The Effect of the Departure of S

This morning the horizon looked so dusky and grey that I convinced myself that it was not going to wait for tomorrow to rain. Then I opened the window to a blue sky. I think I need to wipe down the windows. I also need to scrub the toilets, sweep and mop the floor, remove the rubbish from the drive, fix the leaky faucet, hug the kids and hand them their breakfast with a smile, dust, vacuum, and make supper and the beds--EVERY DAY.

We are very much missing S the Wondermaid. She started asking us in September if we would be okay without her for six weeks as she was planning a trip to Sri Lanka to happen later in the fall. I scoffed and told her that of course we would be okay—not to be silly. However, now that we are actually living through those six weeks, I am eating my words—or I would be eating them if I could find the time and energy to cook them.

Having to come home on those two busy days during the week to a dirty house and another night of sandwiches? How did I do this for all those years of my adult life before I moved to the Gulf and became convinced that I needed domestic help? And how do I go back to managing my life independently now that S is gone?

In light of the window incident, I decided that I would begin to pick up the pieces of my grimy household at that moment by cleaning the driveway. Six a.m. seems an ideal time for such tasks and besides, the windows simply looked too daunting. And so, with cats in tow and brooms in hand, I headed out to the driveway.

November is the best time to come to Oman, I thought, trying to cheer myself to the fact that I had just swept up a half-chewed gecko carcass. “The breezes blow off the ocean and the air is clear and clean,” I muttered to myself as I scooped up a gigantic pile of dust, fig leaves, shriveled fruit peelings, cat poo, toilet paper clumps, and hair balls. When I found the two dead dragonflies at the base of a palm frond-pomegranate branch structure in the middle of whale rib bones, and the cats began snacking, I decided I was done with the driveway.

This is the point at which I decided I had had enough of driveway detritus

It rained last week which meant that our house flooded, but Tony and Tian were out when it happened and so we were down on manpower to sop up the flood waters and hang out the soggy towels. I rationalized this oversight by telling myself that in this environment the towels would dry just as fast on the floor as anywhere else. In addition, wet tiles make for excellent skating and damp towels are ideal for use as a door mat. Now, though, I picked them up and set them to dry on top of the clean clothes on the back porch.

This brought me to the tissue party on the floor, off in a corner where someone or something had emptied the contents of a box of Palace Tissues. The box itself had been turned into a wooden ship with straw cannons and its adversary, an old cereal box with iron (aluminum foil) sides and a turret, lay in the tissue detritus. Scooping up the remains of the battle brought me face-to-face with a smear of…what was that on the wall? Hoping that it was chocolate, I wet a towel and began to sponge the questionable mark only to discover a furtive message scribbled on one of the columns in pencil—I love…and then some indecipherable name—large print has led me to conclude that Tehva is the author, meaning that the name is either Louis or Zain. Totally 1D. I took grotesque pleasure in scrubbing away the spastic pencil marks.

And at the base of that same column? A collection of candy wrappers. That reminded me that I needed to get into the kitchen and trash the last of the Halloween candy since I have very bitchily put Tehva on a no-sugar diet in a desperate, last-ditch effort to salvage my sanity. The diet has been wildly successful in that instead of 15 temper tantrums a day she only has one, and she tries to slaughter one of her siblings only once every other day. This is progress.

Damp and slightly mildewy swimsuits hung, stale cat food swept from under the fridge, ant hills along the base of the stairs destroyed, carpets swept, rotten bananas stuck in the freezer, and counters wiped for the first time since S’s departure, I make a cup of tea and ponder the reality of the American life that will be ours again starting next year if all goes as planned.

Removed from this equation will probably be the mildewy swimsuits and, quite likely, the ant hills that form thrice weekly at the base of the steps, and I suspect I will no longer have to deal with a driveway filled with bizarre bits of other people’s lives. However, everything else that S deals with on a twice-weekly basis will once again be part of my collection of responsibilities.

And, like every other Gulf expat I know here who is looking at the possibility of returning to the home country, I ask myself frequently, Can I stand to return to “real life” and the losses it entails? No more annual air ticket, summer holiday time in Europe, domestic help, tax-free living, huge international community, nice salary, or cheap petrol. I can do it, but can I stand it?   

