Mum or maid?

There’s an exercise I sometimes undertake when I am sitting around at my children’s school. The kids finish at staggered times, and often have after-school activities, so this amounts to several hours of sitting around each week. As we wait, my younger kids do their homework and eat afternoon tea in the cafeteria along with a teeming rabble of other students and their mothers. Or maids. And that’s where the exercise comes in.

It’s called ‘Mum or Maid?’. The question mark is important because the aim is to decide whether the woman accompanying the child is a mother or an employee of the nanny/maid variety. If there are some blokes about, I often get in a quick round of ‘Dad or Driver?’ which is always a bonus round. Double points.

Now, most of the time it’s a problem that is easy to solve, because this is a society built on castes ruthlessly dictated by race. If you have before you a European, Arabic or Indian child and a Filipino woman (extra clue – she’s the one carrying the school bag) odds are she’s the maid. The mothers, on the other hand, are the impeccably dressed and made up ones (well, okay, not all the mothers. Me, for instance), and generally of a matching racial persuasion to their children.

Almost no one in an abaya or burqa is a maid, though sometimes the Muslim maids do wear a headscarf.

The interest comes, though, when the child is Filipino (or from one of the less prolific maid-supplying nations, such as Indonesia, Sri Lanka or parts of Northern Africa) and so is the accompanying woman. Mum or maid?

Here are some tips. The maids are – to a woman – almost always physically smaller than their employers. This seems to hold sway even when they hail from the same place, as sometimes happens (or close enough so that I, in my ignorance, can’t separate them). This helps solve the puzzle when both the mum and the maid are in attendance. Also, the maids are always very plainly dressed – three-quarter pants and an old t-shirt seems to be the unofficial uniform of those who don’t actually wear an official uniform. (Many do. Yes, this is a strange, strange place). They don’t wear any make up. Their hair has not been blow-dried, their nails are un-pedicured/manicured and they don’t wear high heels.

In my opinion, this is more a comment on the mothers than the maids. Since the above (maid) description could pretty much belong to me (and to most of my Australian friends on a school run), there is obviously something else going on here. It could be that women (and men) from non-European backgrounds make a huge effort to not be mistaken for the help. Europeans get a free ride, as usual – there are no white maids in Dubai. Which leaves the high standard of European mum-dressing an inexplicable mystery to me. (It may be as simple as – me Aussie, them French.)

All this is fascinating when you are sitting around, bored, in the school cafeteria, but it is deeply disturbing too.

I have been to restaurants and parties where the maids (who are along to wrangle the kids) eat at separate tables, and there would not be one person there who would find that uncomfortable. 

In the malls they trail along behind their 'families', holding the bags.

I totally understand the dependence on help in the ex-pat community, especially if both parents work. Here I sit with my three school-aged children and my loving church community, and a husband who is in the same city as me more often than not. It is not my aim to suggest that women with babies and toddlers, whose husbands are away almost every single night and have no family or community back-up, should not hire help.

I imagine I would do the same.

But I am uncomfortable with the way we often slip into a given culture instead of challenging it.

I know some people who have developed some very sensible rules regarding their home help: their children are not allowed to ask their maid to do anything for them (she is Mummy’s helper, not your slave), meaning their kids aren’t going to grow up (like many here) strewing the house with their belongings only to find them neatly put away five minutes later. And someone else who limits her maid’s services to the children (no spoon-feeding the lazy three-year-old at dinner, for instance) to force the kids to look after themselves.

There are families with very happy, healthy, positive, even loving relationships with their live-in domestic employees. But they are not the majority.

And - as if the whole subject wasn't complicated enough - there's the kids to consider.

My eldest son’s friends were incredulous when he said we didn’t have a live-in maid. They think Australia, where most people don’t have help, must be a very poor country.

“So what do you do when you want some food? Do you just… go into the kitchen and get it yourself?” they asked.

I am proud of my kids’ independence, and I am sad that some of their friends aren’t getting to stretch their own wings.

And that’s just with regard to the kids. There’s probably a whole other blog post in treating that other woman in your home like a human being, but I shouldn’t be the one to write it, seeing as I don’t actually have one.

But you can be sure of one thing – the kids are watching. If someone asks their maid to do trivial, unnecessary or demeaning tasks, so will their children. I have observed (okay, spied) as some people down my street leave in the morning. First the maid comes out and gives the car a quick once over with the hose (the waste of water is a topic for another day), then she turns on the engine to get the air-conditioning going, and heads back inside. Then she emerges with the children’s school bags and puts them in the boot. Then she comes back with the kids and helps them into their seats. Then mum or dad appears and off they go.

Is it really too hard for those kids to carry their own schoolbags to the car? Or for the parents to start their own vehicle?

I’ve been hesitant to post a blog on this topic. To non-Dubaians, this must all seem like life on Mars. And to Dubaians, I have probably said all the wrong things. Tell me, what do you think about it all?