Blog: Molly Saves the Day
Author: Molly
I’ve written a little about her before, but I’d like to talk about someone a bit more in depth today, since the “mommy wars” seem to still be raging. When I first started my last job in journalism, one of the reporters was out on maternity leave. As I read archived stories in subsequent weeks in order to get a handle on the politics and people of my new hometown, I began to notice her byline in the pieces that were the best-written, the most literary, and the most human. I learned a little bit about her before she ever came back from leave: she was a member of one of the town’s most “old money” families, had graduated from a prominent Seven Sisters college, and there were whispers that people would have thought she was a lesbian, if she hadn’t been married and recently given birth.
When she came back — let’s call her Kim — her maternity leave had just ended. She was glad to be back at work, among adults and with co-workers she’d built good working relationships with. I didn’t get to know her very well, but I did hear people talk to her a lot: “You know, it’s okay if you decide to leave and stay home with the new baby for a few years.” “I stayed home with mine until he was four and I never regretted it — they’re only that young once.” “You have the money to do it, so why not do it? So many people would if they could!”
People commented derisively behind her back about where she’d gone to college and that she must have picked up “weird feminist ideas” there. You can imagine the derision for yourself. The fundamental idea was that the only reason a woman could possibly have for going back to work was economic, and that if economics were taken care of, a woman should surely forego work — even work that was fulfilling and creative — in exchange for full-time childcare responsibilities.
She didn’t get as many good assignments after that, though her status as one of the city’s favorite daughters had always won her juicy stories previously. They moved her to an “editing” role which was supposedly a promotion, but without the office and supervisory role this suggested. Instead, it cut down on her available stories.
So she made the choice to stay home.
Apparently, I’m supposed to regard that choice as noble, and one that she made completely of her own free will. Apparently, that’s a totally valid choice for a woman to make, and not open to criticism.
When people ask me — as my friend Ceecee did earlier today — why feminists don’t believe women should have the choice to stay at home, I said to her that it’s a lot more complicated than that. It’s not that we think women shouldn’t have the choice: on the contrary, I wish EVERY woman had the absolutely free choice to determine whether she wanted to spend her child’s first years doing full-time childcare.
Note that I do not say “taking care of her children” or “being a stay at home mom.” Countless women have children and careers. The choice is not between these things, and “stay at home mom” just has way too much baggage attached to it — as if the moms who stay at home are less mom-like. It’s also a word that sounds overwhelmingly positive: stay-at-home mom conjures images of cookie-baking and playtime. Most people, however, understand that when the idea is phrased as “full-time childcare,” it refers to all aspects of taking care of a child, good and bad. It also describes it as work (though not work people in this society are paid particularly well for). The choice in question is not between being a mom and being a career woman. The choice is between a career and full-time childcare, and it’s high time we recognized it with the terminology it deserves.
But women in this society do not have freedom of choice, regardless of their socioeconomic status. Women on the lower rungs of the economic ladder, who often (not always) have less fulfilling work, cannot even imagine the possibility of choosing not to work. Their income is needed to support the child they have given birth to. For women on the upper end of the scale, the ones who are able to think about both options, the pressure is insidious and high to choose full-time childcare over career. As the example above shows, the pressure to be a “good mother” comes from countless directions, and even class guilt is invoked — you’re lucky to have a good enough husband that he can take care of you, so take advantage of it! — and many women with otherwise successful and brilliant careers are persuaded to give it up for life in babyland.
I maintain that the best solution to all these issues is a comprehensive parental leave plan that allows parents to care for their children and keep their jobs, and allows choice regarding which parent or parents stay home with the child and when. However, it’s important to note that good parenting has nothing at all to do with whether one is working or not. Even if you’re in the same room with your child, you can still be a bad parent — as John and I found out a few nights ago.
Noodles and Childcare
John and I love a local Vietnamese restaurant here in town. Great pho, a fabulous clay pot pork dish, and summer rolls to die for, with no entree more than $7 unless you delve into the seafood. My kind of place.
