Calling all MNers with large families....who work.

[mozhe]

We are expecting our 6th baby in october....all of them will be under 8. We are pretty well organised now, and have a marvellous nanny,( whose been with us since day 1 with our first ), and we will be having a maternity nanny too for the first 6-8 weeks. I usually go back to work at the 8-12 week stage part time and build it up to fulltime from there, but this time am thinking of doing it a bit differently. One MNer who posts regularly,( and speaks a lot of sense imo ), recommends going back much earlier at the 2 week point...I 'm seriously wondering about doing this as I think it would really help me establish a routine quicker. I live in France and work as an academic at the moment.I still breasfeed my twin daughters aged nearly one. Has anyone else tried this ? I'm genuinely interested in other peoples' experiences.

Xenia - what makes you so sure that the failure of your own marriage had nothing to do with your own parents' unhappiness?

Given that you married so young, I wonder how much time you had to experiment with relationships and see other family models in action before starting your own?

Obviously I have thought about it and I said below my husband thought the marriage failed in part because my parents were unhappy together but I really don't think so. Some people marry quite young and are very happy and some people's parents' marriages break up and they still go on to be happily married. In a sense seeing how badly my parents got on for years (we didn't as teenagers want them to stay together) helped me to see that that would not be sustainable for me - to spend the next 40 years miserable with that person. We were married for 19 years.

I have seen happy marriages and they're really nice when they work well. I'm sure it's possbile.

but just not with a sahm

Xenia - and conversely, having been in a family of happy marriages and one disastrous one (my father's elder brother), I grew up quite aware that a happy marriage and family life is a lot of hard work and compromise and I wasn't prepared to commit to anyone who wasn't aware of that.

wh, I never said stay at home mothers or fathers can't have happy marriages. That's a different debate and depends on the personality of the people involved.

I think your model of 'heriditary ' happy marriages is overly simplistic, Anna. Life, society is so different from 20/30/50 years ago. My parents were very happily married and I am too,but what I admired in my mother was her energy and resolve to contribute to society,( yes she worked fulltime as a doctor until well into her eighties..), as well as bring up 11 children,( like you she had 2 rather traumatized step children as well as the nine of us ).All of her children,( though sadly not one of my step sisters ),grew up to value work as an essential part of the adult experience...and we're all parents too. Sadly though not all happily married, some not at all, 2 divorced.

Wow Mozhe! 11 children and a career into her 80s. What a woman! That's quite a lot to live up to.

Yes it is Spidermama....she was an inspirational woman.She worked hard, enjoyed life and was a great mum.My dad was a very needy man and she was his carer too in many ways.She always emphasised to us girls that we must always strive to do our utmost best in everything,put up with things that were less than perfect,( she was of the benign neglect school of parenting really ),and not waste life's opportunities.She was always saddened at the way many women in her day achieved so little.....she'd be horrified at this modern revival of SAHMdom.

breathe deeply now otter

Anna - how do you square that off with the fact that your DP has a failed marriage? Did he not work hard enough at it? Was he not committed enough? And given that it failed, what makes you think your relationship will be any different?

You do have a lot to live up to, Mohze. What a lot of pressure.

mozhe - I never said, simplistically, that I thought that you can "inherit" a happy marriage.

What I do believe is that you are very likely to have, when you come from a family with happy marriages in it, two major advantages in life. 1. a working model of happy families that you integrate into your subconscious behaviour (so that gives you a good starting point in life for your behaviour in the family setting) 2. a family (in the widest sense, including cousins, aunts, uncles etc) where communication is open and people talk to each about anything and everything - since they are not bottling up unhappy feelings/resentment - and that also gives you, going forward, much better skills for resolving difficulties and differences between people.

thedogsbollox - undoubtedly in my partner's first marriage neither party worked at the marriage at all, and his ex-wife didn't work at bringing up the children either (and still doesn't) though he's always been quite a hands-on father.

