Motherhood Has Radicalised Me

[IWantThisJob]

The social and cultural conditions of motherhood are actively cruel to women.

In pregnancy and birth we are often not listened to, or patronised, or have our pain minimised by medical professionals. The induction rate is sky high and it’s not uncommon for women to suffer quite extreme birth injuries and be expected to get on with it, to care for a newborn, often with very minimal support, and not make a fuss. We are often discharged, in pain, with very limited pain relief, bleeding, to care for a baby, sometimes having been awake for 3 or 4 days solidly.

Statutory paternity leave is 2 weeks. I read somewhere the other day that the average mum on maternity leave spends 8 hours a day alone with her baby.

We experience broken sleep for years on end, in my case 4 years and counting, and are expected to just carry on, go to work, earn money, listening to and managing screaming and crying and tantrums at all hours of the day and night.

Work and childcare are non functional. Most households need two incomes. Childcare is expensive, even with funding, work is often inflexible. We’re expected to work like we don’t have children and mother like we don’t work. If you work full time you might be made to feel guilt, if you don’t work you’re lazy.

The mental load! The sheer weight of the responsibility of organising everyone and everything, the cooking, the planning, and the amount of information we need to remember on a daily basis, of who needs to be where at what time, who needs to take what to school, who we need to buy a birthday present for, is proper cognitive labour. If you ask your husband to do it, he probably will, but it’s just another fucking thing that you need to do in asking. If he’s anything like mine, he’ll be a good husband and a good dad, but he just will not ‘carry’ it all in the way that you do.

School is term time, 9-3. 6 weeks to navigate over the summer. Arranging work, sorting childcare, trying to do activities with them to keep them and yourself sane (still not sleeping, still often listening to screaming).

Then there’s the cultural and social pressure. Can’t breastfeed? Failed. Had a C section? Failed. Oh they have to share a bedroom? Failed again. Are you feeding them well? Are they on track developmentally? Are they making friends and coping at school?

This model of motherhood may not be what everyone experiences, but if it what you experience, this level of pressure, expectation and sheer workload on mothers is actively cruel. It’s a feminist issue, and I have been radicalised. I feel actual anger at the way mothers are treated at a societal level.

I have two children. I work part time in a career that I love. My husband is also doing his best, just like me. But the pressure and expectation, and sacrifice of self, work, and autonomy is just not the same. I’m not depressed, I love my children desperately and I enjoy my life. This is not really a discussion about my own personal motherhood, but the general pattern within society.

Anyone else?

Absolutely!
I married someone I thought was happy to take an equal share in parenting, but his efforts gradually dwindled.
I’m also the mother of autistic children who are now adults - the mental load is still very much as never ending as when they were children.

Different experience but my children are now young adults and I was for the most part a SAHM until our youngest started school.

The people who treated me most cruelly during my births and postnatally were women. One midwife was the most evil, unempathetic person I have ever had the displeasure of encountering. The men that I met on both occasions were amazing, incredibly kind and helpful.

Husband shared parenting completely and all that it involves with me and still does. Both fortunate to have parents who were very engaged with us growing up and very good role models. We did have some family support when our children were young but nothing regular.

Things have changed and most mums work a lot more hours than I did back then; it must be very hard juggling everything especially when you don't have much/any family support. I cannot imagine how difficult getting up to go to work after being up most of the night with a baby must be.

I returned to work at a time when a lot of other mums were still not yet back in paid employment and always felt a bit self conscious being the only one at the school gate in work uniform but my boys always told me it made them feel very proud of me. It gave them a fantastic work ethic.

I felt all of these:

'Can’t breastfeed? Failed. Had a C section? Failed. Oh they have to share a bedroom? Failed again.'

...and they bothered me, very much, at the time.

But now, I see what a success my children are and those things don't matter one iota. I have the confidence now to tell people that I stopped BF'ing because I despised it. I know of plenty of people who breastfed but now have a very bad relationship with their child.

I completely agree with you OP. My DH is an absolutely wonderful husband and father who does more than his fair share of night wakes, domestic chores, ferrying DD about to activities etc but even he will admit it has been harder on me. My body and mind are both f-d (cancer diagnosis 16 weeks after a c section didn’t help), I have all the mental load, I’m very often the “default parent” despite all our efforts not to have one in this house - and I feel the most horrible guilt every day about dropping DD off at nursery and going to work, even though I have to because we couldn’t manage on DH’s salary alone. I’m the higher earner so we could in theory live off mine but DH’s pension is significantly better than mine is so it’s swings and roundabouts. I am surrounded by male colleagues whose wives don’t work and they don’t get it. They have no idea how much I’m juggling every day and seem to think I can do as much as they can. Aaaaargh

I can’t relate to the mental load as my husband and I have always shared that - we definitely wouldn’t be married or have children if we didn’t.

I do agree with the feeling of loneliness at the beginning which is why I think paternal leave should be much longer and paid appropriately. How do we expect some men to take more responsibility if we don’t afford them the time to take sole responsibility of a child and all that goes with it. We did shared parental leave and it was one of the best decisions we ever made.

So what would you like to see happen?

I'm not disputing the fact that there is still structural sexism at all. It is real.

But I also don't understand why women complain about the system but are seemingly willing to tolerate inequality in their own homes.

