STI: We've got it maid - without one

Nov 3, 2004
We've got it maid - without one

A SHUFFLING sound came from downstairs while I was channel-surfing through the latest TV news on the United States presidential elections.

Sean heard the noise too, ran to the basement door and found it open.

On the stairs, he found my mother carrying up Crown Lines boxes from the dozens still left over and still unopened from our move to Brecksville, Ohio.

'What you doin' granma?' he shouted in his outside voice, even though he was inside.

'I'm bringing up some boxes,' she replied.

I walked down the stairs behind him to try to help pull up a box that was bigger than my four-year-old son.

'Don't do that, Daddy. I'm helping granma,' Sean said.

It was exactly what I had hoped to hear.

My wife and I have always raised our son, who is now four years old, to fend for himself. The last person we wanted around the house when we lived in Singapore was a maid.

Now one of the benefits of living in the US is that almost no one has domestic helpers, especially the live-in kind.

When I say benefit, I mean it.

When I was a youngster growing up in Cleveland, Ohio, my mother taught me and my two brothers how to scrub kitchen and bathroom floors on my hands and knees.

My father built a garage for our car and renovated the entire attic of our home into two bedrooms for my brothers and myself. He did it almost single-handedly although he let us pound in a few nails and varnish some hardwood floors.

One of my favourite chores was washing dishes with my mother. I loved soaping and rinsing them and towelling them off - at least until I got a job washing enormous piles of them in a hospital cafeteria when I was in junior high school.

In spring and summer, the whole family took turns mowing the lawn. In winter, we bundled up in thick layers of clothes and got out our toddler snow shovels after a blizzard to help clear the driveway.

In the season that we're now having here - autumn - my parents, wife, Sean and I have been out in the yard several times already raking the brown, gold, red and yellow leaves.

Like other homeowners in this neighbourhood and others all around the parts of the US where trees shed their foliage, we've been raking them into mountainous piles at the kerb-side.

City trucks come around every week or so to suck them up with supersized vacuums.

It's not that my neighbours and I have more time on our hands to clean our own houses, tend our own lawns and gardens, and even fix our cars than people anywhere else in the world. Most of us do not.

My own parents worked most of their lives. When my father came home from his job at the Cleveland Electric Illuminating Company, my mother went to wait on tables at the Highlander Restaurant.

'One of the things I regret most was not being able to kiss my boys goodnight,' she said recently.

Still, both of them always made time for household chores, and still do.

After a long day and night covering the elections for the Straits Times Foreign Desk on Sunday, I gathered all the rubbish round the house to put it on the kerb for the Monday morning collection.

My mother realised it was Halloween and thought it better to wait until early morning than to give trick-or-treaters in the neighbourhood easy access to ammunition for that mischievous night.

I didn't get to sleep until almost 3am, but I heard her scrounging round downstairs at 6am. I dragged myself out of bed, as I didn't want my 75-year-old mother hauling out a week's worth of rubbish into the cold before dawn by herself.

My parents passed their own work ethic on to me.

During junior high school, I delivered newspapers after school before going to work in the hospital canteen. During high school, I tended fairways and greens on a golf course.

Still, I somehow found time to be the editor of my high school literary magazine, write for the school yearbook and newspaper. I even pitched in to turn the high school cafeteria into Camelot for the senior dance.

I also found time to help my parents around the house and garden.

Now the last person I want doing things to my house or in it - and especially doing things Sean should be learning to do for himself - is someone else.

I'm teaching him to sweep the floors, vacuum the carpets and wash the car, just like my mother and father taught me. After all, I had learnt from my parents that getting your hands dirty is just as important to growing up as going to school.

Of course, having Sean help me in the yard is not terribly helpful at his age. Before long, he is jumping into the mountains of leaves we rake up, and laughing.

When we washed the car a few weeks ago, he insisted I use the sponge and pail and that he man the garden hose to do the rinsing.

Unfortunately, he realised eventually it was more fun turning the hose on me than on the car.

No matter. That's part of growing up, too.