When people have experiences like that, and years of misery, some of them (though not all, I grant you) are very determined to understand why and to make sure they try to improve themselves. My partner is a very high-achieving sort of man, and nowadays he puts a lot of energy (which he formerly directed solely at work) into his home life.

NotanOtter - you are not alone...

Which is why comparisons with first marriages are not fair. Someone can be utterly awful to a first wife and very nice to a second one or not be at a life stage to be a good partner at one point but will be later or earlier. What is likely is that if you're prepared to spilt up once you're more likely to do it again although one always hopes not.

Xenia - I don't think many people in this day and age aren't ultimately able to walk away from a very unhappy marriage. Not many people think that marriage is a lifelong commitment come what may and however vile the other party may be. But I think that with the growing understanding that you have to work at marriage, that life is long and that you have to constantly re-examine your attitudes to the world as time goes by, people are better able to understand when it is time to give up on a partner and when it is worth working issues through.

mozhe - of the eleven of you, how many are girls and how many have modelled your lives on your mother's versus done something completely different?

My mother was very feminist and I suppose my father too and most of us take our values from our parents. Some people see very unhappy parents and want to do the opposite and some copy their parents. I don't think you can generalise unless we're talking about cultures where no women ever work or all go to finishing school marry young and have babies so that you only really see or expect a life as a housewife in which case then I suppose you are likely to follow the norm for your group in rural Pakistan or whatever your grouping is.

Anna, I doin't agree about marriages though - I found it very hard to leave. Lots of people do even though they ought to get out, even though they're even being physically abused. It's a known thing - they just can't break away.

Xenia - I didn't say "easy to leave", I said that ultimately they do, just like you did ie you probably agonised over it for ages but you did get there in the end, despite not having any divorce precedent in the family, being a Catholic with five children, having to pay out loads of money to you ex etc. In the past, all those factors would have prevented a couple divorcing and they would have carried on being miserable until death.

My partner found it very hard to leave his marriage too. What he is quite clear about also is that it was very difficult for him to understand why it went wrong until he was outside it - which goes quite a long way to explaining why it's so hard to leave, since, like any rational person, he likes to make decisions based on facts.

Yes, also you don't always realise how bad it is when you're in it. You accept things as normal that aren't.

Quite, and most people have a hard time discussing (admitting) the intricacies of family relationships to the outside world as we don't want to wash our dirty laundry in public, so all those things get bottled up and we pretend we are OK ie things are "normal".

Which is why I'm a huge fan of Relate-type counselling and bringing down taboos surrounding family functioning. Anything that gets these things in the open and gives people perspective is a very good thing. And the best thing of all is when families can discuss their unhealthy attitudes openly and try to improve on them.

I tend to agree but there's an opposite case - that buttoning up and getting on with things stops you bothering about and worrying about things whereas years of discussing your "problems" and therapy and crying etc might actually make it worse.

No therapy should go on for years.

I remember a very good (NHS) counsellor telling me that, if you weren't feeling a bit clearer about your relationship after 2-3 sessions, you should probably change counsellor; that if after 10 sessions you didn't see light at the end of the tunnel you probably needed to make major life changes, ie divorce.

He also told me that, when training, the trainers had explained how counsellors could make the therapy last for years ("you can get your children through private school with these techniques" was how it had been put).

And I never agree with the bottling up and just getting on with things argument. Life isn't perfect, far from it, but it's important to recognise imperfections and injustices. If they are ignored there's no chance of ever improving things and bottling things up uses a hell of a lot of energy that can be put to much more productive use elsewhere.

Mozhe, I have two kids, and returned to work after two weeks after the first one. Then I had DS and stayed home for 3 months then went back. I do think there are some benefits to going back early (avoids mother/baby trauma of separation, etc.) but I think 2 weeks is a bit early. I only did it because I needed the money. I was working contract at the time and so had not maternity pay at all.

I think somewhere between 6 and 8 weeks is good.