A surge in au pair unemployment could mean unfamiliar work at home and less time spent in bed for all, writes Orna Mulcahy
CALLING TO a friend's house the other morning, I had plenty of time to admire the immaculate granite paving and the big box pyramids on either side of the front door, since the au pair took a good seven minutes to open it. Maybe she had been up in her attic suite sorting socks, but I don't think so. She finally appeared, all tossed hair and bleary eyes, and took the package I was dropping off, along with my apologies for disturbing her.
It was 9.15am.
"No matter," she said with a yawn, pushing the door closed.
Call me suspicious, but I didn't see her going back to put on a washing load.
I bristled briefly on behalf of my friend, who does an obscenely early school run to beat the traffic and so has her quality time with the children in the car while waiting for the school to open, before putting in a 10-hour day at the office. But then who could blame the au pair if she had gone back to bed after breakfast, in an empty house with an empty day stretching ahead. I would do the same. After trying on Señora's boots or having a go at her Creme de la Mer.
While her charges stay on for after-school care that includes cookery lessons and experimental dance, she has the run of the house, and can do as she pleases, so long as she has the fish fingers ready for five o'clock. She probably feels more at home there than the owners, who, having traded up only recently are saddled with a gigantic mortgage that doesn't allow for lazy stay-at-home mornings. They're putting in extra hours at work and lighting candles for the European Central Bank to cut interest rates again before Christmas. Which leaves Juanita with a free run over about 3,000sq ft of cream carpet and flat screens over every mantelpiece.
She might as well enjoy it because they can't.
Au pairs everywhere should enjoy any peace they get while it lasts, as the domestic landscape is changing. With gas hikes on the horizon they might find their employers fiddling with the thermostat to make sure the central heating stays off all day; or they may discover that the ironing service has been cancelled and mounds of shirts are suddenly being pushed in their direction.
Cleaners across the land are having their hours cut back, as couples face up to the fact that they can't afford €12-€15 an hour to have a spotless kitchen or a colour coded hot press. Prized Brazilian gardeners and Polish painters, whose phone numbers were jealously guarded in the good years, are now available for work.
Weekend nannies, night nurses for newborns, drivers, in-house masseuses, personal trainers, caterers, not to mention spiritual advisers are all facing lighter workloads as household budgets contract. Personal tree-trimmers and present-wrappers may not be run off their feet this Christmas.
At the risk of being lynched by those who rely on having floral arrangements delivered twice weekly, maybe it's no harm to cut back on the hired help. A South African woman living here, who has seen it all before over there, says the Irish women have gotten quite a Madame and Eve complex, wittering on about their staff all the time, and going all limp and helpless in the face of a school lunchbox to be filled, or a child's head that needs to be combed for nits.
Having relied heavily for years on a series of brilliant childminders, I've become quite useless myself at certain things. Learned helplessness I think the doctors call it. Sometimes I take the long way home in the evening, rather than disturb the dinner routine, or on rare days off, I stay out of the house altogether so as not to get in the way. It bothers me a bit, being so redundant in my own home. At weekends I sometimes have to make a phone call to the childminder to find out where things are.
The days when I forget something and have to go back to the house . . . it feels different. The radio plays a different station, the atmosphere has switched to daytime mode. If the phone rings it will not be for me. Does that ever bother you, I ask a girlfriend who has worked long hours for years. "Never!" she says, explaining that if she happens to come home an hour early she goes goes straight to bed. "I let them all get on with it while I catch up with reading journals. If you don't keep up with ideas, you're dead in my business. If I didn't have some peace and quiet to read, I wouldn't have a job."
Clearly it's not just au pairs who need time in bed.