When we went there last week, though, we saw an unlikely sight. A party of nine, two couples with five kids of ages 6 to about 10. The kids all sat at one end of the table while the adults sat at the other. The first thing we noticed is that the adults were all chowing down on appetizers while the children stared at empty plates and poked each other with chopsticks. They were bored — as any kids would be. The parents talked among each other but never to the children, except to admonish them when they behaved badly.
A few minutes later, just after we’d ordered, the entrees were brought to the table of 9. The adults had some of the yummier dishes served at the restaurant. The children, on the other hand, were each issued a bowl of plain white rice vermicelli and a cup of soda.
Let it be known that I am no stranger to the plight of the picky eater. My sister was one, and many times we went to a Chinese restaurant only to hear her order plain rice with plain broccoli. But I got the feeling there was no way 5 out of 5 children would opt for plain noodles, with no sauce or condiments.
My assumption was proven right a few minutes later, when the oldest of the children asked her mother if she could try a bite of the mother’s dish. She was told that no, she couldn’t have any, but if she finished her current bowl of noodles, she could have more noodles.
At this point, John and I were absolutely flabbergasted. The kids, now loaded to the gills with the carbs from their unadorned pasta and sugary soda, were starting to get testy and irritable. The parents continually ignored them as long as possible and only talked to them if they’d done something really bad. When one child intentionally spilled her soda, the mother left it to the waiter to clean up.
****
I like children. And I love seeing good parenting in action — the problem is, when you see good parenting, it’s often hard to notice it. When you see bad parenting, it’s hard to ignore. I do not know whether those mothers stayed home with their children or not. But I know this much: even if they did, it wouldn’t do those kids any good. An average daycare provider would pay more attention to each child than these parents did.
We can idolize stay-at-home moms all we want, but the truth is, there’s no way to tell whether these mothers who are nobly “opting out” of the labor market are decent parents, or what I’ve now decided to term Vermicelli Parents. The notion of deciding whether someone is a “good” mother based only on whether she attends to her child full-time, rather than on her actual interaction with her child, makes my blood boil, especially when bad parenting abounds.
43 Responses to “When Choices Aren’t”
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It would be sad for a perfectly good pasta to suffer by association with such awful people.
Wow. Thanks for sharing this story. Agreed: There is no litmus test for what makes a good mother, and if there were, simply staying at home would not be it!
Indeed we can all share “bad parents in public” horror stories. I am far more horrified by the pressure applied to “Kim” to give up her paid job.
I was a full time childcare provider for 2 1/2 years. By the end I thought I was going mad. I spoke in babytalk despite my best efforts not to. I hated my life. I wondered if I should ever have had a child at all.
Being in the working world, being among adults, using my language and other intellectual skills, is simply vital to my sanity. None of that is available at home. I wanted to stay home. I thought it was right for me. But until we acknowledge that not everyone is temperamentally suited to it, and that doesn’t make us bad parents we will get nowhere.
Thank the gods my son was born in 1990 and not 1950. I really think I might have killed myself given another six months.
This example of the family at the restaurant is one of those drive by parenting anecdotes. Perhaps these truly were the worst parents of all time or maybe there were events earlier in the day that you don’t know about. As a parent - strike that - human being I realise that every thing I do in public leaves me open to others judgement and ridicule but I also realise that one can’t base ones every move on what others might think.
My two children frequently want plain pasta and my younger child only drinks water but my older girl always wants soda. The only time she is allowed to have it is when we go out to eat - it’s a special treat. When we go out to eat I always say “please bring the childrens’ food as soon as possible” and ask for bread or corn chips or something that can come right away. As frequently as not the adults who are having appetizers will get food before the kids.
Maybe the dad spent all day with the kids giving them love and affection and intellectual stimulation and at dinner he wanted to have some adult interaction. Maybe the mom’s dish contained something the child was allergic to. The point is maybe these were bad parents or maybe they were just normal people.
Parents are damned if they do and damned if they don’t as my mother used to say.
