A good article but this view of balance between career and family is very unfair to women. There are many men who would like their wives to work and support family....we just need to appreciate that the world is very different these days from when women were merely home makers. That is why we are educating the girl child not to be child bearer.
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by Caroline Njung'e
In Summary
Today’s career woman seems to have it all; a good job, nice
car and beautiful house. But behind this façade of success could be an
unhappy husband and neglected children.
It is a controversial, even taboo subject among some, but the fact is that a number of career women are losing their families and homes to their house helps. In their quest for impressive academic credentials a successful career and enviable social network, they forget to nurture what is probably the most important part of their lives –their families.
The result is that they wake up several years later to find that they have lost their families. Their children have developed into secretive, broody and rebellious teenagers while their husbands, whom they long stopped giving serious thought to, have become emotionally withdrawn and carved out a new life for themselves.
Women who have found themselves in such a position will probably relate to Margaret Mwangi.
Two years ago, 41-year-old Margaret Mwangi (not her real name), a senior manager in one of the largest banks in the country, thought she had it all. Already a Masters degree holder, she was a year into studying for a PhD in financial management and had won several awards for her outstanding performance.
She was earning good money and had extensive contacts. But as she rode the wave of her success, she forgot to channel the same effort and energy she directed at her career towards her husband of 14 years and three children.
Margaret would be up by 4 a.m. to get ready for the day’s numerous strategic meetings and for mandatory 30-minute jog around her upmarket neighbourhood.
She would leave the house at 6a.m., as her husband and children were waking up to prepare for the day. Thanks to Martha, the efficient and capable house-help she had had for eight years, Margaret knew that her family was in good hands.
Martha would prepare a healthy breakfast, ensure that everyone’s clothes, including her husband’s, were ironed and laid out and that their shoes were polished.
Given Margaret’s busy schedule, including her daily evening classes which ended at 8p.m., she usually got home at around 9 p.m., tired to the bone. By then, the children were in bed, having had supper and completed their homework with Martha’s help. In Margaret’s mind, she was a good mother and dedicated wife since she ensured that her family was well taken care of.
But due to her constant absence from home, her once close and loving relationship with her husband faded, to be replaced by a cordial one, devoid of emotion and passion. Their conversations were perfunctory and usually, after asking about each other’s day, she would take a shower, have a quick meal then collapse in bed, exhausted, with things that needed to be done at work the next day going in her mind.
She could not even recall the last time she and her husband had been intimate, but this did not really bother her. According to her, all marriages lost the initial fire they had after a couple of years. After all, hadn’t her friends confessed that they were going through similar experiences?
That’s why Margaret was shell-shocked when her 45-year-old husband announced that he was marrying another woman last year. But nothing could have prepared her for the bombshell that he dropped shortly thereafter — the other woman was Martha!
How could he do this to her after she had worked so hard so that they could all have a good life and a secure future? It is not like he or the children had been neglected – they lived in a clean home, had healthy, wholesome food everyday and led organised lives, she argued, as she tried to come to terms with the shocking news.
But when her husband pointed out that it was their live-in house help who did all these for the family, the argument instantly fizzled out. During the last five years of their marriage, Martha had practically usurped Margaret’s roles of wife and mother. She cooked for and served the man of the house, washed, ironed and laid out his clothes and dutifully cleaned and polished his shoes everyday. She even made the
couple’s bed, as well washed and changed the linen because Margaret often left early in the morning and returned late at night.
But more important, Martha had raised the couple’s three children almost single-handedly. When they were young, she would wake up in the middle of the night to lull them back to sleep or warm them a bottle of milk because their mother would be too exhausted to do it. And when they started going to school, she walked them to the bus stop, picked them up in the evening and helped them with their homework.
“How then can you claim that you are my wife and mother of my children if someone else has been doing what you should be doing?” her husband had retorted when she asked how he could embarrass her by having an affair with their house help right under her own roof.
