To feel disheartened over daughter's decision to become a housewife

[user1495062634]

Before you jump on me, please read below.

My daughter (aged 24) is a recently qualified midwife, and has been in her new London job for a couple of months. Recently, she informed me she is planning to leave her career behind, as they are trying for a baby, and her ultimate ambition is to become a housewife/stay at home mum. Admittedly, her and her new husband are financially well-off, and so she doesn't have the financial incentive to work.

It's all so clear to her, but so, so muggy for me. I can't get my head around it and feel so disappointed. After 3 years of gruelling training at university, landing a London hospital job and beginning to move up the ranks, I just can't understand how she can give it all up so easily. This also isn't a job she can easily pick back up where she left, after so many years of not practising she will have to go back and retrain, if that's what she decided to do.

This doesn't come as a complete shock - she has always dreamt of being a housewife/SAHM, ever since being a teenager - but I'm astounded she's really going ahead with it now.

I have not yet spoken to her about how I truly feel, and my plan is to await responses on here before deciding on whether to do that, and how to say it.

I'd appreciate your thoughts.

I would advise her to at least complete the preceptorship first. It's much easier to go back and do bank or the return to practice course with that under her belt.

I hope she doesn't throw away her registration completely, that would be a real shame. Remind her that bank pay on a Sunday in London is very very good! You never know when that money could come in handy for her family.

I would be a bit dispponted to especially as she probably had a good chunk of her deter funded by the now exist burseries.. Lots of people would hAve loved to have had to space to train. But her choice

If she's 24 it's likely she got minimal bursary to be fair as midwifery has been mostly degree for a number of years now.

OP, I'm a midwife and I have another job and work very part time in order to maintain my registration. You only have to do 450 hours in 3 years to keep it up, that plus 35 hours study and some portfolio work. It's not that onerous to maintain your registration. Also if you are full time you can easily take a year of mat leave without compromising your registration hours.

Many people I know went part time as soon as poss because FT is just hideous. If I was your daughter I'd look at going back very part time or just going on the bank with a view to keeping up her hours at minimum level. Even a shift a fortnight or something. You don't forget what you're doing and I found my love of the job came back when I wasn't doing it 5 days a week, burnt out.

The attrition rate for student and newly qualified midwives is huge. Unless you've done it yourself you have no right to comment on whether or not you think someone should have just carried on. I've seen people convinced it was their calling, applied over and over again, get a place and then quit in their 3rd year, never practise or quit in the first year because the reality is that it is harder than anyone can ever describe.

Nanny, are they the same people though? If someone is independent enough to not want to take their husbands name it's highly likely they aren't going to become a housewife either. If they are the same then very pot kettle black to expect his money to keep them.

Reading the OP the daughter is qualified and working as a midwife, she is planning to have a family and ultimately be a SAHM. I don't read that as she is giving up work now or that she isn't going to to finish her preceptorship. Think there is a bit of overreaction on here.

As an aside, can I point out how laughably blinkered and privileged the "brain turning to mush" argument is. The majority of the workforce do not have intellectually challenging, interesting jobs: either because they aren't around locally, don't fit with family commitments, or they didn't follow they educational path they needed to progress to "better" jobs. A lot of people work to live, I don't think 12 hours packing flowers or ripping the guts out of chickens passing by on hooks provides these working mothers with the after-dinner anecdotes Hilda and others deem essential to maintaining the interest of their husbands.
There are pitfalls both to being a SAHM and to working with small children but I don't buy the brain mush argument. I was able to engage in current affairs while on maternity leave and didn't find my frames of reference shrink to exclusively baby related spheres.

I agree OP, I'd be gutted

I agree Light - some of the most boring people are the ones who talk about boring jobs all the time, or the ones who think that their salary indicates their value to society just behind the people who talk about a sport all the time in the most boring stakes

Actually of everyone I know who is past the toddler stage, the mother's who talk most about their children and do so to the point of being dull (and also are not interested in anyone else's children but believe everyone is interested in theirs) are two women who went back to work while the children were under 1. One of them has talked at me about her child so much I know more about her than most of my family, but I'd lay bets she doesn't know how many children I have although I was a sahm for 10 years so shouldn't have much else to talk about...

Mothers without apostrophe!

God there is some absolute bollocks on this thread... I'm a sahm, didn't take my husband's name though. Does that make me me a baddie? Because I don't earn any money while I'm at home looking after OUR family, does that mean I have no rights to my own name or my own life?

Am being berated on another thread by people who dont want to take their DH name when they marry recon its tantamount to slavery, and loosing your identity, who come they are happy to stay at home and be "kept" by these same men whose name they dont want?

Eh? I'm a SAHM who kept my name on marriage. I'm playing a role in our family that DH and I agreed on together. It's not a role that directly brings in income, but it's work that we'd otherwise have to pay out most of my earnings for someone else to do. Plus DH gets to pursue his career without ever worrying about taking time off for sick kids, leaving the office in time for pickup and so on. I'm not 'kept'. I'm a net contributor. And I, a bright and capable person, am voluntarily taking a serious hit to my own career because I believe that overall it's a good thing for me and us. It benefits the family, and it lets me get involved with study and freelance opportunities that I'd have no chance to pursue if I was working FT and thus spending my evenings making up time with the kids.

Which part of that means I have no identity and no right to my own name?

sadsquid It sounds ideal to me. Some people can't accept that there are women who could possibly make that choice for themselves.
I wish every woman had that choice and were not looked down on for it.

Her life, her choice. Say nothing OP, it's none of your business.

