Pick up any woman’s magazine and it’s likely you’ll find an article or, at the very least, reference to working mothers. It is an ongoing issue as more and more mums struggle with the physical and emotional juggle of going back to work. According to The Guardian, today 66.5% of mothers work.
Hobson’s Choice
I have three children and have always gone back to work following maternity leave. However, I am a teacher and I am fortunate that this a job that allows you to spend the holidays with your children, so I have the best of both worlds; an income, a career and time with my kids. But what if I worked in an office job? Or did shift work? Or was in the forces? Would things be different? The answer is, I don’t know. I have always said that if that were the case, I probably wouldn’t work. But that’s not wholly accurate. I wouldn’t want to work but I might have to. The current economic climate is dictating that we have no choice. In order to maintain our mortgage, car payments, utility bills, let alone our lifestyle, holidays and leisure activities we HAVE to work. For a lot of us there is no choice.
I have spoken to many working mothers who, once travel and childcare costs are deducted, are bringing home barely a couple of hundred pounds a month. But, they tell me, this £200 covers the council tax and electricity bill and so although a paltry ‘wage’ for all their efforts and seemingly ‘not worth it’, it is actually an essential part of the uphill struggle.
Get Back in your Box
What irks me is that whichever parent decided to be the ‘stay at home’ one, their career has been at best suspended, at worst gone forever. We often return to work in lower positions, compromising years of climbing the ladder to find ourselves answering to someone who was once, and still should be, in a junior position to us. When considering promotion my initial reaction is that promotion increases responsibility, which means more hours, which means more childcare, which means less time with my kids. Promotion becomes a negative thing. Something to be held at arm’s length rather than embraced.
Thou shalt not return to work when one has gone forth and multiplied
I am not going to say whether mothers should/should not return to work. Who I am to judge? Who are you to judge me? It infuriates me when this gets turned into a moral issue instead of a practical or personal one. When people have the audacity to suggest if you loved your children, you’d be at home with them, ergo working mothers are bad, selfish mothers. How dare they! Whether it is by choice or having to go back to work that is YOUR decision, not mine, not the neighbour’s and certainly not the mother in law’s. And it certainly bears no reflection on how much you love your children. Back off.
It’s not normal
I’ll leave you with this thought: The working mother is not a new concept. Go back through history and you will find mothers have always worked in some capacity, unless you were very rich and lived in Downton Abbey with the children being raised by nannies which is clearly much better for nurturing the kids… Today many of us still think ‘normal’ is father bringing home the bacon and mum at home with the kids, mirroring the iconic 1950s housewife, dazzling us with her sparkling taps and worrying gin habit. For many women this was a fulfilling role. For many more women, it wasn’t. In a country where, on the backs of their foremothers, women demand equality; we claim our choices. Our choice to marry, our choice to vote, our choice to have children, our choice to work. The mother’s role has changed. I’ll leave it up to you to decide if it is a change for the better.
Another thought provoking blog…I am, through choice, a stay at home Mummy and feel lucky and happy to have made this choice. I very much feel everyone makes choices that are right for them personally and financially about working or not and I would never make judgements on other peoples decisions. However, wish to share an incident …whilst at a school quiz night I overheard a table of working Mums make the comment “as long as we beat that table I don’t mind how we do” that table being mine with a team of ‘stay at home mummies’ …obviously a table of lazy, lower intelligent beings…pleased to say we beat them!!!!
I completely agree that everyone’s choice is personal and should be without reprimand. Love that the other table had you SAHM’s so wrongly pigeon-holed! Why do we judge each other so?!!
Sx
Secretly I’d LOVE to be a kept woman! A stay at home mother stroke housewife with enough money to shop in boutiques for myself and do my weekly shop at Waitrose…. like most of my friends I am not in this fortuitous situation. I work full time, as does my husband. Where I am lucky (or not as the case may be) is that I work from home and therefore incur no childcare costs. However it does mean that my working life and mothering life are all rolled into one – no separation. The bit that pisses me off the most is that people think we should feel GUILTY for working when we should be spending quality time with our children…. yet my children wouldn’t have the quality of life that they do without me earning the money to pay for it. If they want swimming lessons in Boden swimsuits and new school shoes then someone needs to earn the money to pay for them. I have no guilt about being a working mum – in fact I’m quite proud of it. And it’s nice to have some money to treat myself to a Costa once in a while without having to hide the evidence… With the recession on and costs of living going sky-high I think most middle-income households need to have 2 earners.
What a great post, Sarah- so balanced and thought provoking. I completely agree- there simply is no one size fits all- we as women are different, our families are different, our needs are different- and all of these change and evolve over time as well. For myself, there simply reached a tipping point, long before the fifth child came along, when the childcare costs outweighed the benefits of me working. Also, if theres one thing I’ve learned-no one has it all- there are compromises to every single choice we make, but for now, our family runs more smoothly when I’m at home. That may well change at some point in the future, Emx
Hmmm, an apt blog for me today. I work full time with two small children, since the job became a full time post in September. Today, Daughter had a huge meltdown, and we are beginning to see the “lack of Mummy time” cracks appearing at school. I spend my week living by the clock and consequently, as she is the eldest, she is left to get on with it a bit too much. She is capable for a 6 year old, but I fall into the “accidental parenting” (aka easy option) a few times too many, and now have the results to prove it. I forget that she is ONLY 6, but with a younger Son, who has something of a Peter Pan about him, he manages to secure more of my time. Luckily I had a half day, a heart to heart with Husband over lunch and then a dog walk together before picking up the children from school – the day ended better than it started. I have a few ideas of how to improve this, and hope it will settle down soon.
(It’s late and I’m struggling to edit this, so apologies if it’s not very cleverly worded.)
Most of my friends work – both full and part-time. I have one friend who’s recently gone back to work part-time in London after a 15 year career break, so it is possible, although she was never exactly twiddling her thumbs at home. She was always fundraising, organising events, running the village lunch club for elderly living on their own, on the tennis club committee, she was properly busy, involved and making the most of her time. I’ve always worked part-time, between 2 – 4 days/week, with a mixture of childcare. I’ve always wanted to work, felt the need to keep my hand in and earn some money (although for a few years I spent a fortune on nannies), as relying on one income these days feels precarious and the main breadwinner may well experience a period of unemployment. Several of our friends have separated over recent years, so financial circumstances have become more fraught, working has become an absolute necessity with two separate homes to run. I’m encouraged that more agencies are setting up offering better quality part-time jobs (www.womenlikeus.org.uk & http://www.timewisejobs.co.uk), although they are mainly London based, as locally here in Tunbridge Wells firms play on the mother being the second income and generally pay miserably.