Abuse is not only when you lock your housemaid in the toilet or pour hot water on her.
You are an abuser if:✍🏼
You feed your children sumptuously while your housemaid eats sour/spoilt food or leftover from your children’s plate.
You give her mat to sleep on the hard floor even when there is an extra bed in the house. Your only excuse is that she does not have such bed in her parents’ home.
You use your mouth to kill her slowly. From telling her how wretched her parents are on a daily basis, you also make sure you remind her daily that she is useless, stinkingly dirty, lousy, without brain, will never amount to anything in life, etc. Furthermore, you will cap it up by telling her that any day you decide to throw her out of your house she will end up in the gutter because she has nowhere else to go. 😢
Your housemaid wears tattered and oversized shoes and clothes while your own children are adorned like princes and princesses.
Your housemaid goes to school only on days you feel there is nothing for her to do for you in the house. Meanwhile your own children do not only go to school regularly, but also have home lesson teachers who continue from where the school teachers stopped.
She does not go to school with the necessary books and other required materials, not because you cannot afford them but because she is ONLY A MAID.
Your maid works like a jackal while your children, including the ones who are even older than her do nothing all day but watch television and press their phones.
She sits on the floor even during family prayer – if she is allowed to join in the prayer; simply because the seats in your living room are too expensive for her wretched buttocks to sit on.
You allow your children to insult, disgrace and humiliate your nanny or driver who is old enough to be their mother/father. As far as you are concerned a poor man/woman has no dignity.
Your housemaid cannot go out with your family because she is not neat or decent enough. Meanwhile, you are the one that bought next-to-rags for her to wear.
She cannot watch television in your house unless there is nobody in the house, after all there is no television in her patents house.
You take your children to the best hospitals and make sure they receive the best treatment when they are sick, but you are the self-made doctor for your housemaid. She does not worth your family doctor’s attention and you cannot imagine “wasting” your precious time and money to take her to any clinic. She either gets well with the paracetamol you are giving to her or be left to die. By the way sickness is not an excuse for her not to perform her chores as and when due😎
Your housemaid still uses pieces of old cloth during her menstrual cycle, but you buy the best sanitary pad for your daughters.😞
She has separate plate, cup and spoon, which must be kept at the balcony or anywhere outside your kitchen because they are contaminated🙆
You allow her to use detergent to bath because you cannot spend your hard earned money to buy toilet soap for her. Meanwhile, you allow her to carry, and even back your baby whom you use the best mother care products to polish their skin😁
Your housemaid is going through emotional, physical or psychological pain but cannot talk to you because you are not approachable. Some of such young ones ended in wrong hands because you scared them away from you😭
You are aware that your spouse or any other member of your household is abusing her sexually but you turn blind eye to it so as to protect the image of your family
I can go on and on but there is no need for that. I just want us to know that there are many ways we abuse the people staying with us consciously or unconsciously. Let us not be too quick to condemn those whose stories appear on social media without first of all checking our own lives and our attitude towards the people living with us.
Next time I will show us the ways we abuse our biological children.
Shalom!
Still your friend: Ijeoma Igwesi
@ familymattersng.com
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