Upset by Mumsnet - please cheer me up!

[MargaretCavendish]

So, I started having a look at Mumsnet a month or so ago. My husband and I are thinking of trying for our first child in the next few months, and I was Googling some conception advice (alright, alright, I was actually trying to find out whether I really needed to give up drinking while we tried) and Mumsnet came up. I have become a bit addicted, particularly to AIBU. I know, I know.

Anyway, while I have been enjoying reading it (I've always loved problem pages, etc.) it's also been making me feel really depressed and even panicky about post-baby life. So many partners who see everything to do with babies as not their job, so many women giving up work so that they can dust four fucking times a day, so many women whose lives and worlds seem to have got so, so small. I tell myself it won't be like that for me, that my husband (who is far from perfect, but who is a proud feminist who has never seen us as anything but equals) isn't like that. We're planning to do shared parental leave, so I'd only be at home for five-ish months, and then we're hoping he could drop down to part-time longer term. I earn quite a bit more so it makes financial sense for us; I guess there's also some ideology there too for me. BUT I'm still scared that having a baby might turn me into 'wifey', I guess. So, please tell me that I'm being silly, that you can be a feminist mum (and a feminist dad) and that equal parenting isn't just a pipe dream!

I don't think Krist1na has misunderstood you. Basically, that is what happens. "Choice" is a duplicitous and tantalising fantasy that serves to hide the reality of women-with-children being structurally screwed.

thecatfromjapan I was recently talking to my mum about a different feminist issue (a friend of mine who had experienced some pretty shocking discrimination at work) and she just looked so sad and said: 'I was just so sure that this wouldn't happen by the time you were grown-up'. Let's hope that if I do have a baby, that baby (whether a boy or a girl) grows up to live in a better world.

Yes, cat said it much better than I did

I think she has misunderstood me - she thought my husband would have no time at home at all, which is the opposite of what I actually said!

And thousands of families will have less disposable income if they are paying for a lot of childcare (say more than two pre-schoolers, or twins) and if one of the partners does not earn a huge wage then the family as a whole cannot afford to take the hit! It isn't about childcare costs being deducted from the woman's salary, it is about them being deducted from a modest joint income. It is REALLY not rocket science

That is precisely our situation. We are not starving because of both of us working, but we are operating to a strict budget and economising a lot, and have very little over. It is likewise not rocket science to view this as an intelligent investment in the professional and financial future of both parents, rather than a reason why I should give up work in a profession that took a considerable amount of study to enter, and which I enjoy.

Margaret IME all parents have massive guilt as soon as their children are born about pretty much every decision you make (either as a mother or a father).

Job, housing, budgets, holidays, moves, food and a million other decisions and choices are filtered through the "am I doing the best for my child guilt-o-meter".

You get used to it!

Margaret

It wasn't my intention to offend you, but your OP was a bit goady and you did speak about not wanting to be a wife.
However, you have graciously explained now and moved on.

FWIW, it's hard to plan exactly what will happen and how you will feel when you have children, they do take over but besides this your outlook is bound to change too.
I had a thriving business and was a hr tax payer at just 21. During first pregnancy decided to give it all up to become a sahm, it meant nothing to me anymore and at one time was my whole being and what I believed to have been put on this earth to do.

As you are an academic some info for future reference, not meant sarcy at all btw.
Some parents like to sah, this doesn't mean they spend all day looking after children and cleaning up.
My dh works and does more around the home than I do, because he enjoys domestic chores for some ridiculous reason.
I have had him doing it naked today but tmi perhaps there
Some of us enjoy managing our own lives, not being told what to do by others, being governed by our own clock and time scale, following our own hobbies and interests.

Omg.

There are families who simply cannot afford to pay for childcare. The deficit they would be left with after paying for their childcare is more than they can afford to cover, no matter how hard they might budget.

Will that do?

Mumsnet is full of women who take the time off work for sports days , nativity plays, illnesses etc because their partner has a terribly important meeting at work. Or has to be in Paris for a crucial conference . Over and over again.

They will be the same men whose employers wouldn't let them go part time . Or change their working hours . Funny how so many women negotiate flexibility with their employers and so few men .

I kind of get what you're saying Fela, but I am talking about families where they would actually be financially worse off if someone doesn't work.

However, the structural inequalities thing is spot on

And yes Kristina, quite

So you're definitely not going to apologise for your factually incorrect but aggressive first reply, then? Look, if you want to believe that my husband is a secret sexist and I'm deluded, that's fine. However, I'm not inventing the fact that men can suffer employment discrimination too; nor am I inventing the fact that my husband's HoD thinks the whole idea of hands-on fathers is ridiculous so may prove obstructive. The SPL is a statutory right so there's no question about my husband taking that; reduced hours is what we'd both like, but it's much harder to be 100% sure about.

