Stop the ‘housemaid’ excuses!
Otherwise, your wife too should start sleeping with whoever pays for her hair, buys her lunch, makes her feel safe and appreciated.
I remember the Luganda song House Girl by The Obsessions in the early noughties rubbed so many married women the wrong way. On one New Year’s Eve during the band’s heyday, they performed the song live at Garden City rooftop.
One husband sitting next to us started cheering the song lyrics a bit too enthusiastically, but his wife’s glare piercing him through the dim lighting sat him down within seconds. Because, if you replace in the song ‘house girl’ with ‘my boss or boosi wange’, and replace all the things the house girl does that should otherwise be done by a wife, with everything a boss does that should surely be done by one’s husband, then we would have another hit on our hands!
Some husbands, because their wives have jobs, no longer pamper them, whatsoever. No surprise car service, no treats at the spa or hair salon, no wardrobe change, no home shopping, no paying bills… but the same husband expects that working wife not to stop pampering him with the domestic luxuries he expects from a traditional wife. Wait; are you a traditional husband?
Meanwhile, boss at work is the understanding man that extends an advance or even a ‘grant’ for your wife to clear the school fees you neglect to pay; the one who seems to be in the ‘provider’ and ‘protector’ role mister at home no longer cares about…
But you don’t hear your wife walking around threatening to sleep with the boss, unless you take your gender roles seriously. This broken tune of “your husband will sleep with the maid because you have let her become too efficient around your home” should be rested, already. Just be a good and committed spouse.
Even as a wife, one can’t demand that her husband is ‘The Man’ of the home 24/7 – picking all the bills, taking care of her every need – while she does absolutely nothing in return, to show that these traditional gender roles mean so much to her.
Gundi, pause your pre-office schedule to make him an omelette and juice for breakfast, because you know he likes that, and keep the ‘The Man’ side of him that turns you on, activated. Otherwise, this sense of entitlement is killing many modern marriages.
Even the sex becomes a burden one carries with so much resentment, because the scale feels very unbalanced when one spouse is doing all the giving and the other, all the taking. People are asking their spouses to ‘stay in traditional character’, even when they know they abandoned their own roles a long time ago.
Don’t demand for eggs and bacon for breakfast when you don’t know how one stands when one is paying for a tray of eggs. Don’t demand for money to do your nails and for shopping, then sit there looking pretty all day, while your husband feels neglected and very much like an ATM machine.
Iron sharpens iron. Expect your spouse’s A-game only because you too are bringing your A-game to the table.
caronakazibwe@gmail.com
Source: The Observer
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