Madam

Deepak Chopra said that flexibility is the deepest strength. I heard this while listening to his free 21 day meditation experience with Oprah in the second week after giving birth. It was timely.

During my pregnancy, I had been quite sad and disappointed when everything did not remain exactly as it was before pregnancy. I had nausea until delivery, the kind that left me dizzy and with images of of raw pink chicken all the time and yet was not relieved by vomiting. Every morning, I fell into a deep black sea of nothingness for three hours and came back to shore with the sound of the askari‘s cockroach screeching chabasa with people speaking like cars racing in a Formula 1 race. As I scrambled to the bathroom in a daze, my inner critic who woke up at 5:00 a.m. no matter what, would say to me, You are of no use.

As I became heavier, I could no longer run errands which required me to stand in lines for hours. One day after standing for almost three hours in a bank, I, with a heavy heart went and confessed to my sender that, I was sorry I could not stand for long hours anymore. Why couldn’t I? Why shouldn’t I? I thought. But while in the line, it had dawned on me that if I lost consciousness and had people swirling all around me, creating an emergency situation for myself and my baby, nobody would have understood if I had explained that I just did not want to hurt anyone’s feelings. Even my attempts to continue making breakfast every morning, ended one morning after I smelled the warm dizzying sweet smell of a ripe bogoya.

By the time that Carrot came, I had to started to accept my new reality, my biggest fear before getting pregnant, that everything had and would change. I had survived all of pregnancy, and almost three months postpartum without a helper but going back to work necessitated more than I had anticipated. I was breastfeeding, pumping, washing, disinfecting and arranging the pump, packing baby’s bag for daycare, waking up three times in the night to feed the baby, doing house chores and being at work by 8.

Carrot was brown skinned, of slight build and with shoulder length relaxed hair. She had a sense of style, sometimes wore football jerseys and shorts. Sometimes long flowing dresses. The ‘old’ clothes I gave her, she wore to clean the house. She was quick and methodical and she didn’t speak her words though on few occasions, her eyes would glare in annoyance. And, except, that one time she raised her voice at me for coming home late when she had a paper. She spoke English and was pursuing a degree. It was easy for me to write endless lists on the fridge with instructions and a timetable for baby.

Carrot had first come into our lives in the first month after we got married when she came in to clean the house for a few hours on Sundays. We never spoke, barely. I could not think of what to say to her. It was only a few hours. She did her work and left soon thereafter, not meaning to intrude. I think she might not have known, when coming in, whether there was a woman in the house, and then when I called her, just how old the woman would be and then later, she must have battled with just how to address this young girl who would be her boss. She was uncomfortable but I didn’t correct her when she called me Madam. I needed a helper more than I needed a friend.

When I first asked her to come in and take care of our baby, I knew she would say no. She did. She had done housemaid work before and she was clear when she said, “I’m not interested.” Yes, she was educated and she spoke her words clearly and not exactly disrespectfully, though in her tone, and on her face I detected a sense of indignity. A sense that, this work was beneath her and she was not in this for the long haul. Couldn’t I see that she had a sense of style and a beautiful face and that her and I were not much older than each other? I saw it. But I didn’t know what to do with it.

Having been in the house alone with a new born from his second week of birth, I had not expected that anyone would notice that my child had cried and that he needed someone to carry him. The last thing I had expected was that she would even offer to carry him for me. I had been hanging his clothes outside while he was in his crib when I heard him to starting to cry. I instantly tightened up and hang his little socks a little faster, my anxiety starting to rise. I looked up to the the door, I looked up to see her with a concerned look, talking in muffled tones. When she came to clean, she only came to clean, I never asked her to do anything other than her original mandate.

“What?” I gestured.

“The baby. He’s crying. Should I pick him up?”

It was what made me agree to call her once again, after she had clearly said no, and ask, again if she would take care of our child. It had been 10 days of day care and my expectations of daycare had been a mirage. A marketing stunt. A petri-dish for three strains of flu in three days and cough so deep you almost cried when your baby coughed.

I offered her a third of what I was making. She accepted. I always knew it was about the money but she did her job diligently. She stayed until he was 1 year and three months. And then she graduated. In the week that she graduated, she asked if she could leave early on Thursday to pick her gown. Graduation day was an off day obviously. She also asked for Saturday, because, it was the day after graduation. I accepted. I understood. I hoped my work hours would understand too. I knew they would not.

On Monday, she asked if she could leave earlier because her evening classes had began. Earlier than what I had already been struggling with was unfathomable. My postpartum phase at work was already taking on a hesitant re-contemplation. On Tuesday evening, she accidentally tore the seat belt on the child’s dining chair. She showed it to me. I sighed and said, “Use a little less force when cleaning his chair.” She looked into my face, for something, for more, I don’t know what. On Wednesday at 7:30 a.m., after having dressed, checked my bag, and peered outside the curtain for the third time, I saw the icon of an envelope appear at the top of my phone. It said she had “resigned and would not be coming in that day.”

