When I was pregnant with my first daughter back 2010, I imagined that I would only need a month to look for a good house help.

I was newly-married so I wanted to maintain the privacy in my house for as long as possible.

I did not want a house help needlessly pottering around my humble abode until that time that I absolutely needed her.

I also had this addiction to cleaning and it had grown worse considering that I had the nesting syndrome that women fall victim to in the last trimester.

I had to clean everything and it had to smell great — it had to smell like detergent and bleach or to me, it just was not clean.

So my first house help arrived just on time.

Those were the days when everything was timed perfectly and everything worked like clockwork.

It was the pre-baby days.

It is like the photographs you see of a field with lush green grass in the middle of nowhere and a perfect blue sky.

Picture perfect (they only exist in pictures).

So let’s not talk about how the bubble of my perfect planning burst.

By the time my baby was four months old, I had fired my fifth house help.

And it only got worse.

There is one who lasted only a few days. Another lasted a week.

Four years down the line and two babies later, I know exactly what I want with a house help.

I also know when I am losing a good one.

That is why I am mourning the departure of my current nanny.

Let’s call her Alice.

Alice is in her late 20s.

She had a child in her early 20s.

She left her child with her mother so she could take up the job of watching over my children.

Life must go on

She treats them like her own.

Back at home, her brothers are not happy about her child in their father’s homestead so Alice has been saving in order to buy a piece of land.

She also saplings which she watched grow into trees and eventually converted into timber to build her house.

She has been keeping the timber in her father’s store while she waits for her savings to reach its target.

When she leaves my house, she will be going to a hardware store to buy iron sheets to roof her house.

Begging her to stay would be selfish yet letting her go is not easy.

My children are so attached to her and I know the transition will be difficult for them.

But life must go on and there will be more difficult changes ahead for them.

It is better for us to let go sooner than later.

My worry is that it will take a while to settle.

It is probably inevitable that we will go through a string of nannies before we find “the one” again.

However, this time I have braced myself for the worst so it can only go uphill from there.

As someone says if a nanny lasts one day, clap for yourself, your child is one day older.