Not ready to live in the same house or share her husband with Martha, Margaret walked out of the marriage with the children. Although she can offer them the comfortable life they were used to, re-learning how to be a mother to her children is proving very difficult.
The older two, a boy and a girl, are teenagers. Sulky, disobedient, and disrespectful, they are constantly getting into trouble at school. The other, now eight, is clingy, teary and has not stopped asking when they will move back home to “daddy and auntie”.
Margaret recently learnt that her former house help, a single mother of two, had given birth to a baby girl, who had been named after her husband’s mother.
Margaret’s case clearly demonstrates the situation in which many women find themselves after entrusting their family’s welfare and the running of their households to their house- helps.
This often unappreciated and underrated woman is the one who draws up the budget, does the shopping, decides what meals to prepare and sometimes even rushes the children to hospital when they fall sick. And it is she who helps them cope with the unsettling changes that take place during teenage.
It is no wonder, then, that some mothers don’t even know when her daughters had their first period, and that would be shocked to learn that they have actually reached this milestone.
The result is that such children grow up to be comfortable with their house-helps and prefer to go to them for advice rather than to their own mothers, since they have not formed a close bond with her.
Under their noses
It is these same house-helps who wait on their husbands, take their bath water to the bathroom, make their tea just the way they like it and have since discovered what makes them tick, what makes them happy and what sets them off. Yet wives are surprised when they discover that their husbands are having an affair with the house help right under their noses.
One of the women Saturday magazine talked to, a lecturer and professional counsellor, confessed that two years ago, her marriage was almost broke up because of the amount of time she was spending at work.
“Between my clinic and lectures, I did not realise just how little time I spent at home because I was always rushing somewhere,” she recalls.
It wasn’t until she overheard her house girl of two years asking her husband whether she should prepare for him “the usual tangawizi and lemon” to treat his cold that the alarm bells went off. “My husband had never asked me to make him anything for his cold and, worse still, I had not even noticed that he was unwell,” she says,
adding that this is what jolted her to take action. The following week, she gave up three classes, which meant that she could get home early at least three evenings a week to prepare the evening meal and have some quality time with her husband.
“I don’t think there is any married woman who believes her husband can have an affair with the house help, or worse, leave her for one, but what we forget is that she, too, is a woman and that human beings are naturally drawn to those who treat them well and show them that they matter,” she says.
She says that since then, she has been doing more for her husband, including serving him food, preparing his meals once in a while and spending more time with him. “Our relationship has improved, and although I am earning less than I used to, I am more relaxed and have more time for myself,” she observes.
Which brings us to the question – is it really possible for women to have the best of both worlds? Is it possible for women to have outstanding careers as well as happy and contented families? Kenyan women have been fighting for equality for quite some time now, and they are getting it. They are rising to positions once reserved
for men and earning as much as, if not more, than them. But at what price?
According to an article published in the The Mail of UK recently, women may have won the fight for equality, but “It has left many of them imprisoned and exhausted”. This is according to Erin Pizzey, a British women’s rights activist and author. Pizzey adds that the idea of women happily combining career and a family has turned out to be a myth.
In the article by Paul Revoir, she observes that women’s freedom of choice to have both has left them with less spare time than they had before, and as a result, lost something very important. “Many women don’t have a choice now, they have to work, they have to work hard, and I just see an exhausted generation of women trying to
do it all.”
Pizzey’s views are supported by Helen Fielding, author of the popular Bridget Jones series of novels, who criticised women who aspire to “have it all”.
In an article published in a recent issue of The Daily Mail of the UK, Fielding is quoted as saying that many young women today struggle to have successful careers and families in an idealistic society that expects them to balance these roles perfectly, a battle that leaves them “confused”.
“They feel they should be getting up at six in the morning and going to the gym, then doing a full day’s work, coming back late and feeding 12 people for dinner. It’s a modern disease,” she is quoted as saying. Explaining why it is not possible for women to have it all, she argues that there are only so many hours in a day and as a result, you either spend most of them at work, or at home raising children and making a home.
cnjunge@nation.co.ke
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