If we don't feel able to insist on an equal contribution from those closest to us, then what hope do we have for changing the rest of society?

Men need to step up and carry their fair share. Women need to stop letting them off the hook. Nothing will change until that happens.

'I married someone I thought was happy to take an equal share in parenting, but his efforts gradually dwindled.'

It's scary how common this experience is. I'm childfree myself but most of my work colleagues are mothers, and there's a lot of conversations about how utterly useless their male partners / children's fathers are. The expectations of fathers are so low that their pathetic efforts are accepted or even celebrated, and it's so depressing

I agree with a lot of your post, despite the fact I had the easiest baby imaginable and have a husband that does just as much as I do.

I disagree with the part around social pressure. I feel as though try at is something we do to ourselves. Who gives a fuck what society thinks to not breastfeeding, csections etc? I don’t! I don’t even know how the majority of my friends and family actually gave birth let alone how they feed! If more women actually didn’t bend and break to an imaginary ‘societal expectation’ they would feel so much less pressure.

The trouble with that sentiment is still, though, that it lays the shortcomings of men at women's feet. They are useless because women 'put up with it'

It's all very well to say we should insist men step up and not let them of the hook - but what if they won't? Separation, sure - but setting aside the financial and emotional toll on the children, that's the most letting off the hook a man can dream of! If they're not pulling their weight particularly when you're together, you can guarantee they do fuck all when you're not. And society WON'T expect more.

Yes it isn’t too difficult to see why people are opting out.

No time for relaxation, just doing jobs or thinking about doing jobs.

I think you must have accidentally deleted some of your post.

I did. I dropped my phone in the bath. I have edited it

Oh dear! Hope your phone is ok?!😂

I think the inequality creeps up on you when you have children. Pre children, things can look quite equal.

Then the domestic burden balloons and women end up taking on most of not all of it - and the alternative to doing it is constantly nagging, which is also unpleasant.

I honestly think a lot of men would just live like students if left to their own devices - everything last minute, as basic as possible, least possible money or effort required.

It's nuts, isn't it? I feel similarly. Then there's all the everyday practical nonsense that doesn't account for children, like nowhere to move/store prams when out and a total disdain for children in general in public spaces. It's maddening.

I completely agree with a lot of this but I'm not sure about the idea that 'society' is to blame. Women wanted better access to the jobs market and no one foresaw that working would stop being optional. We make up most of the people organising and delivering maternity care. Women are also very much the ones deciding what standards of housekeeping and the 'mental load' should look like. I feel like some of this is in our gift to sort out. We could have lower lifestyle standards and less perfectionism; we could live more communally and/or stay living near our families; we could marry men who'll share the load.

There's a lot of 'we're expected to' and 'failure' in your post, but you don't actually have to subscribe to all these expectations. If you stay off social media you'll be exposed to very few of them.

The biases against women and working parents are fewer than they've ever been and if parenting is important to you, there are many many jobs that will accommodate that. But you do have to redesign your life around having children: have friends and family around for mutual support; downgrade your lifestyle; move into family-friend employment.

It now presses parts of the phone I'm not. I have lost count of the number of ads I've liked and forms I've submitted half-empty 😂

I get what you're saying, and of course, the responsibility shouldn't be laid at women's feet. But realistically, men aren't the ones who are disadvantaged by the current set-up, so why would we expect them to be the ones to drive change? The status quo suits them just fine.

And yes, I get that it isn't always possible to get men to step up, and that will some do even less after a separation. But if we don't raise our standards, what is going to change?

I honestly think a lot of men would just live like students if left to their own devices - everything last minute, as basic as possible, least possible money or effort required.

This is completely true ime, but then you have to ask, have they got something right? Why should they take on more of the load of jobs that they consider unnecessary?

My DP is very good around the house and does most of the childcare. If it were up to him though, our house would be furnished with the barest of essentials. There would probably be no holidays. Children would not do any organised activities and would be a bit more feral. He would play with them and take them to the woods and stuff, but life would be a lot simpler and cheaper.

If you have a partner who shares the load 50/50 it's a hell of a lot easier. Picking the right partner is crucial.

I get that. But I think this standard-raise will have to be a gradual, en masse change of societal standards, which women of this generation won't benefit from. I agree wholeheartedly that to change the narrative we need to speak up and act NOW to affect future attitudes - but right now 'expecting more' will just see more single mother households while men live unaffected and care-free.

@WallaceinAnderland And lucky.

Same here. My dd was surprised that mothers wanting to be grandmothers one day is just a trope and there would be no pressure from me.

Both my grandmothers had multiple children, 4 in one family, 6 in another. Both my grandmothers worked full time, (one was widowed during the war). One ran a laundry, the other was a hairdresser. Both took the children to work with them until they started school. Both were brilliant grandmothers. Luckily, mental load had not been invented and so they just did their best. I am proud of them both.

My DH would be like this too.

But it reminds me of a Bluey at the Pool book we have. Bluey’s dad takes them to their cousin’s swimming pool in the garden and fails to bring most of the things they need beyond the basics to actually enjoy it. Bluey’s mum arrives later and has miraculously managed to bring the sunscreen, the armbands, a snack for after and everything else beyond the swimwear that means they can have a good time.

My husband pointed out this is a bit sexist and I pointed out it is also accurate in our case.

When life mirrors art.