I hear you Deborah. My mother is a highly successful attorney who made a conscious decision NOT to be a stay at home mother to me or my brother. Things weren’t always perfect when we were little, but still in retrospect given my mother’s personality, I am convinced that keeping her housebound would have made Joan Collins in Mommy Dearest look like June Cleaver on Leave it to Beaver. Seriously she needs to be kept busy with intellectually challenging activities and a healthy amount of business related aggressiveness or she goes insane. And I suspect I myself having tendencies for depression when I’m not doing work I like am probably not a good candidate for stay at home motherhood either, though I might someday be a mother. I have one cousin who has three kids and still works fulltime-another with three kids who stays home, and guess what?!? I respect both of them for making the decisions they made according to what was best for THEM.
Ogo, you may want to re-read the last two paragraphs of the post and get over your feelings of being insulted. Then figure out what the point of the post was actually about. I was wondering where Molly was going with the story when she suddenly switched gears but it was pretty well pulled together in those last two paragraphs.
BTW, I loved your post Molly. I’ll have to start checking out your site.
Parents are damned if they do and damned if they don’t as my mother used to say.
Oh, I don’t think that’s just parents. :/
I like reading this except for the “analysis” of the family part. I frequently get irritated at the way parents treat their kids, but they are doing the best they know. I’m guilty of being a less than perfect parent, too. My son is 24 and still likes cheap macaroni best, not the kind from the health-food store that I would rather he’d eaten. Yeah, maybe the mom didn’t give the little one a bite, but this incident does not a bad parent make. As a mom in the early 1980’s I stayed home some, I worked some, and I’ll tell you there just isn’t a good way to parent in a country that disrespects parents and children. I always felt one step out of sync, one foot in several worlds, and woefully under-educated about parenting. I only had my parents way, and that was a huge lesson in how not-to-parent. I had to forgive myself for my less than perfect attempts, and apologize to my boy for the fact that he didn’t come with a how-to manual. I tried things that didn’t work , and tried other things that did. Sometimes the things that didn’t work were clear to others as well, and I was ashamed for being terribly human, flawed, less than perfect. It’s so much easier to parent other people’s children…especially across the room from them…it’s so much harder to parent your own kids.
Thank you for a lovely, well-articulated take on the subject. It’s time more educated women leapt up and said, “Thank you for asking, but no, I’m not going back to work only because I need the income but also because I feel I have another purpose on this planet besides just motherhood. I need to run this country, company, NGO, whatever and hey…they thought I was perhaps the best candidate for negotiating peace in the Middle East. Didn’t think I could pass up that opportunity.”
Another problem is the age segregation of society. For the majority of human history, the bulk of work was done ‘at home,’ loosely defined as that may have been, and adults brought children along for all but the most delicate and dangerous tasks (though there were variations of course by age and gender).
Children were expected to get along politely in adult society, prompting rapid socialization, and adults were expected to integrate children into their lives.
Considering how much less dangerous the typical modern, Western workplace is than many past examples, it’s high time we quit penning kids up between school, home, parks and the mall. This age segregation directly harms childcare providers by cutting them off from adult society and effectively hiding their work, as well as making it even less likely that men will ever engage broadly in shouldering more of the childcare burden.
And as problematic as the mother drive-by phenomenon is, how hideous is it to expect that parents discourage their children from acting like unholy terrors and at the same time, treat them with consideration and respect in public? The myth that developmentally typical children can’t be socialized to have good manners is a cornerstone of the age segregated society.
That said, given that public school is in general a Good Thing, it further penalizes parents to have it get out in the early afternoon. If kids can’t come along and experience the adult work world at least some of the time, if the school schedule has to mimic the workweek then it shouldn’t be structured so as to put families in a bind, a situation not helped by budget cuts that eliminate after school programs and recesses.
A sucky system, all around.
I think this post and the one about Schaefer and sexual harassment should be read and thought about together. Given the incredibly hard (and unpaid) work that constitutes doing care for an infant or toddler, what would cause women with thriving careers that they loved to go do that fulltime?
