A good friend of mine recently left Vietnam and relocated to the UK. As usually happens when we former ‘ladies of leisure’ move home, there was a lengthy period of dead air on the email front. In my experience this silence is due to culture shock-- the sort experienced by someone who is used to having a spotless home AND dinner ready at 6 AND clothes laundered, pressed, and hung, AND not doing any of these things themselves—suddenly finding themselves having to do everything the paid help used to do.
So when this aforementioned girlfriend finally got around to sending out her “We’ve Landed!” email, I opened it eagerly. It’s not that I wish ill on any of my girlfriends, but hoooo boy, I do enjoy hearing tales of shock and awe from those recently ripped from the Promised Land. It’s a misery-loves-company thing.
However, her email was disappointingly upbeat. It was “fresh country air” this and “pastoral vistas on the way to school” that. There was a passing homage to domestic disarray but that somehow segued into a vignette describing how she and her three boys play every day in the garden and sometimes just lie on blankets in the yard and share their innermost thoughts. I hastily closed the email when my husband walked in. Like he needed to read how much she adores her new life after I’ve spent the past eight months hammering home how hard my wife-life is.
I promptly wrote her an email demanding the dirty dirt. I didn’t want the sanitized version. I wanted the one where she called her husband at the office just to start a fight and hang up on him. The one where no one noticed or appreciated what goes into keeping a house moderately acceptable. The one where you make a nice pulled pork dinner and your children start crying and saying, “I hate this meat. It looks like guts!”
She responded immediately, admitting she had written a false-positive email because she didn’t want to sound whiny—then, gave me what I was looking for.
“…It doesn’t help that I completely cleaned the house last Thursday and again on Monday-- I am talking 5 hours both days of vacuuming, mopping, washing, bathroom cleaning-- you name it--and my husband didn’t even notice. But he does tell me that because both younger boys are suffering with allergies, I should vacuum twice a week! This from a man who, before we left HCMC, proceeded to figure out MY domestic schedule and said, 'Well there won’t be much washing, I think you should do a load on Friday as you don’t want your whole week taken up with domestics so you cannot go to the gym'! What planet is he on? I do a load of wash a day, sometimes 2 and yesterday 4 loads because I did all the linen and tomorrow probably 2 or 3 cause of towels. I mean seriously.”
While basking in the warm glow you get when you hear someone else’s life is actually more fraught than yours, it occurred to me that I never hear these housework laments from my local friends. They seem very at peace with unmade beds and petrified Kraft Dinner noodles crusted into the area rug.
It reminded me of an email I received in March from a friend in Vietnam, who was either trying to shut me up about How Much Housework I Was Now Doing, or was actually, very wise.
“The problem with once having staff is that having someone pick up after everyone all day and wash floors AND iron dishcloths just sets too high a standard. Once you have been there a while you will also relax, lower you house-cleaning standards. There are shortcuts. Soon, you will only iron your husband’s collar and tell him to keep his suit jacket on all day and buttoned up! I have a friend with a sofa in her living room but you can never see it, as it is full of laundry. To save time she no longer folds or puts away clothes, or even carries them upstairs. The family all wanders downstairs in the morning and rakes through the clothes on the sofa to find something to wear…”
Had we former expats--with our fond recollections of our maids--flown too close to the sun? Were our standards too high?
Clearly.
Why were we killing ourselves trying to replicate our former gleaming homes, when keeping it that way was a full time job for a pro?? It was my Ah-Ha Moment, Oprah. Nobody CARED if my floors gleamed. Frankly, nobody in my house even notices. And from now on, as long as our sofas don’t become the default laundry basket (have some pride, ladies), I’d say we’re doin’ just fine.
ABOUT THE BLOGGER
Dona Johnson is a 40-year-old mother of three who has recently returned to Canada after spending much of the past ten years in Russia, Indonesia and Vietnam. It bears mentioning that this would be a much more positive blog about motherhood if she still enjoyed the services of the maid, nanny, gardener and driver she regretfully left behind in Ho Chi Minh City.
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