{"id":5344,"date":"2016-07-31T04:00:32","date_gmt":"2016-07-31T11:00:32","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/nickichenwrites.com\/wordpress\/?p=5344"},"modified":"2019-05-03T14:48:06","modified_gmt":"2019-05-03T21:48:06","slug":"everyone-has-a-maid-or-two-or-three","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/nickichenwrites.com\/wordpress\/philippines\/everyone-has-a-maid-or-two-or-three\/","title":{"rendered":"“Everyone” Has a Maid (or Two or Three)."},"content":{"rendered":"
\"Nellie<\/a>

Nellie and R<\/p><\/div>\n

\u00a0<\/strong>Back home, I was an independent woman. I did my own house cleaning, washed the clothes, cared for the kids, weeded the garden, mowed the lawn …<\/p>\n

No pizza delivery for us, no take-out, no supermarket deli food. We cooked our own meals. That\u2019s just the way things were for an ordinary American in 1971.<\/p>\n

Then my husband got a job in the Philippines. He’d lived there before, so he prepared me for some of the changes we were going to experience. For one thing, he said, almost everyone there has maids. So, yes, I was expecting we\u2019d have one too \u2026 eventually.<\/p>\n

The wife of my husband\u2019s boss had another idea. In the hospitable way of many Asians, Dr. and Mrs. H met us at the airport and invited us to dinner at their house. After feeding us a home-cooked Chinese dinner, Mrs. H introduced us to her maid and her maid\u2019s highly recommended cousin, Nellie. If we wanted to hire Nellie on a trial basis, she said, she could be at our apartment as early as the following morning.<\/p>\n

We agreed. (We could hardly say no to the boss\u2019s wife.) And the following morning the new maid joined us at our temporary residence, an apartment-hotel in Makati. You wouldn\u2019t think anyone would need a maid in the confines of an apartment-hotel, and yet, all the apartments had maids\u2019 rooms off the kitchens.<\/p>\n

I liked Nellie. She was cheerful and cute, and though she was only twenty-two years old, she\u2019d been a maid since she was fourteen. She wanted me to know that she was smart, second in her sixth-grade class. But being the third of nine children, she had to work to help support her family.<\/p>\n

I\u2019d forgotten all these details about her age and education and the number of children in her family until I started going through the letters I sent home to my family, letters my mom saved and eventually gave to me.<\/p>\n

I did remember my first day with Nellie, though, how I tried to get her to sit down and eat lunch with me. I couldn\u2019t imagine us eating in separate rooms. It didn\u2019t seem right.<\/p>\n

For Nellie, on the other hand, it didn\u2019t seem right for us to eat together. We could talk after lunch, but she would eat in the kitchen.<\/p>\n

It took me a while to get used to our new way of life, one that was more normal for Nellie than for me.<\/p>\n

Since our shipment wasn’t due to arrive for months, I had lots of shopping to do. With three young children\u2014a month-old baby and a two- and a three-year-old\u2014 shopping in a strange, crowded, hot city without a car would have been a monumental task. Having an always-available babysitter made life a lot easier.<\/p>\n

\"Nellie<\/a>

Nellie and the girls<\/p><\/div>\n

Fortunately, Nellie loved kids, especially the baby. We had one point of contention, though. I wanted to nurse the baby; she enjoyed feeding her. Invariably, I’d return from an afternoon of shopping to find that the baby had already been fed\u2014usually a raw egg stirred into hot rice gruel.<\/p>\n

I can hear you young mothers gasping. Your pediatrician never would have allowed such a dish for a one-month-old. But R grew fat and healthy on it \u2026 maybe a little too pudgy.<\/p>\n

\"baby<\/a>Next week I\u2019ll explain why we decided we needed more<\/em> than one maid. Really, we did. You\u2019ll see why.<\/p>\n

\"my<\/a>(See also: The Letters My Mom Saved<\/a> and Live-in Maids<\/a>.)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u00a0Back home, I was an independent woman. I did my own house cleaning, washed the clothes, cared for the kids, weeded the garden, mowed the lawn … No pizza delivery for us, no take-out, no supermarket deli food. We cooked our own meals. That\u2019s just the way things were for an ordinary American in 1971. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1340,155,1317,177,148],"tags":[1321,1320,1318,1319,1027],"class_list":["post-5344","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-expatriate-life","category-family","category-maids","category-parenting","category-philippines","tag-babysitting","tag-benefits-of-having-a-maid","tag-independent-woman-hires-maid","tag-large-families-in-the-philippines","tag-manila-philippines"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p3Kn1e-1oc","jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":5365,"url":"https:\/\/nickichenwrites.com\/wordpress\/philippines\/two-maids-really\/","url_meta":{"origin":5344,"position":0},"title":"Two Maids? 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