Her work hours had been day hours. As soon as I came back at 4:00 p.m. or 5:00 p.m. on most days, she left immediately. On Saturdays, she left by 2:00 p.m. I usually left work in a hurry because, I would not be the reason she missed a lecture and I didn’t want her to be annoyed with the child for his mother’s lateness.

There were two events that happened before that took us off our fairly good timekeeping record. Two weddings, a friend’s wedding which went on till late in the night and a husband’s friend’s wedding where he was the best man and I decided to pick my sister from the airport and both of us thought the other had reached home yet neither of us had. I was very guilty about that. I tried to make it up to her after by reorganising my time schedules but I always felt that I could have done better. After the second wedding, she informed me that she had got in trouble with her father and requested that I come back early from here on out. She would not be able to make the late nights. I could sense boiling emotions underneath her directives. And eventually, the subtle undertones of her thoughts became louder and clearer. She was above this. Fate had been unjust.

On the day that Carrot left, I tried to go on with life as usual but broke down in tears at my desk. I let myself have a morning off and went to cry at breakfast over a plate of food. I went through my mental archives to find out the reason why she had not afforded me even a day’s notice. As I sat looking bleary eyed at my eggs, I received another message from her saying, If I could kindly send her money for the three days she had worked in February. It was a personal assault.

My memory showed that I had told her, twice, in the months before she left, that she was capable of having job that suited her qualifications and that she was free to leave. That I wanted her to here because she wanted to. That I said this because I had not wanted her to feel caged and desperate and angry because, of my child and his well being, for we mothers are always at the mercy of our maids. But that she had to tell me. She had to tell me. I had told her that part, the very first time we sat down to talk about her work. But she spited me. I relied on her. And she left without notice. My memory showed that I had seen it on her face. The way she spurt out the word ‘Madam’, almost as if it hurt her to say it.

I constantly questioned my actions. Had I pushed her to leave by telling her she was always free to get a better job. Had I not been good to her? I had not been her friend. Maybe it was the one thing she wanted, to be able to sit down with me and discuss boyfriends. But I had paid her on time, paid her almost more than I could afford. I had come home on time, dashing out of office, skipping any and all evening programmes, moving up my grocery shopping to weekends. I didn’t shout at her for anything, not even when baby fell and split his lip. She broke almost an entire shelf of water glasses, the juicing machine, the clothes line and the window knobs. I said that she was quick and methodical, but she was also heavy handed. On the days when we were late, we either drove her to the taxi stage or drove her home. I had stopped giving her things when she looked with disdain at the baby powder and vaseline. Still, I had given her the perfume in my drawer that I was not going to use and she had received it with a passing ‘thanks’, almost as if she was being kind to take it. In the months towards her ‘resignation’, I noted that while she pointedly almost, comically, like an inside joke to which her and her friends were party to, called me “MADAM”, she also pointedly greeted him by his name. She seemed to say, Me and You, We are the same. But fate just dealt me a bad card.

Carrot left me reeling, just like she had hoped. I got someone else, who went by four different names, had no past employment record except through her own references to, “working for a very rich couple,” “the woman works in Ministry of Finance” She had a driver at her disposal and was making more money more than she could dare say and yet she had left and started a business of selling mukene in the market.

“Why did you leave?”

“They shifted to somewhere far. The transport.”

“What about the driver? The money they were paying you.”

“It was too far.”

She called my baby, Baby T. That it reminded her of that other baby. It gave me chills. I corrected her and reminded her that this was another baby and that wasn’t his name. I still, sometimes, heard her exclaim, Baby T!

She was a thief. She ransacked the house, left windows open, clutched her bright pink bag to her chest and asked three times if it was okay for her to leave. There was a gnawing feeling inside me but I let it go because she sang nursery rhymes for our child.

On the day I caught her stealing, she refused to leave. Her dark face and hollow eyes became dangerously wild and scheming. They kept darting from place to place, as if she was looking for a knife to kill me with. She would only leave if “they” sent her a car. She was a poor woman, she said at first, and then later, she taunted me, She had seen much more than this. She had touched more money than the crumbs I was giving her. I don’t know what changed her mind. But she left.

…

Paddy is big and busty. She has small round hot tempered eyes like that nasty market woman who abuses you if you spend too much time at her stall and don’t buy anything. In her mouth, you always sense an insult, a quick come back to anything you say to her. She does not seem to know why she is here. I can sense that she does not like children, leave alone toddlers with their whining and tantrums and indecisiveness. She wears her emotions on her sleeves, will cry about being told not to shout at the child. She wears her phone at the end of her hand. If it was not for our presence, she would always be outside chuckling on the phone about her neighbour’s goat which strayed onto the other neighbour’s land. She does not call me Madam. She does not call him by his name. She said she had wanted to go to Dubai, to become an Arab’s maid. I told her that, that it is fine with me, but if she can only let me know when she wants to leave.