She just wants her kid to be happy

Today I am going to write about the maid we have had in our house since as far as I can remember. She has worked for the family for more years than I have been alive.

10 years ago, I overheard her having a conversation with another maid in which she questioned how all her life she basically worked for this one family. That how she couldn’t believe that that was all there was to life. That ALL her life she will work for the same family earning a meager amount and that’s it, then her life is over. There was disappointment in her tone, disbelief in her words and utter resignation in her air.

Quite recently, a relative of mine suggested that she should send her son (who has come of age I think he is 17 now) to some vocational training center where he can learn to be a mechanic, an electrician or a plumber.  She didn’t out rightly deny the idea, in fact pursued it to some end as well, but some days later, she came up to me and told me very directly. She said if she wanted to make him a plumber, she wouldn’t have sent him to school in the first place. She would directly send him to work at a plumber and by now at 17 he would have learnt quite a bit of work. She didn’t want him to do anything that required no formal education.

She doesn’t want to continue being part of the class that she is part of. She doesn’t want that her kid would work at other people’s houses (which she herself did all her life). She wants him to move up a step in the social ladder but the people around him wouldn’t let her.
Another aspect of this situation is that all her life she believed education will help her change things for the kid and now her faith is education is waning. She thought in order to be rich, you need to be educated. I don’t want to be the one who tells us that the number 1 criteria to be rich is try to be born at the right place.