Schools of Nursing and Midwifery run 'Back to Practice' courses, so as her children grow up she could access one of these, should she wish to.

I suppose I can possibly add from the other side...

I'm in a similar position to your DD. I'm currently contemplating leaving my job (actually leaving the country altogether) to go with my DP.

I never thought I would be like this. In fact I was always quick to say I would always work, never be a SAHM or housewife and yet here I am...

I know my own mother feels like you. She hasn't hid how she feels - though she's not said to DP - she is gutted. More than gutted. She feels I am throwing my career and my life away. She says I will come back to no role after making a name for myself here and I will have no support only DP. And in many ways she is right - I have worked hard (and studied hard for that matter) and always wanted to work but now I am suddenly doing this U-turn...

Sometimes life just throws things at us that we can't plan for nor can we explain unfortunately x

I can't explain why I have suddenly changed - my partner is not controlling neither am I too stressed at work but it just seems like this is what I need to do right now.

She's only 24!

She has years ahead of her.

Right now she wants ( and can ) be a SAHM. Good Luck to her. Support her choices.

Things can change, things often do change. For many many reasons. Good and unfortunately sometimes bad. Read the stories on here. Who knows what her future will bring.

While she can choose good on her. One choice is as valid as another.

Be pleased that she has qualified and has that skill under her belt. So what if she takes time out for kids. She may well go back and she could go back and she might NEED to go back to midwifery. And she might not. She is no less committed than the next person. But she is making a different choice.

Don't try to write the script for her. She has her own script.

Peeface

Describing a SAHM as a "kept woman" is just deliberately offensive, as it implies a lack of reciprocality. The reality is, bringing up a family requires a range of responsibilities to be fulfilled, of which earning money is only one part. The couple, while together, are reliant on each other to fulfil all of those functions and have every right to share the responsibilities out in the most efficient and sensible way to suit their circumstances. Why be colossally wasteful and inefficient in how you do this when you don't have to?

Or, more accurately, don't have to and don't want to.

I can understand your disappointment which, I suspect, is also partly worry. I would hate my dc when he is an adult to become financially dependent on someone else. But I too wonder why she bothered training (and costing the NHS money) if her goal was to find a rich bloke to live off. Is her new DH a doctor?

Rainbows I know someone who refused to take her DHs name and not bothered working for 15 years!

It obviously wasn't her goal originally. She just wasn't enjoying her career as a midwife. I suspect that is often the reason people become SAHP whatever they say about it being for the family etc. It's often more of a failure to find a reasonably flexible, satisfying job/career.

As an aside, can I point out how laughably blinkered and privileged the "brain turning to mush" argument is. The majority of the workforce do not have intellectually challenging, interesting jobs

Yeah, and even the ones that do... I was an actual scientist, I worked in chemical process development for pharmaceuticals. I worked on asthma medication, flu medication, I worked on drugs they give people after heart operations, I'm published, my work's been mentioned in the same breath as Nobel prize winners (one time, I'm very proud). A good part of my day was spent measuring out chemicals and fixing equipment. I spent many a night shift sitting talking shite with the operators while we watched a stirring reaction vessel... stirring... and then arguing over whose turn it was to take the van out and go and get the fish suppers.

The chemical industry was extremely volatile and jobs were always disappearing or moving continent so after three consecutive years of redundancies at my company I thought fuck this and changed career. I worked in a statistical reporting role at a large government institution, I talked to journalists, my data was regularly reported in the news and some of my analysis got quoted in the Times once. Very exciting, to me anyway. But again I spent most of my day sat in front of a spreadsheet checking that the numbers in the spreadsheet added up to the same as they had added up to the month before.

Now I'm a SAHM - DH's job got relocated and while we're better off here with one wage than we were with two, the downside is that we're living in an area where childcare is a bit sparse, and so rather than cobble together some awkward compromise, I decided to chuck work and hang out with the kids. They're in kindergarten so I have the mornings to do my own stuff. I do various writing stuff, learn the language here, and I've turned half the garden over to growing the soft fruit that my youngest kid seems to live off of. It's not more boring than work, it's not less intellectually demanding. It's just different. Last night I found myself in a conversation with a 5 year old about the French Revolution.
I don't recognise this way of living that says work's the only thing of interest or significance that a woman can do with her time. Or the idea that it's unfeminist to be a SAHM. I am a feminist. I believe that women are unfairly saddled with a huge number of disadvantages by the way society runs, and that it's unfair, and that it should stop. I am well aware that the reason I'm not working and my DH is is because of tons of structural inequalities in the UK and here that have led us to this situation, but I am not going to reverse the whole of discrimination by putting my kids in with a childminder and going off and working 60 hours a week and pretending that I love it.

And then the idea of "wasting" your training. I guess it's different for midwives because we will always need midwives, but for most people, the reality of the job market now is that professions come and go. Organic chemists with pharmaceutical manufacturing experience, like me, are ten a penny now, as there are plenty of people in India and China who can do the same job as well for a fraction of the price. What am I supposed to do, sit and cry at the terrible "waste" of 7 years of training? Or perhaps say, it was a privilege to be able to go to that place in my life, to know a subject in that depth and to produce some original research. And then just move the fuck on. It's all just stuff to do. We'll all be dead soon enough, does it really matter how many years we put in at the coal face?

Well said, roundaboutthetown and toomuchtooold

Absolutely Natalia!

And to the people who continue to labour under the delusion that OP's daughter has been 'given' the cost of midwifery education, I am absolutely certain she has earned it both during her training and since then. No question.

maxandruby

'Rich bloke to live off' and 'not bothered working'

Well aren't you lovely