Twenty Minutes

This morning I awoke at 7:20 to find the house empty. Of course the tacky press board furniture was still present, as were the ratty towels, the cheap bedding, the perennial smell that permiates the kitchen now that the weather has switched from bearable to hot, and the roaches that invade "that corner" of the kitchen every night. Those things were all there, but the children were all gone, as was Tony, to a playdate, to school, and to work (yes, in that order). Mine was a house momentarily devoid of noise or responsibility.

One year ago, this never happened. Every morning was a typhoon of screaming as I was enveloped in the insanity of dragging three kids out the door by 7:20 in order to be in the right place at the right time. They were mornings riddled with steaming cups of tea left atop the car, book bags misplaced at the last minute, forgotten lunches, and "oops-peed-my-pants-just-now" sorts of incidents.

This morning, with the novelty of an empty house and an early hour before me, I could think, and I found myself weighing up the pros and cons of sustaining our current lifestyle and situation, but quickly threw away this philosophical bent in exchange for getting a jump on the chores du jour.

We have an automatic gate that protects our driveway, and house, from unwanted invasion--the only way to open or close the heavy metal gate is through one tiny remote control. Unfortunately we currently also have construction going on right outside that gate, and the worker men somehow keep causing our electricity to short so that that heavy metal gate will not open or close at all. After the last incident, I disabled the gate opener and now do the opening and closing by hand, much to the amusement of the construction workers who all drop their picks and shovels to watch me open and close my own gate.

Because I do not enjoy acting as daily entertainment for a sweaty conglomeration of migrant workers, the gate sits open more than it is closed now, and we have all manner of debris blow into our driveway and up our front steps. To put it plainly, we have become a sort of catch net for balls of thick black hair, bits of styrofoam, dead insects, snack wrappers, plastic water bottles, store flyers, and endless drifts of fine sand. To compound the problem, the kids and their friends have adopted the Omani philosophy of trash disposal, which is the drop wherever (in their case, usually our driveway) and saunter away philosophy. To put it simply, our driveway is gross and requires a massive output of effort to keep it clean.

So this was my chore of choice this morning--cleaning the driveway. I was thorough. I squatted underneath the trampoline and used the hand brush; I swept into the corners of the marble steps; I picked up the animal skulls and whale ribs we have accumulated over the months and swept; I wiped down the plastic chair and table where no one ever sits. I worked in the relative quiet (except for the construction workers) of the morning, sweeping, brushing, and dumping, and appreciated this comma in my life. For the time-being, the days of tea flying from the roof of the car and children sobbing over forgotten items at home are gone.

I realized as I brushed that, in the United States, I was always consumed with the 20 minutes that lay directly in front of me. In the mornings the kids had twenty minutes to get up and dressed for school, and twenty more minutes to choke down their tea and toast before making the twenty minute dash to their respective schools. Then they had twenty minutes to chill in my classroom until school began. At the end of the school day, I liked to take twenty minutes to close up my classroom after the last of the students had left.

Then I had a bit less than twenty minutes to get to the Y in order to make the first of the evening's exercise classes. After that I had about twenty minutes to pick up Tehva and get home in order to get dinner (ideal if I could prepare it in twenty minutes or less), and listen to Silas read for the teacher-recommended twenty minutes, which really never ever happend (but I signed the paper anyhow, like dozens of other parents I knew), before slumping off exhausted to the usual slew of evening activities--homework, Scouts, baseball, church groups, soccer, PTO meetings, and so on.

Imagining the years ahead I could hardly see beyond a life segmented into twenty minute chunks. The kids would grow up rushed through the minutiae of daily life ("Come on! We're going to be late! What are you doing? Hurry up!") and I would continue to clip my greys and wonder at where the endless series of twenty-minute blocks had gone.

Sweeping the piles of rubble against the walls of our drive in order that they not once again become scattered victims of the hot desert winds, I appreciated my sweeping chore, for today at least. Sweeping my driveway means that I am able to see farther and closer than twenty minutes, even if it has done nothing for my greys.