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.

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.

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”.

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…

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.

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.

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.

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.

(*fwiw, I think bad daycare is bad.)