I liked this post, but like ogo and Shelley, I didn’t care for the family criticism. I would have appreciated it more as an allegory, I think. The thing is, it’s just impossible to know if that situation was really as bad as it looked. Maybe the daughter always asks for white rice vermicelli. Or maybe she always insists on getting exactly what her brother does, even though she is admonished every time that she never eats it, and it’s been said so many times that the mother knows her daughter is just trying to push her buttons, so she tells no, eat the food you ordered.
You can play that game endlessly. The point is, just as you shouldn’t judge a book by its cover, you shouldn’t judge a family after you’ve seen them interact for an hour.
I couldn’t agree more that the quality of the parent-child relationship has nothing — nothing — to do with whether or not mom stayed at home.
It always makes my blood boil when I hear people say that they think their children will be missing out on something by not having mom at home during the day. My parents both worked full-time for my entire life, and I don’t feel I missed out on a thing. I had a wonderful relationship with both of my parents, and I still do. (Whereas the very same aunt who scolded my mother for putting me in daycare hasn’t exchanged a civil word with her daughter since the daughter was sixteen.)
I think part of the problem is that no matter what a woman does, whether it’s returning to work or staying home with the kids, there will always be someone telling her that she made the wrong choice, and that she’s missing out on something important, be it her child’s early years, or the satisfaction of having a job and a life outside the home. That brews resentment, which makes it all the more likely that those women themselves are going to be the first to try to pressure other women into making the same choice they made — especially if their own choice was made under the same kind of pressure.
It’s about validation.
Just one of the many reasons I’m grateful to my mother for having been such a good role model. I’m hoping that, when I reach that point, it will give me some measure of resistance.
I think class fear is a bigger part of this than is usually discussed.
Going back to work right away is a sign of being “lower class” in a lot of ingnorant people’s minds. To be working class is to be unsuccessful, in thier minds. They see these kids of “lower class” people grow up into “juvenile deliquents” beacuse of the lack of “parental attention”. They do not see kids as products of the overall community - if a child is “messed up”, it is because the mother was not good enough. Not shitty public education, lack of health care, hunger, consumer culture, or violence-is-good media. Nope, a kid grows up “bad” because the mother was selfish. So, if you leave for work, you risk imposing a “lower class” lifestyle on your precious, innocent, baby, who can only become brilliant, cultured, and well behaved if you quit your job and become a full-time model of how the “successful classes” do it.
hk -I’m not insulted. I do assume from the post that Molly hasn’t raised her own children so she might not be quite so able to look at the “vermicelli” kids from the perspective of a parent.
However I did go back and re-read the entire post. While I thoroughly agree that women don’t have real choices, I don’t think blanket condemnations of two families that one saw for - what - an hour or two helps create an environment that respects everyones choices. She claims, having only been in the same restaurant with these families, that even if those mothers stayed home with their children it wouldn’t have done the kids any good. That is an unsupported conclusion because she really doens’t have any other observations to base it on (or she fails to give us the further details that could support her point). What she described barely represents terrible parenting. The adults sat at one end of the table - how is this terrible the kids were described as between 6 and 10 years old. Presumably at least two children sat ajacent to adults. Did she see the parents order the food? Did they consult the children about what they wanted? Who knows she doesn’t say. There are a many non-bad-parent explanations for the kids food choices and the seating arrangements. Poking each other with chopsticks is what that age range does it can be obnoxious or annoying but kids can be both (obnoxious and annoying) and still be great kids with good parents. I’ll give you that spilling soda on purpose is bad behaviour and could be blamed on the parents but as to letting the restaurant staff clean it up are these bad parents because they neglected to bring their mops with them?
I get it. Women don’t have real choices. I get it 24/7. I don’t think the noodle anecdote works well to bring home the point.
I was going to say something in regards to the main point of the post, but so many people jumped to defence of the parents that I feel like I should say something.
