To be confused by the two working parent set up

[Angels1111]

As I return to work from my Christmas break I return to the same conundrum I've been having since kids were born...
...that is confusion at how to handle my multiple roles in life.

I can't help but think that in my mother's generation they had to do the same stuff as us, but with no work. And, there was more of a community to fall back on too - she could get the neighbours to watch us if needed, relatives had more time to visit and play with us, etc. But she had time, to keep herself healthy and to keep us healthy.

Now it feels like a lot of us work in careers which are not conducive to taking long career breaks or going part time. Or, we can't afford to. So we end up juggling everything that comes with having a family with work. My partner does lots but it feels like two people splitting three jobs between them (work, children, house) is more of a stretch and a juggle and I wish every day that I could just focus on the house and kids.

I feel resentful that if I hire a nanny or a baby sitter or get family to help, they'd just play with the kids, feed them lunch, and maybe wash up after lunch wheeras I'd be doing all of that plus the food shop, house cleaning, admin, cooking dinner, washing, homework etc etc simultaneously, and if I wanted to hire someone to truly replace my roles it would take 2-3 people just to do the home stuff let alone work.

But this could just be how I'm handling life! I have a chronic condition so potentially have less energy than the general population, I do handle it a lot better when I'm not flaring.

Did you grow up in India? We’re Indian but born in the U.K. My mother had to work, she was 12 when she came over here. My grandmother also had to find a job to support her family when they emigrated over from Malaysia. Relatives on my father’s side who were still in India were doctors who worked but had access to cheap Labour (maids, cook, drivers and had a big house) in India and they lived with grandparents so kids were looked after/supervised by them. But again cheap Labour to do all household things).

@B0bbingalong I know hardly any mums who work f/t, equally know very few who don’t work at all. The vast majority of my friends, family & colleagues work p/t & have done since having dc.

But in recent years more mothers are working f/t

”In 2010-2011, 25% of all mothers were working full-time and by 2022 this had increased to 41%”

Yes - i worked in the NHS and when I had my children (1980’s) you had to start maternity leave at 28 weeks pregnant. My first baby was born in April and I had to start back at work in August.

Wow that's a huge difference re women working ft

Different generations had different lives.

My grandma didn't work so she could babysit my cousin if needed, hardly any female worked when married unless it was a family business.

I do have photos of me in a playpen because my mum cooked/did laundry/cleaned and I was out of the way. She was glad when I was in pre-school and she had less to worry about.

Today most women work and I know plenty who aren't retired and don't have time to do childcare or even ad-hoc helping. With loss of social safety net and high rising costs, you need two incomes.

But - my dad was hardly a hands-on one until I was around 7-8. He taught me a lot of practical things but hardly anthing in day-to-day life or school work or did housework. My aunts had their own lives and families to worry about.

DH on the other hand parents DD since she is born, bedtime, bath, changing, feeding (apart form 6 months breastfeeding). He attended school events, helped with homework, sorted out medical issues, took her out on his own in the school holidays
DH is not helping me, he does housework because we are a family living together.

It's not so much that "the village" is missing, it's that men haven't stepped up enough to do things automatically instead of women telling them they have to help.

We grew up in the UK.

Yes despite other posters claiming 95% of mothers worked f/t in the past 😆

helpful to include that in the OP?

Fifty percent of mothers worked in the 1970s

seventy five percent of mothers work now.

that’s not what has driven the housing boom.

there are a lot of other factors.

my own parents couldn’t afford to buy a house where they grew up and had to move north and both work in order to get a mortgage and that was in 1977.

since then there has been right to buy, very little building, significant immigration and smaller households.

Honestly didn't realise it was relevant, sorry!

My mum was working in the civil service when she got pregnant and was made to leave! As a married woman, then pregnant, she wasn't allowed to work there. This wasn't that long ago either, she's only early 60s.

Personally if I could jettison something off it would be the housework, not my job! I wouldn't want to be a sahm myself. Although I do look forward to retiring!!!

Its a hard life not being eligible for dla when you have an invisible illness like cfs... people just don't understand what its like ... until its them.

