Tick: Hard-working mother of three
Ton Lankreijer (61) is a writer and TV producer. He temporarily lives and works in Chiang Mai and observes Thai society.
Tick is forty-two years old. She cleans here, in the apartment complex in Chiang Mai. I have been living there since November last year.
Tick cleans corridors, offices, stairs, but also my apartment. Like that of other residents, there are about five hundred in total. When she finishes here, after five, she works in a massage parlor until late at night.
Copyright Ton LankreijerTick's husband died of alcohol five years ago, she has a daughter of five, fifteen and a son of eighteen. Tick is on the road a lot, she cooks early in the morning before going out and her son takes care of the little “baby” almost all day and evening.
Sometimes the “little baby” is forced to go to work, because then there is no other option. The beautiful, exuberant girl draws in the hall where you enter, while Mama cleans. Not an angry word, not a cry for attention. My mother works day and night, it's no different.
After work they go upstairs together to the English teacher, because there is still energy for that too.
I am reminded of the pampering with children in our own country. Food for psychologists, children in our culture are actually raised far too protectively, if you look at how things are going here. With us, every deviant trait is immediately ADHD, and if your child scores low during the CITO test, a battery of pseudo-experts is involved to turn your child into a modern version of Einstein. Because oh God, what could the neighbors think of such a “stupid” child. Who has never been outside Europe, and especially in Asia, travel advice: Thailand.
My own childhood also automatically passes by here. My mother was also a cleaning lady, "maid", was the hard definition at the time, bluntly. My mother often worked for shopping-sick ladies, who changed their interior every year, purely out of sheer boredom. Every week to the hairdresser, chronically dissatisfied and a different convertible every other year. I sometimes visited my mother when she was at work. A hard-working woman, never comment, not even on those poop bitches.
Copyright Ton LankreijerLike Tick's daughter, I often came home alone in the afternoons from school. The key was then under the classic garbage can, I still had one in 's Graveland. On Saturday, my mother was at the market behind a textile stall of an “uncle”, summer and winter. With goat hair socks in a kind of winter boxes, which were supposed to keep her feet warm. My mother turned 94 on December 18 last year, so work never kills anyone. And I also don't have childhood trauma when I see a garbage can. Nice that Tick and her children touch my spirit so much here.
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