I’m currently raising one of those kids that nobody wanted. That kid was labeled a delinquent pretty much before reaching 4 years of age, when we got him. I’ve recently told this to a comparatively new friend of mine and she was like, NO WAY, he’s such a bright and sweet kid! And yes, he is - now. After bloody YEARS of really hard work. And yes, during those years one may have chanced upon us out in public with my son misbehaving or whatever. His first teacher wanted me to put him on Ritalin in the beginning of his first grade. But what the people would never have been able to say is that we were not invloved with him. We were/are always interacting with our son, always on top of things. And I happen to have a pretty fucking invloving career, and my husband does, too. We don’t hover over our son, he is actually pretty independent (too independent, for my grandma’s comfort), but we make it a point to be there for him.
If those parents from the story wanted some adult interaction, they fucking shouldn’t have brought the kids with them. If they brought the kids with them, they should be talking with them, instead of just reprimanding them. It doesn’t have to be all SpongeBob talk, either - my 7-year-old is starting to be able to discuss Buddhism vs. Christianity, because that is a topic that he’s into these days. And both me and my husband are into Code Lyoko cartoon he watches. So we can talk any time on quite a few levels.
I’m not saying we’re the golden standard of parenting, but dammit, people, how many excuses will we keep coming up with for shitty parenting? “Oh, my parents were this way, so it’s all I know.” - read some books. Pick what makes sense. Try, see what works. Modify. Repeat. “Oh, we’re only human, I get so tired.” - Does anyone realize how refreshing and fun it is to romp around with your kid? Like, you know, when you do it like you mean it?
I could go on. I probably already said more than I should. I realize there will be people who may call me a perfectionist or parent nazy or whatever. I just completely absolutely disagree with the “you can’t have it all” excuse that people use. YES, you can have a really good career and a really great relationship with your kids. And fuck those who say you can’t, because they are just showing their weakness and are trying to excuse their incompetence.
Maybe I didn’t make it clear — all five kids, from two different families, were served exactly the same thing.
That, to me, is what made it seem weird and not just “oh, a picky eater or two.” I think at that point — and you didn’t see the borderline abusive way the father talked to the daughter and one son — you can pretty much say “bad family.”
Ah. Thank you for the above. I also agree with that — if you don’t want interaction with kids, babysitters are hella cheap around here. For the price of feeding them sodas and rice vermicelli, even, you could probably hire a sitter in these parts.
babysitters are hella cheap around here
Ever tried to find one to take five kids?!
(not to excuse bad parent behavior, but c’mon.)
Oh, and I know this is a triple comment now (gah.) but elfinity, thanks for sharing your viewpoint.
I generally DO give parents the benefit of the doubt. I don’t generally think “oh, man, they can’t control their brats” when I see upset or whining kids. I know I was a whining kid more than once and probably embarrassed my parents greatly.
But the way these kids were treated was plain neglectful, and it was obvious from the context — if it didn’t come through, that’s because I was trying to be nicer to them than they probably deserved. Parents who won’t talk to their kids except to growl at them shouldn’t have brought along more kids than adults to a restaurant. It’s that simple. Either be with your kids, or don’t — either way can be good and necessary for everyone’s sanity — but don’t be with them and ignore them. There’s no excuse for that, especially from two families at the same table.
Mythago: in this area, babysitters who’ll take 5 kids aren’t that uncommon, and aren’t expensive.
I just asked my neighbor (who has 4 kids) how much she paid babysitters a couple years ago, when they still needed one. She said that for the four of ‘em, she usually paid $20 — unless the sitter stayed overnight.
In other areas I don’t know how it is, but this is a very economically depressed area with tons of people with 4-8 children.
In NC we pay $10.00 hour for two little ones. However one of my friends stays home with her children and takes other peoples kids for the day. She only asks $7.00 (for 2 kids) because she doesn’t feel comfortable asking for more.
This drives me nuts. It’s the same “women can’t win” theme. If you WANT to work, you are a BAD MOTHER because ALL GOOD MOTHERS only want to stay home and raise kids! If you WANT to stay home (and if you can — that’s a big “if” in this economy), you’re a brain-dead soccer mom setting back the feminist movement.
