From Amanda's very early writing (1990s to early 2000s), shared as it was originally written.
If you are female and have children and you want to work full time you have rocks in your head. If you want to be a househusband you have rocks in your head as well! Sure, working part time is essential for most people with small children - it’s the only peace and quiet and rest you have. But any more than very part time and you must be a maschochist.
I was babysitting my adored niece and nephew the other night and it reinforced a conversation I had with a number of men the previous week. I had come in from a busy day flying around (literally), moving office and collecting them at 5.00pm. This meant I was just in time for feeding and bathing. I did the normal auntie thing of spoiling them with pizza - no, this had nothing to do with saving me time and energy - I was indulging them of course!
So we went through the drama (he is 6, she is 4) of eating. He is great at it, she enjoys exploring the world with her eyes as she forgets to chew. I eat half her dinner showing her how easy it is to actually eat efficiently. The only way to have her eat faster is to suggest her brother is better at it and bribe her with ice cream for desert. Surprisingly, my sister is often reluctant to let me babysit the children. However, I adore these kids and normally have endless patience with them for 30 minutes or so, and I really look forward to spending time with them.
This particular evening, a friend of mine was at a loose end and I invited him over to dinner. Fortunately he has children of his own so he didn’t mind when I bathed them after his arrival, cooked their peaches and ice cream and handled the exhausted, teary rejection (theirs not mine!) of this delicacy that they normally ate cold.
By this stage I am very tense. I have made up their beds and thankfully put my precious babies to sleep after a nanosecond long story. I check on them 5 minutes later and two little angels are sleeping peacefully, looking gorgeous. And the tears came to my eyes as I was reminded of how much I loved them and how precious my time with them is.
Then I felt guilty.
But now I have to cook dinner.
As I’m cooking dinner, I am thinking I could have been more patient and let them eat slowly. What did it really matter. And I should have spent more time reading to them. So I vowed to play with them more the next morning while we were rushing around preparing for school. Oh yes, my sister had ironed their clothes, packed their lunches and done just about everything else. So I felt bad that I had struggled with the small load I had to bear.
Having small children is a HUGE strain. I know it’s wonderful and a very precious time. It’s also exhausting as you face chronic sleep deprivation and , in today’s era of ‘women should be able to do everything’, guilt because you want to stay at home full time, and either can’t afford to or feel you have to because being ‘just a mother or housewife’ is sort of a disgrace. Like I mean what do you do with your time?
This is a question posed by people who have never had children. Or babysat children over a long period of time. Or maintained a busy household so it runs like clockwork. ‘Work’ as in going out of the house to another place to earn money of any sort is a holiday compared to looking after houses, toddlers and babies.
Work as in staying at home except for the shopping with children, taking them to doctors, dentists, paying bills, cleaning, ironing, sewing, gardening and arranging the millions of things that have to be done behind the scenes to keep a household running smoothly and looking clean (let alone being clean) is not really recognized as ‘real’ work. Sure, there are debates about this issue and most people pay lip service to it and say “oh yes I’m sure it’s hard work”, but I think the role of the house person (usually female) is grossly undervalued.
And what surprised me was the number of men who said they really appreciated the role their partners played in supporting them by being at home and keeping the home running and in great shape while they earned money; and how much they valued their partner’s role in caring for the children and how much it reduced their stress levels to know all this was being taken care of so well. And how proud they were of their partners.
The men were asking me how to let their wives (in this case) know how much this meant to them. They were concerned with their wives feelings of non achievement and the drive they seemed to have to take on a really ‘important’ role. Or to improve themselves by studying. And that they should be able to do all this - work, study , mother and housekeep and bounce home at the end of the day ready to be a glamorous seductive siren able to set fire on a continuous basis to their man’s heart.
Do you think of yourself as “just” a housewife? Just a mother? Is that what you say when asked what do you do ? In an embarrassed voice that implies it’s nothing?
Has society changed so much that we can no longer , if we have the option, take time out to bring up children or support the working person with a stable, secure and smooth home life?
Of course, I can imagine how draining it may be to have children as your main intellectual stimulation each day; and that (usually) men can ‘escape’ (and often do) to work but please stop suggesting you are just a housewife or mother/father. It is a full time job, much more demanding than 99% of outside the home jobs; and you are in fact shaping the society of the future. Children learn about 70% of everything they will know by the time they are about 7. And they learn most of this by watching you and modelling what you do. It is a critical role.
It’s a difficult balance to achieve when you do have to work for financial or other reasons. How do you handle the guilt? And the work load - home work and away work? And the romantic loving sexy partner? When all you want to do is sleep for 8 hours uninterrupted and sleep in , do nothing for a while, make love on the sofa, go to the loo by yourself or read the paper in one hit. More on handling these things and staying sane in another column. Of course there’s always those who actually feel that by working away from home they have better quality time with children and partners. But I reckon they are in the minority.
Never call yourself “Just a housewife or just a mother’ again. Yours is a role that is incredibly important to society and appreciated more than you can imagine by most of your partners.
