Rearing family is work, so let’s pay for it
My single biggest regret as a mother is spending so much time working outside the home,
IT’S Friday. A sunny afternoon in late May. I’m almost 42 weeks pregnant and on Monday I’m booked in for “dynamite”. Long walks, the potholes of Wicklow and a Pacific Rim of vindaloos are no match for this child’s obstinacy. But now, around 5pm, there’s a delinquent pain. A definite stirring. The phone rings. It’s my best and favourite client. “Sorry but we need another speech for the Finland trip.” “I’m in labour,” I say. “Don’t worry,” comes the reply, “it’s only a short one.”
My daughter is born with the dawn and five days after an emergency caesarean I’m back at my desk at home, cradling her in a rose-pink sling. When you work for yourself, it’s No-Mun-No-Fun. The mortgage must be paid and with two children, costs aren’t doubled, they’re squared.
After five months of 14-hour work days and 24/7 breast-feeding, I’m back at another desk. Or rather in front of it. Thin. Dazed. Our wonderful GP is prescribing two kinds of therapy. Sleep and talk. Did they work? Yes. Did I learn? Not on your nelly.
Fast-forward to 2007, the months before an election. The ante is up, the Yanks have arrived from Washington. I’m in the inner sanctum. At home, there’s been a cold, a sore throat, the GP, paracetamol, antibiotics, non-stop checking in with Granny who is minding. But on Sunday there’s a rash. The glass test proves it’s not The Other. It must be the new washing powder. Only the child must be gorging on it, because her tongue, too, is roaring red.
Doctor. One of those walk-in locum places. “Allergy,” he says. “It’s not,” I say. “Are you a medical professional?” he says. “I’m not,” I say. “But I know an allergy, and that’s not one,” I say. The trainee beside him starts to fidget. He knows too it’s not an allergy, but will he say?
Three hours later, we have an emergency. We’re watching Dancing on Ice in front of the fire. But we can’t move. Doctor. This time, a different locum is on duty. It’s a mom from school. “Hospital,” she says. “You know what it might be.” In the intervening hours I still haven’t become a medical professional, but I do. Turns out to be scarlet fever, and its complications are not confined to the early 1900s, incinerated along with the Velveteen Rabbit. As we get ready to speed into the winter night, a fox with a broken tail is slipping through the car park’s Edwardian railings. He looks at us, and I think, “We’re living history”.
Like thousands of parents before and since, I lie on the floor on a mattress in Crumlin, my left arm held up, holding a tiny right hand. And that’s it. The moment. No more mad work. No more late nights. Everything of value is in that bed or under a Harry Potter duvet at home. No more career. No more ‘path’. Work would be whatever it took to keep a roof over our heads. I wouldn’t be fussy. The realisation changed our lives, infinitely, for the better. For the richer? Definitely not. Having made the choice, I can’t complain.
There’s the downside to stepping off the career ladder, particularly when you’re the family’s main or sole earner. My children would have so much more stuff, be so much ‘better off’, financially, if I hadn’t. But equally, we wouldn’t have had so much family time together. As our children vanish out the door to university, we can’t tap them on the shoulder and say, “I have time now, love. Let’s go back to when you’re 10”.
Last week, with my friend’s son starting school and my own son finishing, we spoke about those critical first seven years and if we had them back, what we would do differently. We agreed we would have stayed at home. In fact, my single biggest regret as a mother, is that I spent so much time out at work.
It goes without saying that there are mothers and fathers who perform minor and major parenting miracles, daily, even hourly, and still achieve stellar career success. Good on them. My mother did the unthinkable in the 1960s, going back to work, leaving her tiny baby with her own mother. Staying at home was not for her. It was never part of the plan. If she had stayed, both she and we would have been miserable.
But those who stepped off the career ladder to rear their families and now want to come back, find themselves in a work world where, according to the Financial Times journalist Lucy Kellaway, the “largest missing office minority” is not women or ethnic, but the over-50s. Certainly, employers need to get over their bias that women in their 50s who’ve reared their families have little to offer their businesses. A woman who’s managed to run a family and household could free and feed a city.
But it’s not just women
‘The wealthy can pop out squads of kids who abseil out of jeeps in the Serengeti of Rathgar’
who are suspect because of their age. I hear it from male friends who are being let go. There’s no way back. Except maybe as a freelancer or ‘consultant’ with no perks and lower pay. Over 50, we might have wonderful life and professional experience, but in the workplace is it valued?
What is not valued by Irish society is the ‘contribution’ made by the mother or father who stays at home. Earlier this year, at the Constitutional Convention, 98pc voted to amend article 41.2 regarding the woman’s place in the home on grounds of gender equality. (The article states: “In particular, the State recognises that by her life within the home, woman gives to the State a support without which the common good cannot be achieved.
“The State shall, therefore, endeavour to ensure that mothers shall not be obliged by economic necessity to engage in labour to neglect of their duties in the home”.)
I didn’t see any mention of article 41.2 being amended on the grounds of being good for children and families, for one parent, be it mother or father, to work exclusively in the home and have that position recognised financially. Because caring is work. It is hard work. Unrelenting work. It is essential, inestimable, invaluable.
Now the economy has started to move again, and in the centenary of 1916, perhaps we can decide, as a society, to value that caring in deeds as opposed to words. Even better, in hard cash. We could ask ourselves what we mean by “the common good”? What constitutes a rich life, a good life?
Would we dare to be so philosophically expansive that we would imagine our national wealth to comprise something other than a balance sheet? That we would pay parents to work at home rearing the next generation, as opposed to hunting them out to produce the virtual or digital equivalent of the widget?
In the 1980s, RTE had a programme called Women Talking. Apart from Nell McCafferty and Mary Kenny on the Late Late Show ,it was my first time really listening to women’s voices on the telly.
I appreciated the sarcasm when, at UCC, a brilliant lecturer told us he had a far better programme in mind. Women Silent. Today, he’d be hounded on Twitter. Possibly even out of his job. By umb-rage taken.
Last week saw quite a bit of umbrage at the speculative reporting of a study done on children and working parents. ‘Stop blaming us’. I’m not sure we were blamed for anything. But the yet unpublished study has got children talking, apparently, and they’re concerned their working parents are so
often absent, with little time for them. Yes, we hear about “the voice of the child”, yet I suspect it will be heeded only when the status quo is not at stake, or we agree with what it says.
For now, many parents will go on struggling to keep work and family going. Regrettably, it’s mostly those who are not well-paid. The wealthy can bounce out squads of kids, who this summer were abseiling out of the backs of jeeps in the Serengeti of Rathgar, their white cotton smocks straight out of War and Peace or Avoca.
If they choose to, they can buy lots of help. Not so the mother or father who would give anything to stay home with even one child but are “encouraged” into another kind of “productivity”. And are desperate to make the rent or mortgage.
Amending and animating Article 41.2 could bring priceless transformation to our society. To ignore it will be to count the cost.