A week ago today I brought a medium-sized shampoo for the three helpers/caregivers at home. There are three women all employed to attend to and be with my 90-year-old mother. Two of them stay with her in the room, one does the cooking and laundry, while the other is with my mother. The third reports at night when I leave for Manila or some place, and all three of them are asked to stay with my mother.
My mother grew up in a house with extended household. Now that she fears she is going to go soon, she needs to be surrounded by people. These three women compose a people.
We share the bathroom and toilet on the ground floor. For a month now, I realized all of our heads and hair smell the same. I came to the conclusion that they have been using my shampoo, as well.
There is another woman in the house, the nanny of my granddaughter by my nephew. Except for the night caregiver, who is a widow, all of them are battered women. They spend whatever surplus they have for the month, buying load for their mobile phone. The two caregivers constantly send “text messages” or SMS to their respective husbands. I eavesdrop or gossip with them and I am able to find out the dynamics of each relationship. The morning caregiver has given up on her husband, although she still talks to him because “he is the father of my children.” The cooking caregiver has also given up on her husband, although he comes riding to our home on a borrowed motorcycle, according to the morning caregiver, to threaten that he will leave her forever or love her for eternity. The night caregiver just looks at them and thinks of the night differential.
A week ago the shampoo arrived. They were very happy, I sense a lilt in their voices. They are happy to smell, finally, a flower-based shampoo, not my shampoo, which smells of leather and apple, the kind of scent that is determinedly chauvinistic.
I did a cost-benefit analysis of my shampoo policy and concluded that to treat the caregivers to cake and soda each day would be more expensive. The shampoo has a different effect altogether on them. They walk now with confidence, flicking their long hair as if there is forever, well, at least in their scent. They have, it seems, forgotten their erring partners. The morning caregiver has become extra friendly, sweet, to the cab driver who picks me up daily. The night caregiver has become an excellent one, combing my mother’s hair and treating her to lotion massage. The cooking caregiver is pregnant.
Presently, I also walk with a restored masculine gait. My head is supremely different from them women. Structured inequality is restored.
Shampoo as equity is brilliant.
I think I can be a politician.
E-mail: titovaliente@yahoo.com.