Different stages bring different stresses. I had to go pt due to kids needs. We won't have amazing pensions or large house but have had relatively less stress than friends who work ft.

However as kids get older (teens) my work friends full time working is paying off. Bigger pension, more avaliable money, being able to retire earlier. So swings and round abouts

I think fragmentation of society meant that was never going to happen. Long gone are the days where you could work and shop within walking distance of home. With centralisation, retail revolution, phone/email customer service, etc., jobs and shops are now much further away from where people live, hence long commutes, cars needed in lots of places to do the simplest of things, etc. Add in the drive for 50% to go to Uni which meant that 18year olds now tend to move to different cities for 3 years and then often never return to their home towns, mean the "extended" family simply doesn't exist anymore for lots of people. Organisations re-organising and shutting down means people have had to relocate for work, again, leaving what little "extended family" they had behind.

Even with my son, not a single child from his secondary school lived in the same village as us, so he literally had no one to "walk" to play with or socialise with in his school year group. Everything he wanted to do involved us driving him there/back to his school friends' houses. That just put added workload onto us to ferry him around. (It's not even a small village - 7,000 inhabitants, more of a small town!).

'Golden age for women'? What golden age for women??? It really wasn't!
Social mores and values meant women often stayed in unhappy and often abusive relationships; They were severely judged and suffered poverty conditions if they did leave their marriages; men often just stopped seeing their children altogether, and also didn't pay any maintenance at all; women weren't encouraged to go to university/ further education so were stuck in low paid work, often 'cash in hand' like domestic cleaning, delivering leaflets etc; sexism and misogyny was rife; the equal pay act didn't even come in til 1975, and even when it did, wasn't adhered to...
Honestly, I could go on and on, but suffice to say there was no 'Golden Age' for women in the last century.

Also @Angels1111 (sorry not RTFT and others may have said this) if we go back to the generation that genuinely did not work as mothers (so I am thinking 1950s/60s more than 70s 80s (when my mum btw was a FT teacher), we now have so much more in the way of automated household help.

I recall my mum having a carpet sweeper rather than a hoover; my MiL had a twin tub to do the laundry. Coal fires, no central heating, no supermarkets really (I remember my mum in the 1970s visiting a Sainsbury's for the first time (she wasn't impressed)).

So we do need to be wary of looking back through too much of a rose tint. And I think I did see a PP point out that now women have so much more available to them in terms of range of careers and indeed possibility of education. DH who is in his 60s like me, recalls his older sibling looking at banking jobs (so probs in the 70s again) and the ad said "For boys with A levels or girls with O levels" wow just wow.

YANBU, but I'd be bored shitless as a SAHM. I'm so glad I get to work, earn enough money to support myself if necessary, have my own bank account and a mortgage. Women (middle class women) didn't work but also had no autonomy. Jobs for women were poorly paid because people genuinely thought men should earn more.

Also, my mum's mum worked in a shop and my dad's mum worked in a factory, once their kids were at school. Working class women have always worked, but couldn't earn enough to support themselves. Thank goodness we're not in that situation anymore. Don't wish away your rights.

Both my mother and my grandmother worked. (My mother was very career driven and did various qualifications alongside full time work in senior roles.). She married a man who was a capable adult too, who also worked full time but did more than his share of childcare and housework and home and car maintenance. There was no family on hand to help.

I did the same. We only had one child for a number of reasons but we have both been equal parents and there is no job in the house that we both won’t do. No family nearby to help out so we have arranged our work and lives as needed around DD. Neither of us has ever worked part time.

Unless you’ve a brood of 10 children I’ve no idea what is so challenging TBH.

I know - it feels impossible to me too. I need to find some sort of work but it feels hopeless at the moment. What I feel is that people are pushed into making themselves so ill that they can't work and then might be entitled to PIP....there's no thought about prevention but then I think chronic illness isn't understood. And it's usually only the people with sensitive nervous systems who suffer so you'll get a lot of harsher women on MN invalidating your experience. They think that one week you're well and the next, you're diagnosed with a disease that can be treated and then you're well again, whereas we know that it's developed from years of trauma and people pleasing. I believe that all these chronic conditions are caused by stress and trauma at their root.