Can’t we just support one another’s choices? Or are we all so insecure that we can only defend our choices by knocking down others’? Some women like to hang with their kids all day. Some women would rather not, thank you very much. Some want to but can’t because they have to work. So friggin’ what? Why are any of those choices “worse” than any of the other choices? (Except for the sad lack of safe, well-paid, affordable child care, that is. Which sometimes unfairly makes the work choice “worse” — but not because it’s inherently bad, for crying out loud.)
Sigh, sigh, sigh.
The thing that’s “wrong” with these choices is that a patriarchal society has put so much pressure on women that it’s hard to tell whether a given woman’s choice was really her choice, or if she was pressured into it.
In the example I gave of Kim, you might say — not having seen her work environment — “you should support her choice to work from home.” But the real story is a lot more complex. It wasn’t totally her choice, and that’s what sucks — pressures surround women on all sides, and it’s hard to know if their choice was really their own or if forces collided to make it happen.
Ever tried to find one to take five kids?!
Okay, so the two families each get their own babysitters. You’re still saving five meals (even shoddy cheap ones) and you can get all four in one car, so you’ve just halved your gas costs for the night; a babysitter for two or three kids isn’t going to be hard to find at all, and two of them for a couple of hours aren’t going to break the bank.
“When one child intentionally spilled her soda, the mother left it to the waiter to clean up.”
Did just the mother leave it, or did the father leave it too?
Oh wait, I forgot. It’s just mom’s job.
Good catch!
I was thinking of my own family dynamic, in that one, where my mother invariably was the scolder/cleaner-upper.
But good catch nonetheless. No one’s free from those slip-ups, including me.
It’s okay. I’m actually proud that I caught it, since I tend to be “less feminist” than the other feminists.
I wish that children’s behavior in public was always a good indicator of how well-behaved that child is. I’ve watched parents of horrible children, I mean children who should be put in muzzles, for crying out loud, and felt smug because my children never–NEVER–act like that in public. They are polite, well-behaved, say please & thank you, and have excellent manners. But let me tell you–the oldest daughter was hell on wheels. She was sweet in public but treated me like dirt at home, stole, lied, cheated, ran away, ditched school, got suspended over and over, and was generally horrible. There were days when the only parenting success I could point to was the fact that she was only horrible to me, and out in public acted like everybody’s fantasy of a sweet, well-raised child.
Molly, how do you feel knowing that the point of your post has been pretty much over-taken by people’s reactions to your anecdote? I think that everybody has an opinion about parenting and just has to spout it.
Kactus makes a good point about ignoring Molly’s major point in favour of the response to her anecdote. Why should “Kim” have to forgo stimulating adult workplace interaction simply because her family has enough money that a second family income is a luxury rather than a necessity?
Obviously, if she had wanted to be a full-time childcarer for her infant she would have already chosen that at the time of the birth instead of coming back to work at all, so we’re not dissing a woman who freely chose full-time childcare as her proferred childrearing model, we’re looking at a woman who wanted to go back to work in the job she enjoyed. But others changed her job against her wishes so that it was no longer so stimulating and enjoyable, so she gave up. Why fight against an entire community’s opprobrium for a job you don’t enjoy anymore when you don’t need the paycheck?
“Kim” was lucky in one way that she did have the financial option of doing without her wage, so she could ruefully shrug and get out of that newsroom. What about all the other women who can’t afford to shrug off the paycheck and find themselves shunted on to the less-challenging less-rewarding less-promoted mummy-track whether they want it or not?
Well, and that leads, really, to the big problem. A lot of the women who can LEAST afford to leave work are the ones who perhaps don’t have as fulfilling work anyhow — unskilled laborers, minimum wage workers, et cetera. For an unskilled laborer, full-time childcare might be a preferable alternative to their normal job — but it’s not an alternative they can take.
Women fortunate enough to get an education and get fulfilling work they love are most likely to end up economically able to do it — but for them, work is a more attractive option than full-time childcare.
Women at both ends get screwed by this system, bigtime. If America had an actual parental leave plan, I wonder how much of this “debate” would be moot!