There are families who simply cannot afford to pay for childcare. The deficit they would be left with after paying for their childcare is more than they can afford to cover, no matter how hard they might budget.

Yes, and as I've said at least twice on this thread, those are not the families I'm talking about, the ones who can't put food on the table if they both work. I'm talking about families for whom there is a viable case for absorbing childcare costs for a few years by strict economy in order to invest in the longterm professional future of the mother as well as the father. Not rocket science. Just not thinking purely in the short term, and not defaulting to the idea that heavy childcare costs always mean that the obvious solution is for the mother not to work outside the home.

For instance, it's probably the main reason we have had only one child. We couldn't stretch our finances to cover childcare for more. It's a sacrifice worth making from both out points of view.

Yes PalmerViolet, in my case, me and my children were/are a family but because we were a single parent family there WAS nobody else to share the cost of childcare with, so I genuinely was kind of trapped, for a while. It passed.

And I agree with TheCatFromJapan, Mothers are just people! Nothing happened to me to make me boring. Or stupid.

But they are the families I am talking about. The ones that you have written off as "that old Mumsnet chestnut".

Sorry palmer I was responding to cute. Yes i agree there will be families where both parents working isn't viable. However i believe there are many more who think its not worth the small extra income, without thinking through the longer term benefits of workng. I think there is a social narrative though where the "acceptable answer" to whether or not a woman returns to work is financial. And that social narrative doesn't actually always support womens best interests.

Please don't make the mistake of thinking women's lives get smaller after children. They change direction beyond recognition. But it's rare for life to be smaller (except for maybe the first couple of years when you are chained to their needs and wants and feel like a robot, but that time passes. yes you forfeit a LOT when you have children but you get so much more back in return. I've never felt more fulfilled, never laughed so much, never felt such love. Life feels more vivid and purposeful and intense with children. And the excuses they give you to have fun again are limitless, from making mud slides to going to Disneyland.

Bibbity, are you being deliberately obtuse? Are you actually suggesting that every time a woman who is in a two-parent, two-job relationship says 'I can't afford to go back to work', it is because her doing so would actually leave her children at the point of starvation?

You are straw-manning like crazy here. I'm out.

Good luck, OP. Being a working mother in a happy and functional partnership is perfectly possible, just FYI.

*It's not an old chestnut. Many couples do not earn enough between them to afford to pay childcare, eat and have a roof over their heads.

This is such basic maths I don't see why supposedly intelligent women can't understand it.*

^^
This.

I worked part time in a very mundane job after my military career ended due to injury. This was before we had children. I was 20 when my DD was born, so not even earning the over-21 band of minimum wage. If I'd have gone back to work, my wages wouldn't have covered the cost of part time nursery hours Mon-Fri.
Even with DH's salary, we wouldn't have been able to afford childcare, two cars to get us to our respective workplaces, our rent and our bills. And as DH is the higher earner, our only option was for me to become a SAHM.

I think it's rather patronising to suggest the problem is women not 'thinking through' the longer term benefits of working. More likely that when women weigh everything up, the downside of working PLUS the fact that you are paying for the privilege makes it no longer seem worthwhile.
Long term thinking is all very well but sometimes with kids you have to make short term choices - if they have stuff going on that means they need you NOW, or you see their childhood racing past while the pressure of your job means you hardly get to spend any time with them. You can't put them on hold the way you can buying a bigger house or going on foreign holidays.

I'm not sure I am straw manning at all, as it goes as it is the usual experience of families where I live.

However, I suppose that according to you, those families don't use MN?

Which leave me in a bit of a bind!

"Bibbity, are you being deliberately obtuse? Are you actually suggesting that every time a woman who is in a two-parent, two-job relationship says 'I can't afford to go back to work', it is because her doing so would actually leave her children at the point of starvation?"

No.

I guess I am being as deliberately obtuse as you are!

Maybe countess. I am concerned from a feminist perspective because that kind of logic puts women in a position of being financially dependent on her husband and that can come back to bite them later if the husband cheats/becomes abusive. Also I know a lot of women who have tried to return to work when children are older to find that they need to take a low skilled low paid job, some have told me they wished they'd kept working.
Also it's not true that working mums don't attend to the needs of their children or spend time with them. All you have said could equally apply to working dads- yet dad's rarely give up work or talk about how their salaries don't cover the cost of childcare, even when that's true.

She's gone Palmer. But you and I still seem to be here . Maybe we are both figments of each other's imagination!

Oh dear bibbity, but thank goodness you and your fabulous NN are here