Hi all! I'm new here but would like to ask for opinions on this case.
My family hired a maid not too long ago (less than but almost 6 months). So far she's been fine but a few days ago, she suddenly came to us during dinner to say she's having quite bad chest pain. So we asked her if she's ok and she told us she never had it before, only started when she started working for us (she never mentioned this until now). Anyway, we told her we'll take her to see a doctor tomorrow. The next day, I asked her if she's feeling better, and she told me it's still very pain but now she said it's her stomach... I told her yesterday she told me it was her chest, how come today become stomach, is it her whole body pain? And she said oh the chest is very rarely pain, it's her stomach that's very pain, and she say she thinks it's because she eat noodles every day for lunch which is bad for her health and she needs to eat rice (background on this, she eats whatever we eat and usually we eat fresh handmade [by her] noodles for lunch). I told her there's nothing unhealthy about fresh noodles and if she's not used to it maybe she can eat a bit of noodles and mixed with other carbs for a while, then slowly transit into eating more noodles over time (she's been eating noodles with us all this while and never complained by the way). And she said ok. Then at night when my mom is back, she complained to my mom the same thing and said she can use her own money to buy her own rice and eat that, if not she's scared she'd die (coz of eating too much noodles...). She even started crying! So my mom said ok, but even then she's still crying! She was literally crying the whole night till I talked to her and asked her what's she so upset about we already said ok. Then she told me my grandma said she's bad so she's upset (my grandma said no such thing that I heard). I told her she probably misunderstood/misheard my grandma, this is not what we think of her. I also told her if she's really upset she can tell us so in case it's a misunderstanding, we can clarify, and she seems ok with it (I also asked my grandma later and she said she has never even said the words 'bad/not good' to her at any point of time....). This was 2 days ago.
Now so far at night after her dinner, she'll clean the dishes etc. then go to bed first around 9.30pm (there's honestly not much for her to do in my house, we even let her sleep for 2hrs in the afternoon post lunch). Usually we only go to bed at 10.30pm when I'll wake her up to clean the shower, post which she'll go back to bed. Last night, she almost didn't wake up so I called her a few times, and she seemed quite unhappy. Since this isn't the first time this happened, we discussed and concluded instead of letting her sleep first then we interrupt her sleep, she can stay awake until she cleans the shower. So I told her that this evening and that if she has nothing to do, she can just sit around first until then (if we're not done by 11pm, we'll clean it ourselves and she can just go sleep). She then tells me she can't sit for so long because it's bad for her back (?????). So I said fine if you don't want to sit you can ask for more work, plenty of work to be done. Then she says ok. So tonight, she's just sitting on the couch from 9.30 onwards and when I came out of the shower, I noticed her crying AGAIN!
Is this a normal thing??? Like I didn't even scold her or anything really don't know why is she so upset. So far we've been more than reasonable with her, if she did anything wrong we never scold only tell her what she needs to do moving forward, if we buy anything fancy we always ask if she wants and give her a share, we let her eat as much as she wants and let her rest when she's done with her chores. We're even paying her the higher end of usual maid salary!
Please let me know your opinions, really at a loss of what to do... Appreciate any feedback, even criticisms.
:thankyou: