Day 14 of Lockdown #COVID- 19

7th April 2020

Diary of a new mother 

My entire series of these 21 days will be based on my experience of being in this lockdown and staying home as a first time mother of a 5 month old baby, Anvay. 

Dear Diary,

After having no domestic help for cleaning the house and washing vessels post this lockdown we, as a family had managed to keep the show running but after almost two weeks it was seeming to be a boring and exhausting work. When we have a baby in the house, we need to be bothered even more about cleanliness and also time crunch always exists. I am so glad that I have family to help at home and it is not just me and Yd managing the show. But I was listening to the stories of some of my friends who had infants/ toddlers to tend to, regular office work with the couple having work from home option, with no other family members and no external house-help; they were having a terrible time during this lockdown. Many articles have surfaced that post this lockdown even men have understood the hardship that women who are staying at home and also who are juggling office work and home are going through. Not every household has men taking charge of the household responsibility when it comes to cleaning/ cooking/taking care of the baby/ keeping the house in order along with their routine office work. I was telling Yd that lockdown hasn’t changed the scenario in our house much as he has always been happy to do his share of responsibilities to ease the burden off my shoulders. For him, it gets even more difficult because he is sometimes seeing that things need to be in order but unable to help because of some emergency meetings and work related deadlines. 

Yd and I have discussed a lot on bringing in the concept of sustainable living into our lives and household. I was telling him the other day that since we are able to manage without any house-help we have kind of learnt to be self-sustainable when it comes to doing the regular household chores like cleaning and wouldn’t crib so much in the future if the maid suddenly doesn’t come for a few days. But Yd debated saying that only in India we are able to afford employing house-helps because we also contribute to their development. If we do not employ them, they will have nothing to do as many, still in this profession belong to the illiterate class and they do these odd-jobs so that their children do not end up working like them. So probably, managing household work on their own is okay for those living in a developed nation but for a developing country like ours we definitely need to support the lesser privileged so that they can have a better future for their family. Lockdown has benefited the class who are having white collar jobs and have a regular salary but it has hit the migrant workers and daily wage labourers very hard. It wrenches my heart to read about the struggle they have to undergo in order to reach their village with nothing left to do in the city. This lockdown definitely has brought to light the importance of migrant workers in each state.