FATALISM AND THE HOMEMAKER

                                                                                      

The Greeks were great believers in fatalism. Fatalism is a belief that whatever happens is predestined. Are we homemakers predestined to suffer holidays or to enjoy them?

In preparation for a trip to the United States for her daughter-in-law’s sixth delivery and for a month’s stay there Jamilah Din had envisioned a holiday of sorts in a cooler clime. Then reality struck and she was brought down to earth with an acute thud.

She remembered the story of The Girl and the Ring Cake. A story that has always lived with her forever, it seems. Nobody else has ever heard of it so perhaps it was a sign of an innate destiny of hers that she should have, inborn, such a ridiculous story that it was to haunt her in her later years.

A mother and a young girl lived together in a forest far, far away from civilization.  The girl’s grandmother died one day and the mother had to leave her daughter to see to the funeral arrangements of the deceased. The trip would take about a week. The mother worried and was flustered over how her daughter would survive the week on her own. The poor mother sat down and rummaged her head for a solution. There was only one night left before her departure and she suddenly got an idea. The mother decided to bake a ring cake. A large one. And so she did. When she had done that and the ring cake was ready, the mother happily packed her bags in the morning and before she left she put the ring cake around her daughter’s neck and said,

“Now daughter dear, while I am away all you need to do is to eat this ring cake that I have put around your neck. This will keep you from starving until I get home.”

The mother left and returned a week later. Her daughter had died. She looked and saw that the ring cake had only been half eaten. Her daughter had been too lazy (or stupid), or both, to turn the ring cake around so that she could eat the other half. She starved to death.

Now, Jamilah Din did not bake any ring cakes. Ring cakes would not have lasted a month.

So what she did was to cook, in batches over a period of a month, two hundred and fifty meals, packed them individually, labeled and froze them in re-heatable plastic containers and zipper bags. She listed instructions on how to use the electric steamer, the oven, the stove and ample warnings of the dangers lurking in the kitchen. She made a food chart or a periodic table of sorts of all the meals that her five children would have for a month. Then she printed them out and plastered them all over the walls in the dining room and the kitchen.

An example follows.

	CHICKEN       CHOP	RENDANG	CHICKEN     CURRY
Childl 1	6  ******	5  *****	6  ******
Child 2	6  ******	5  *****	5  *****
Child 3	9  *********	5  *****	6  ******
Child 4	9  *********	5  *****	6  ******
Child 5	9  *********	5  *****	6  ******

	BEEF       STEW	YUMMY   CHICKEN	BEEF       KICAP
Child 1	6  ******	7  *******	5  *****
Child 2	5  *****	5  *****	5  *****
Child 3	6  ******	7  *******	5  *****
Child 4	6  ******	7  *******	5  *****
Child 5	7  *******	8  ********	6  ******

Jamilah Din then instructed them to strike off the relevant asterisk each time they took a pack of food from the freezer. The chart above ensures that everyone has their fair share of their favourite meals without crossing over into another’s domain. This prevents strife and civil war. And probably mud slinging and hair pulling as well.

She then took an excruciating seventeen hour trip to the US, sprinted five hundred meters in her high heels to gate fifty in New York, took the connecting flight to Baltimore, arrived, and in two days her daughter-in-law delivered her sixth child. She cooked and cleaned and wrestled with her five older grandkids for a month, gaped at their crazy antics, answered scrutinizing questions and cooked for a party of ten a day before her flight back. 

She then took another excruciating seventeen hour trip back to Malaysia, sprinted the same five hundred meters, in her high heels, to gate fifty in New York, took the connecting flight to Tokyo and then to Kuala Lumpur and arrived to a home cocooned in dust and to relieved five alive children. They wiped their brows and sighed, "Now,we no longer need to strike off asterisks.".

Jamilah Din's holiday was anything but.

PS: This is a true story. The names have been changed to protect the guilty. The protagonist now resides in Kuala Lumpur and is living the life of a recluse.


The food chart/periodic table is an actual one that worked well. Everyone had food that they liked. And each person could keep track of how much of their ration had been used up without having to check into the freezer (provided they marked off the appropriate asterisk diligently each time). Even if they skipped meals no one else would be able to eat into the other' share by mistake.

The numbers indicate the number of packs there are for the particular type of food followed by the same number of asterisks. For example if there are 5 packs of chicken curry the number 5 followed by 5 asterisks will indicate that. Each time a person takes a pack of chicken curry he or she will cross out 1 asterisk leaving 4 asterisks which in turn indicates 4 remaining packs of chicken curry left in the freezer. And so on and so forth