To think that a career / work is not the be all and end all

[Cantz]

I am 38 now, no children and I haven't worked a job since I was 29 and even the it was just part time. My husband works but I don't I have a blog that makes a little money and I sell some art work which brings in something but I don't have a career or a job I am mostly at home cooking, gardening and doing my own thing. It works for us and we are happy after 21 years together.
Lots of my friends have careers some are Doctors, others work in TV or in IT and we still have plenty in common. I want these women, my friends to have what makes them happy and of that is a career then great. I absolutely support the right of a women to do what she wants with her life but I am finding more and more that for me to choose not to have a career, especially as I don't have children is a total taboo.

It often feels like there is huge pressure to go out and get a job, that you cannot be fufilled unless you are in paid employment and that worse by not working you cannot possibley be contributing to society. There are lots of ways a person can make a contribution it isn't all about money or even having kids for that matter.

Surely paid employment isn't the be all and end all?

Lweji beat me to it, we only have the op's view that her husband is happy with this. Would be interesting to know his point of view direct.

I don't think work is the be all and end all. I do think mindless pottering around the garden would bore me rigid after about a week though.

I don't think it's the OP and her husband's set up which has hit a nerve with people. I think what's hit a nerve is :
A) why she's felt the need to post
B) why she thinks people have a work 'fetish'
C) why she's failed to address some of the queries raised.

I asked her if she thinks her DH has a work fetish, because he works in a job he finds rewarding and intetesting. She didn't answer.

Several of us have also pointed out that there is nothing remarkable about enjoying gardening, cooking, craft stuff etc... Many of us do exactly that and also enjoy having a career, children...

I don't think anyone gives two hoots tbh about what the OP and her DH do. It's more the fact that she seems to think she's some sort of incredibly unconventional beguiling person because she likes doing a number of totally normal things and doesn't work.

It was definitely the bit about "fetishisation" of working that made me do a double take.

Is the air thin up there up on Mount Olympus, OP?

FWIW, I would be a bit at a thirty something woman who (appears to be) in good health, has no children or other care giving responsibilities, doesn't volunteer or attend college - but potters about blogging, painting, and growing vegetables whilst her husband worked.

If I knew the person wasn't a lottery winner/inherited wealth, I'd probably think she was married to a control freak who didn't want her to work. Or just a lazy arse.

I know someone who married a bloke like that, came home from their honeymoon aged 23 and announced to new wifie, that he didn't intend to work.

He didn't intend to look after their future progeny either: that fell to her, on top of being the sole breadwinner - for the next thirty years - for them both and their child.

She professes to be happy with the arrangement, but everyone else thinks he's a tosser and she could have done better for herself.

Each to their own though, OP. Who cares what random strangers on the interwebs think anyway??

Completely agree with the last 2 posters.

I haven't read the previous 11 pages, but it really annoys me when people say, and they only seem to say it to women, 'work isn't the be all and end all/ money isn't everything/ some working mums work so they can pay for holidays/ cars/ luxuries etc. I have children and work part time. If we cut down, I probably wouldn't have to work to pay the bills, but I have an interesting job that I enjoy. It stimulates me and keeps me interested in things outside the school run bubble. I meet interesting people and get to go to interesting places. I think I'm doing the best for my family. I'm role modelling that men and women can have good, enjoyable careers, that although most of the time mummy takes them to school and does dinner, daddy is also perfectly capable of getting them ready for school and cooking them dinner, so no, a paid job is much more than money for me.
If OP is not utterly bored out of her mind pottering about the house on her own, fine. Good for you if your husband is supporting you to do that. I can't think of what you would that would be interesting enough to blog about. Maybe coming on Mumsnet to get other people to talk about you?

I can't think of what you would that would be interesting enough to blog about. Maybe coming on Mumsnet to get other people to talk about you?

Ahhhh....has this thread just provided a topic for the OP's blog??

Lweji you asked me why anyone would criticise someone for choosing to have a career. In my post I actually meant that as OP didn't criticise them why should they feel entitled to criticise her choices.

But since you asked...my DM was a single parent that went for more and more promotions that left less and less time for me. She has admitted more recently that we didn't need the extra money at all. I was miserable as I didn't see as much of her as I'd have wanted, and when she was home she was often too tired. As a result I swore I wouldn't do that to my DC. So yes. I do criticise my DM's career focus, especially as it ended up making her miserable and she had to retire in her early 50s.

Similarly a family friend is a single parent with a high-powered job that takes her abroad regularly for a week at a time. Her DC was effectively raised by a housekeeper during the teenage years. A person who has no vested interest in how the DC turns out. Unsurprisingly DC went off the rails for a while possibly to get some attention.

I'm perfectly aware that this is a million miles away from the norm and won't apply to most people on MN but I was asked why anyone would criticise someone for their career and that's my answer.

Surely though, you know that is a very extreme example and it's perfectly possible to have a career that you love and a family you adore - and just because you had a bad experience doesn't mean that everyone who has a career should be criticised for it?

Twowrongsdontmakearight

Do you criticise your father for working, though?

Having a career doesn't mean spending all waking time on it.

We seem to expect that our choices or circumstances will deliver this ultimate balanced lifestyle.

