Men get fed up with full time housewives

It is the noon of Eid (at the beginning of this week) and I am relaxing on my balcony.

You know, just reading a book of poetry by a pal ( 'A Blackbird Fell Out of the Sky'), listening to bird song and taking in the sights and sounds – the empty local across the road that, all weekend, was full of cars. The resident mad lad 'Mad Max' cursing the Car Wash boys for giving his dozing body a spray from their hoses. A couple unpacking a child and luggage from what was no doubt a weekend trip to ushago (you can tell from all the raw bananas and potatoes in the boot). A campaign car blaring a popular local musician's song (he is running for MP in our constituency). And that's when I see her – the woman in the apartment block across!

She is standing on her own balcony, staring into space.

She is a hefty woman, who looks about thirty, and is always dressed in a baggy T-shirt (she seems to have tens, maybe hundreds, of baggy T-shirts).

When we moved here two and a half years ago, she had two small children (aged about one and three) and was expecting a third. Now she has four kids – aged six, four, two and zero years respectively – and since she is always hanging out at her balcony (with the kids dashing out and in, yelling 'mummy), I assume that she is what people call a full time housewife.

Which means she has no maid/nanny/domestic help/residential engineer (or whatever P.C. word it is).

In the mornings you can see her taking the two eldest kids (a boy, then girl) to the bus stop where the school bus picks them. Then she washes clothes for hours, and hangs them out to dry, until her balcony is fairly bristling with wet clothes (like flags outside KICC during an international conference).

She is nowhere to be seen in the afternoon (siesta? Nollywood film watching?) but by evening, the balcony gets busy with kids and babies, again, and more than once, I've seen her peering from up-on-high into the large local I told you about. And you've got to wonder. Is it her husband (whom, incredibly, I've NEVER seen, though socks and boxers on that balcony line tell you kuna 'mzee' kwa nyumba) she's trying to spot in the local? Or is she wishing she was one of those carefree twenty-and-thirty somethings in the pub?

Did she have a career that she voluntarily, or at the behest of darling dearest, gave up to become a housewife and dedicate herself to raising these children? I think of the many letters on 'Confessions' that complain of men who never give, or else monitor the monies they give (to the last penny) to housewives who are raising the kids at home.

'My hubby treats me with a lot of madharau' these women will whine to Simon or Boke.

I recall a lady (of about forty) who I sat next to at 'Splash' one day (as my daughter, and her two daughters splashed about) and who had had a few wines to drink, and recognized me from this very space, and decided to 'confide in me' (as she put it). Let me make my own confession here. Journalists are the last people anyone ought to confide in.

If you tell us a juicy story, sooner or later, it is going to find its way to the radio/newspaper (albeit with the name/s changed). Because we care about our readers – and to care is to share.

Anyway, so Susan said how back in 2011 when she got pregnant, she resigned her literally high flying job (in marketing) to 'have time' with her baby; and her husband (well off) was happy with that. Then she got a second child, who had just gone to kindergarten, but now her formerly happy hubby says she is 'lazy' and that her work is to 'sit at home all day and eat his money.'

Before you get emotional (mostly during your maternity leave) and decide to resign to take care of baby, just know that by 2020, that supportive partner may be looking at you like a tick in the coat. Then you'll remember me – as you write to 'Saimo' and Boke .