Handling Stress

By Jaya Chandrashekar

Malini, my domestic helper of many years, had to leave on a moment’s notice for a compelling reason. She was a young girl, very energetic and responsible. She needed the money and I needed her. Above all that, there was a great deal of mutual respect and liking we had for each other.

I was unprepared for the aftermath of her departure. Office pressure, household chores, my bad back and a family who thought they were being ‘accommodating’. Shouldering responsibility didn’t even enter the picture. My daughter advised, ‘Just leave things be. Nothing will happen if the house is not clean for a few days’. My husband kindly suggested, ‘Don’t bother cooking elaborate meals. Let’s have sandwiches but do make my kadha and puffed rice snack please. You know I need them. ’ This, more than the actual physical stress was driving me towards a break down. I was ticking like a time bomb and obviously there were daily reports on my state of being to the rest of the family. Net-net, how are you feeling now, why don’t you just… this and that, sundry advice half a dozen times a day, time that I could ill afford, suggestions that I didn’t need at all. Worst of all, ‘Why don’t you get some help’. Yeah sure, I don’t want to get help because I’m a masochist, want to drive my children away, break my marriage and kill myself in the process.

Control freak that I am, I have a parallel track running in my mind in any situation which keeps evaluating how I are dealing with it - how depressed to get, how much to yell, to wallow in self-pity or get angry, who to take it out on, when to put the lid and act normal.

A week went by and suddenly the whole situation seemed hilarious. What actually busted it and got me back to earth was this woman I hired to help. Young widow with 2 children. She quoted what to her must have been a windfall and I simply agreed because I was tired of interviewing, she seemed a nice person and I was also incapable of thinking straight at that point. She obviously thought she had landed a good job and proceeded to make herself invaluable on the 1st day itself. Hyper to maniacal proportions, she left all the cleaning and set about a more efficient way of organizing my kitchen. I couldn’t even find a spoon without asking her. Arranged our shoe rack into his and hers and nearly opened my wardrobe to sort out my clothes. All this interspersed with how much she likes me, how happy she is and that she sees a long future together. She made chutney for dosa entirely with chillies and garlic. She made rasam with 4 onions, 250 gms garlic and 1 full cup of pepper corns. She fried okra still wet from washing and it resembled some suspicious paste with a lot of goo. I was so frightened that I disappeared during lunch and left my father-in-law and husband to experience it all by themselves. She emptied the untouched gooey okra into the wash basin. I came back to find water overflowing from the basin and flooding all over the kitchen. I found her trying to unblock the basin unsuccessfully with a spoon not bothering to turn the tap off. That was the last straw.

It’s her personality too - comical, exasperating and manipulative. She rejected my phulka suggestion for dinner, insisting that we must eat parathas with ghee – it very good for health and later had to admit that she didn’t know how to make phulkas. She forgot to make dal for dinner and said it was because we cannot digest dal at night. And talking non-stop. Even if I disappeared into the bedroom, chased me every few minutes with ‘amma, do you like pudhina chutney, can you please buy MTR masala’, even banging on the bathroom door with some inane remark. I had had enough by the end of the day and told her it's not going to work and that she can come for a couple of hours and do just the main work provided she didn’t talk so much! Next morning I actually got up fairly cheerful and plunged into the kitchen activity with renewed energy.

Lesson - if there is trouble, add one more dimension to it and then remove it. You get a semblance of control :)

By Jaya Chandrashekar