Out & About: Idul Fitri, house chores and babysitting horrors

Idul Fitri has been over for two weeks now, but I have heard from some friends that they are still feeling the pinch of the annual fever known by some Jakartans as flu babu, a word play from flu babi or swine flu.

Flu babu symptoms include trying to juggle normal work days at the office and do all the house chores in the absence of domestic workers that have yet to return from their holiday homecoming.

I feel really sorry to those friends, who are busy contacting many agencies and frantically looking for new housemaids as there is no sign of their previous employees returning.

To me, it revives my own experience of last year, when I had to babysit while my in-house maid took a three-week hiatus for the exodus.

Really, babysitting is a short word, but, I never thought that that word spelled huge chores, severe sleep deprivation and a lack of food.

I just realized that I was the only resource in the one-man team, and that means no way to exert what people call “working smart”: delegation.

I could not delegate the jobs to my teammate as my wife’s office made it impossible for her arrive late to the office, while mine was more flexible.

I had to go against my body clock to wake up early before waking up my kids, prepare their breakfast and uniforms (and sometimes mistakenly pick out the wrong uniform for the day for my kids) and take them to their respective schools.

People say every beginning is always hard. But, this babysitting work knows neither beginning nor end, it seems to me.

It requires the ability to juggle with many deadlines that require multitasking.

The school bell will ring at 6:45 a.m. sharp. Means that five minutes before the bell, my kids must be at the school gate.

It sounds like an easy mission to accomplish if I work with a team of pros. But it is completely wrong when dealing with kids.

I didn’t anticipate many things, which economists often call ceteris paribus, factors that are not taken into account as they are seemingly insignificant.

Waking up the kids could mean an early nightmare when they refuse to open their eyes and prefer to roll over to the other side of the bed. They think I’m joking and will tickle them as I do in normal days.

Shower time would be another nightmare as they prefer to frolic and start splashing water and foam on one another.

People may associate such a carefree moment as one of childhood’s happy memories. Happy, my foot!

And, having breakfast can take longer than expected as I didn’t know exactly how many minutes they took to chew and swallow
their food.

At the rate of one spoonful every five minutes, I would need half an hour to finish a bowl of coco-crunch for their breakfast and I would never make it. So, I needed to rev up their chewing and swallowing speed.

Those were also real tests for anger management, especially when they just ignored my desperate yells for them to hurry up.

When I thought I made it after finished all of these hurdles, I realized that I hadn’t prepare their books for the day. Gosh!

It all ended with me arriving with the kids five minutes before the school bell.

It also meant me being a speedster, zig-zagging through the city’s traffic jams that had returned to normal with the holiday makers returning from their long exodus, all of them it seems except my house’s nanny.

My kids arrived at school safe and sound.

I thought that would provide me with some sort of ME-time until I found the bedroom had yet to be tidied and dirty dishes and clothes were here and there.

Cleaning up the mess is another short phrase that means lots of work to do and could take hours.

As I managed to finish it all, I looked up at the clock to find that it was time to pick my kids from school, while I hadn’t prepared anything for them for lunch.

The babysitting experience and doing all the chores makes me realize the value of domestic workers’ jobs. It seems to be all work on simple and small things. I now realize there are no such simple and small things.

I can count myself lucky and really feel grateful that my house assistant, who has become part of my family over the past seven years, has returned.

She really makes a difference.

— Damar Harsanto

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