having to break petty fights and arguments among my children.Yes, there isn’t pay that is good enough for housework. The backbreaking and thankless work aside, I think the worst aspect of housework is the monotony. You wake up to the same experience day after day, the same tasks, the same motions. It can be depressing and can turn you into a moody and irritable person quite fast, especially if you’re used to a vibrant environment that brings with it new experiences every day.Did I mention that housework is a lonely affair? How our house managers manage to do this job without breaking down or packing up and leaving is a miracle, and for this, I salute these women without whom our lives would be mostly unbearable.[email protected]