My name is Mai, 28 years old, I work as a maid in a large family. My husband’s family has about a dozen mouths to feed: my husband’s parents, my brother’s wife, my two little grandchildren, and my husband and I. Every day, I go to work from morning to afternoon, and when I come home in the evening, I don’t have time to sit down and breathe, so I rush to the kitchen, and then after dinner, I cuff my back and wash a mountain of dishes and chopsticks.
I have complained to my husband several times, he just said:
“Come on, you need to live together.”
I quietly saved every cent of my salary. After about a year, I decided to buy a dishwasher – as if to support myself a little. The day I returned the machine, before I had time to install it, my mother-in-law shouted:
“No one in this house needs useless things. If a woman is lazy and doesn’t want to move her hands and feet, what kind of system is there? You’ll lose money!”
I stood up confused, my heart dizzy. How much fatigue and self-pity had accumulated? I didn’t argue, I just quietly served rice as usual. But that day, I deliberately cooked a meal with many fried dishes, full of grease, and dirty dishes piled on top of each other.
After eating, the whole family stood up without a care, no one moved. I smiled faintly, hugged my stomach, pretended to be dazed, and sat down:
“I’m so tired, my head hurts…”
The mother-in-law groaned slightly:
“If you’re sick, you can take a vacation, and you can wash up tomorrow.”
I quietly entered the room, leaving the bowls and chopsticks in the sink.
It was ten o’clock at night and I heard a noise outside the kitchen. When I opened the door and looked outside, I saw… My husband was quietly washing the dishes, his hands shaking, and his face was tired from exhaustion. He sighed as he washed:
“There’s nothing wrong with the dishwasher he bought… Why do you have to make it difficult?”
I suddenly felt my eyes blurring. It turned out that I was blaming him, who was also stuck between his mother and wife, and didn’t dare to speak.
But the most painful twist was the next morning, the whole family sat down to eat breakfast, and my mother-in-law pointed her finger directly at me:
“You pretended to be sick last night so that Tuan could wash the dishes, right? I told her, as a bride in this house, you are determined to wash dishes for the rest of your life, don’t even dream of relying on machines!”
I held my hands together. At that moment, I understood that the dishwasher I had bought was not only considered a “luxury”, but also a thorn in the side of my husband’s family. And then I said to myself, “Maybe, what needs to be changed is not the machine… It’s my own life.”