One thing that got to me in Kim’s case was, as Molly said, her writing was outstandingly better than her co-workers. So the whole community lost a good writer/good reporter just because Kim was pressured into quitting.
Which brings up the question, too, of how well-meant the criticisms of her choice were. Was there an envy factor behind the pressure?
Deborah, my mom was the SAHP who used to demand of Professor Avenger that he talk to her when she came home because she needed her mind stimulated after being in the house with my semi-autistic younger brothers(2 of them!), my infant sister and I, who at the age of 5 wasn’t the conversationalist that I became later on in life
I’ve just been reading the start of an article by Steve Biddulph, a “parenting expert” of the daycare-is-bad* school. About three sentences in, he describes “rows” of infants in daycare “aching for someone special to love them”. At which point I nearly put my fist through the computer screen, and didn’t read further. How can anyone say it’s a free choice to work or not work when people are throwing that kind of crap at you.
(*fwiw, I think bad daycare is bad.)
Not a parent and God bless those of you who are. As they say to the soldiers these days, “thank you for your service.”
However,
If the little darlings are insufficiently socialized, DO NOT, bring them to a restaurant to create noise and mayhem. It is selfish and inconsiderate. Take them to Chuck-E-Chees or some place.
In Utah I see a ton of parents from the “It’s easier to have a new one than to wash the old one off” school. I and other adults are trying to have a nice meal and here’s a bunch of kids squalling and screaming and the parents seem utterly oblivious to it. These same morons bring kids to plays and movies and have a “fuck you, my kid can scream if he/she wants to” attitude. Pet peeve…sorry for rant.
Back in 1971, my favorite high school teacher gave birth to twins. Her job was held open for her while she went on forced leave. The school district rule was that she could not come back to work until her children were at least two. She wanted to come back to work one year and eleven months later, at the start of the school year but the request was denied until the following school year. If she’d needed to work for financial reasons she would have had to work outside her profession for two years, eleven months. There was no such rule for fathers of course.
During that same period, jobs were listed under male or female in our local paper. All the better paying jobs were under ‘male’ and employers didn’t hesitate to tell a qualified woman who wanted to apply for one not to bother.
We had to fight for laws regarding equality and then we had to fight to get them enforced. I guess this was a long time ago, but it doesn’t seem like it to me, a woman in my fifties. I can’t believe this country has become so conservative when I think of all the battles that were fought for the rights of workers, women, and minorities.
Actually, I’m getting another parallel from both these stories.
Kim’s co-workers all assumed that because she was now a “mommy” she ought to want the more boring jobs, or she ought to want to stay home with her child - and that she ought to be pressured into getting what she ought to want.
A lot of the readers of this blog evidently assume that children will only want white rice vermicelli and soda, and that if you see a group of children eating plain noodles and drinking soda at a restaurant, even if it seems they would like more interesting food, that’s an illusion - it’s obvious that the dull stuff is all they really want.
Power is, among other things, the ability to force someone into an unpleasant environment and to order them to be grateful for it. It’s an authority that adults exercise over children: an authority that Kim’s co-workers and employers exercised over her.
[drift] I owe you, Magis. I was in a laundromat a couple of years back and yelled at a guy for letting his kid race around the place screeching and swinging a pool cue at the other patrons. The way the guy carried on about MY rudeness after his kid nearly connected with my head, you would have thought I was calling for his precious spawn to be roasted alive on a spit;As opposed to calling for the man to explain to his son that the whole world was not a fucking playground filled with living puppets meant only for his own amusement.[/drift]
I and my brother and sister are all 1950’s babies. Our family didn’t have a lot of money, mostly because my father simply didn’t have high-paying jobs - he worked in retail, and then (since post-war America was desperate to find teachers for the swelling ranks of Boomerlets) he became a sixth grade teacher.
It was a very traditional situation: mom stayed home and did all of the childcare and house-keeping. Dad trudged off to work. Each of them was kind of anxious about money, but they couldn’t hold on to it. My grandfather brought groceries sometimes right before payday.