But everything has a cost. I work ft and have three children. I find work stimulating and frankly we need the money. I want to be able to help my daughters financially when they need it. I want a pension. If something happens to DP, I want to be capable of supporting my family.

But yes - I miss out on stuff. I miss them.

There is a cost to everything we do - we just need to make sure the costs aren't too large.

Why wouldn't any adult, male or female, want to be financially independent?

I don't understand why these work-shy people are happy to live off the work and the salary of their partner. It sure doesn't sit right with me.

Maybe becuase giving 25% of your expended effort to the government and then 50% in child care doesn't sit right with them.

The idea of having children and then outsourcing their nurturing, education and care to others, while I work, instead of caring for them and educating them myself, is just alien to me. I cannot abdicate my responsibility to educate my children by palming them off on the state. And I certainly have no right to complain about it if I do, and then find that somone else isn't doing my job for me to my liking or my preferred standard.

Why would any family wish to increase their dependancy on money, increase their tax burden, and become accustomed to a lifestyle that can only be sustained at the detriment of time spend with ones children?

Sorry. That last post was to blackrabbit not OP.

The OP doesn't have children.

When you get married, you become a unit. Dont see why it is seen as sponging if one person in the unit earns the money, while the other person does home stuff. How a couple divides the essential tasks of earning money and looking after the home is really only their business. No one way of living has more/less moral value than another.

That's absolutely true - but to go round in circles again, when one person's paid work supports the other's life of pottering then the potterer shouldn't complain about work fetishism, sneer at work not being the be all or start threads about how she's so original because she doesn't do any sort of real life work - she should really just accept that his paid work pays for her lifestyle, her bills, her food and the roof over her head, and has done for many, many years.

Yes, I think that's the kernel of it for me, SirChenjin. The OP is reflecting somewhat smugly on how she's unconventional and the rest of us are little work hamsters chained to our unseeing wheels, when she's in fact just benefiting from the world of work at one remove, and - far from being unconventional - in fact it's a deeply traditional bourgeois 'kept wife' scenario, since the Victorian middle classes decided it was a badge of gentility for men to be able to keep their wives and daughters without them needing to earn. It's pretty retrograde, rather than unconventional.

Yes that is the most hilarious and irritating thing about the OP in equal measure. Fine, keep the home and peer about in the garden, but to say you are 'unconventional' so you don't need to work when actually you are incredibly conventional to the extent that you have regressed to a Victorian lady, but with the modern benefits of contraceptive choice is frankly ridiculous!

I've never understood the cliche that people trot out that they'd still want to work even if they didn't have to.

I always think that people who couldn't find enough of interest and value to do with themselves outside paid employment must be really dull.

I also think we've been sold a lie, and a lot of people just unthinkingly accept the nonsense that one primary route to a fulfilled life is an often fairly pointless job and a fairly rubbish working environment. And society is now so dishonest about the idea of work still basically being what it always has been- something you do for necessity that you'd rather not do. Now there's so much competition we all have to pretend we're 'passionate' about whatever pointless thing we're doing. It's no longer enough to just do it.

I don't dislike my job, and I know some people adore theirs, so don't all pile in and tell me that you're the exception to this.

Wonder if the attitude to the Op from those with careers would be different if she had posted that she was a "self-employed writer and artist" but was feeling aggrieved as others criticised her for earning less than her DH? This is an equally accurate description of her actual circumstances.

Also agree with Ubik1, EllieFAntspoo and Sometimesjustonesecond. Choices around working and not working do have costs and I question whether individuals and couples always properly weigh up the long and short term financial and non financial costs to the whole family. I certainly think it is deeply patronising and disrespectful to assume others have not.

For the record I have spent the last 14 years at home with a high percentage of that time being devoted to changing nappies etc. I do not see any evidence of my brain having atrophied. I have an economics degree and if the DC were not coming home from a week away with their Grannie today I may well have been doing a bit of financial modelling to start my blog with.

Don'tlaugh- you judge someone who has an MA who doesn't spend their life improving things for those less fortunate???!!

I find this absurd. I bet if OP said she had a busy and well paid job you wouldn't care because you'd class her as gainfully employed and not give it any more thought. Or do you really judge any educated and employed person who is just doing a random job as opposed to helping those less fortunate?

50 years ago people thought that all our technological advancement was going to mean people had too little to do. It was going to be a major social problem. But now we have too much to do- the value of most of which I generally question. I think you just have a knee jerk objection to what you perceive as op's laziness, and you're looking for a swipe.

I am childless too and saving my pennies so I can go down to 4 days a week. I do enjoy my job, but I would like a little more free time so that I can enjoy my hobbies (cycling, hiking and writing) and get the cleaning done and all the stuff I feel I don't have proper time for. I don't think I am lazy.

I agree with Rita. If you have no dependants you are far more flexible.

The vitriol is because people like the op, just by doing what they do, challenge the idea beloved of some other people that you 'have' to work. Whether for necessity, or personal fulfilment, or because you owe it to society to become something really really valuable and worthwhile like a marketing executive.

Some people can't cope with that, so they snipe and lash out and throw stones. I don't know why they find it so difficult to see people live their lives according to different priorities, but they seem to.