All I can say is have faith in yourself, take yourself seriously and don't think you have to push yourself to do what everyone else is doing.

And oh look @AmIHumanOrAmIAYeti has proved my point!!

Working is a tool to obtain money - it doesn't make you morally superior.

My Mum worked from when I was about six. School days, I’d go with a load of kids on the mini bus, which picked up from just around the corner and brought me home again. I had a key to let myself in and was home alone until my Mum got in around 5 (so for about an hour). Tuesdays I would go to a friend of hers and wait there for her, she’d have a coffee with her friend and then we’d go home.

School holidays were more problematic, and I would go to friends down the road most days, or next door, or go and stay with my Gran for a few days. Then my Mum got a job in a school so holidays weren’t a problem.

I don’t know if child minders didn’t exist in the 70s, but I certainly wasn’t the only one in my class with a house key around my neck.

What a depressing thread where women give domestic tips on babysitters, ‘letting the housework go’ or batch cooking as if it’s a woman’s sole destiny to be the crucible of these matters.

No. Let’s not perpetrate this sexist outdated Stepford wife crap. Women need to expect that their partners will be big boys (or girls) and carry half the load and no excuses. He might have a bigger job but tough shit, he can still empty a dishwasher, cook tea or help the kids with homework. It’s not rocket science.

I totally disagree I’m afraid. I’m also in my 40s.

My mum “didn’t work” insofar as she didn’t have paid employment except some part time work in the school canteen. She didn’t have a car and there was no supermarket in our town. We didn’t own a microwave, a dishwasher or a tumble dryer - I only knew one person who had anything that fancy. And we only had a one-drawer freezer at the top of our under-counter fridge. So she had to walk to the shops for groceries several times a week, and walk me and db to school and pick up. Every meal cooked from scratch except occasionally we might have a Findus crispy pancake or a beef burger - but even then it would be with home-made chips. No breakfast or After school clubs back then. Most of our clothes were cotton so yes everything had to be ironed, they didn’t just fall out of the washing machine nicely like my DD’s plasticky school uniform does today. Suits had to go to a dry cleaner which was a bus ride or a long walk. Clothes were mended and altered and passed down. You couldn’t get anything delivered - mum had a Burlington’s catalogue for some purchases but everything else required a bus ride to the town. It was incredibly hard work for my mum. And we had so few of the conveniences that make our lives so easy today. I think people glamourise the past so easily. We were not poor or unusual - this is how life was. When the work at home was so much harder and so much more time consuming, it didn’t leave space for 40 hours of paid work a week.

Remember also how caring has changed - my mum helped care for my grandfather who was gravely injured in ww2, until he died in the 1980s. That meant travelling on a bus to see him three times a week while I was at school, as my gran couldn’t cope alone. After he died, mum cared for my grandmother whose health was pretty shattered. There was no social care help whatsoever and mum got no benefits for the caring work she did. When I was tiny, I recall my gran didn’t even own a proper washing machine so my mum would help her mangle the clothes after they’d been washed, then hang them on the line.

We didn’t have much family - most of my relatives had been killed in wartime or had lost partners and had not had kids. WW2 cast a long shadow for many families. There was no “village” aside from the church, and that never offered any practical help.

So whilst I agree it’s not easy now. It certainly wasn’t easier for everyone in the 80s and 90s.

Interestingly, it looks like the big growth in women working came in the 1940s and 1950s.

this article suggests that interwar (so 1920s and 1930s) only 10% of married women worked.

by 1951 this was 20%, by 1961 35% and by 1971 49%.

https://academic.oup.com/past/article/233/1/269/2915149

so if there was an age when most (married) women did not work it would have been the 1920s and 1930s and I definitely would not want to go back to then!

You're absolutely right! I couldn't agree more. Plus, as I said upthread, women working for less money than men, fewer rights, no minimum wage and often "off the books" ie, not documented.
No "Golden Age" indeed.