So here’s the pertinent point: after all three of us kids were in school all day, my father decided that it was about time for my mom to start contributing economically to the family. That’s how he put it. He felt she wasn’t pulling her weight financially, and now that the impediments to her equal financial contribution were safely in school, her self-indulgent life of leisure should end.
I guess he had a point (there are a lot of family dynamics that I haven’t mentioned), but I recall my mother’s bewildered resentment: she thought she’d known what she was signing up for when they married and she had the three kids. She’d dropped out of college for it, had few skills, was terribly shy, and damnit, she’d expected to raise the children, garden, read her magazines, cook new recipes, visit with the neighbors, and keep a comfortable pleasant house.
There was no such thing as rational adult discussion in my family, so after long months of my father’s needling and bullying, my mother began working at a series of office jobs, usually as a receptionist. That way, they achieved some sort of parity: each of them spent about eight hours a day being miserable.
My point here is that I’m not the only Boomer who recalls a similar event. The post-war trend of moms at home with the children shouldn’t be proffered as the idyllic gold standard for family life, with the only flip side being the stultifying pressure keeping middle-class women out of the economy (made crueller by the fact that many of these women, or their moms or older sisters, had spent the war years doing hugely important war work outside the home). Dad at work, mom at home…well, every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way, but let’s not forget that the post-war years were (a) a sociological aberration, and (b) lived by people who all had their own histories.
And OMG, two couples should absolutely factor in the cost of baby-sitters when they go out for the evening. Otherwise you get take-out. Even if the children are totally well-behaved, because it’s mean to make them sit there like accessories or luggage.
Parenting, women’s choices, and mommy drive-bys…
Molly is certainly right about one thing: when you see bad parenting, it is hard to ignore it. The problem is, it’s impossible to reliably identify bad parenting based on a two hours spent in a restaurant. Furthermore, it’s interesting to note that e…
simply because her family has enough money that a second family income is a luxury rather than a necessity?
Note how we assume that the father’s income is the income, and the mother’s is merely a ‘luxury’ or the ’second’ income, since the family wouldn’t necessarily be homeless without it.
Mythago: in this area, babysitters who’ll take 5 kids aren’t that uncommon, and aren’t expensive.
Well, shoot, send them over here. Where I live, teenagers do rather better financially than $10 for a night’s babysitting, even if they HAD a night off to babysit instead of doing homework (and if you’d trust a teenager with your kids anyway). I have a lot of childfree friends who apparently think babysitters are like pennies–just go outside and look around and you’ll find one lying around, no problem–and it’s just not that easy. Of course, “couldn’t get a babysitter” is no excuse for “letting your kids misbehave in public”.
Mythago, maybe you’d find it easier to get hold of a responsible babysitter if you were prepared to pay her (and it would probably be a her) a rate comparable to the responsibility of the job?
When I was looking after kids whom I could get off to sleep by 8pm, I’d have two hours or more free to do my homework. But I expected to be paid for those hours, because (a) I’d worked hard to get the kids into bed and sound asleep, and (b) if anything had happened, my job would have taken priority over my homework. I *might* have taken a babysitting job looking after five children for $10, but I would have had to be pretty desperate and the parents would have had to be pretty badly off - I might take the job for that kind of money if this was a single mother going for a rare night out and just couldn’t afford to pay me more. But way too many parents seem to think that because babysitting is a “kid’s job”, and because a large chunk of the evening is spent “doing nothing”, they can offer a trivial fee.
A sort-of-related anecdote:
Before the xCLP was born, I was convinced I’d be the kind of sahm that conservatives wet their pants over - I couldn’t imagine anything more wonderful and rewarding than raising my own cute ickle baby. While the xCLP was on the way, it became obvious that economic pressures would force me back to work sooner rather than later, but I ‘knew’ I would go grudgingly.
A couple of weeks ago, at mum’n'baby group, the women were discussing going back to work. They were all dreading it. I wasn’t. I’ve already left the xCLP with her granny for an afternoon so I could get some editing done, and I can turn off my mummyness to a degree that sometimes frightens me.
Upon reflection, I see there wasn’t much point to this anecdote.