Men whose lives are facilitated by women Part 2

[OlennasWimple]

Continuation of the other thread that got filled up

I wouod be very careful about any comments along the lines ‘once you have a child, they always take the priority’
Because that’s the sort of idea that ONLY women have. Men do not seem to have any issue putting their job/hobby/life still very high up the agenda after they become a father.
Second, because it’s totally possible to be a Mum and STILL think about career etc...

Since dc2 was born, 12 years ago, I have started a business, retrained at master degree level and then started another business.
My very big regret is to not have been switched on enough to insist more that DH would pull his weigh properly or to insist that if he didn’t want to, then we had to have a cleaner.
But I certainly do not regret carrying in on a business pov, retraining etc...

I truly believe that in some ways Yolo is right. What women do once they have a child, we should expect men to do it too.
And we should also give the same importance to our career as we want, just as they do.

Even as a SAHM, I think this should be thought about with a career/work hat on. Yes it’s great to be at home wth yoUr dcs. Yes it’s ok to be a SAHM. That will be 20 years the case of your life. Then what’s next? What will you do with your life?
We all have these fantastic abilities and we can all give so much to the world. It would be a shame to waste all that.
And then on a (financial) safety pov, what if? What if your DH is involved in a car accident and can’t work anymore? What if he dies? What if you get divorced (most likely scenario)??

Yolo I agree with you totally, in theory. But in roactice... Sure, after maternity leave you should be able to split 50:50 (and really, you can split a lot on mat leave). But the baby doesn't care about equality, only about their main carer going away... So maybe only you can settle them in the night. And then they get sick, and your partner is in the middle of a big project, but you are already working flexible hours while you return, so you take the hit and leave early. Maybe your employer is genuinely family friendly enough that you could get promoted soon after returning, but it means spending 3 nights a week out late or travelling... And that's before you start school and need to attend daytime nativity plays, or have another child with more needs to balance.

I am in some ways a facilitated woman, my husband is self employed and does most of the pick ups and drop offs, we have a nanny and a cleaner - my career is going extremely well, but there have been a lot of tears on the way here from us and from the kids, and weekly or even daily I am questioning whether we are making the right decision, and wondering when this all gets manageable.

I think a big part of the problem is that there just need to be so many ducks in a row before you can get a fair setup, and they're not all in your control either.

This is the whole point of the thread to me yolo

You may go back to work. Your OH may share everything equally. I hope so. But when you get back to work you will find your self competing for promotions / interesting projects / pay with men who are facilitated at home and in the rest of their lives (predominently by women) to work as many hours as necessary, travel without restriction, and concentrate on nothing but progressing their careers. So even if your own set up is equal, your will be competing against others which aren't

So the logical next step to that is that sometimes, the things you don't anticipate can end up driving your choices.

Had I decided to pursue the matter in a tribunal rather than go for the settlement agreement, I could well have ended up untouchable in my sector even if I'd won. DH's part time wage wouldn't have been enough for us to survive on alone. He would therefore have had to go FT after any winnings ran out, and I might well have ended up being the SAHP to 2 pre-schoolers (and if I hadn't, the thing that would've stopped it would've been family help, which not everyone has). Even though it's not what either of us wanted.

That would have fucked me right over. Mine is not a job that it's easy to get back into after some time out, even if you haven't been trashed. It's given me a number of transferrable skills, but when I've tried to use them to move into another area, I've got the jobs but only been offered full time. You don't necessarily have the currency to purchase flexibility when you're not also offering a lot of experience.

Do you see how the SAHP thing can end up happening long term even if you don't want it to? I very aggressively pursued getting back into the workplace when on ML, because you have to if you've got 2 kids and want to work part time. But it took a large dollop of luck for things to work out as well as they have.

Just to add to this too, children absolutely don't need you less once they're teenagers and at secondary school, they really don't.

You might not need to leave at 5pm on the dot any more but you can't just leave them overnight at the drop of a hat for example and the wifework of children is still there. They need forms filling in, help with homework, advice about navigating friendships, lifts to parties, etc etc

I believe that if men HAD to take in more responsibility as fathers, then companies will get much more flexible.
There would no meetings at stupid hours, no evenings meets up to advance your career etc...
Because I’m sure they wouod find a way to work around that.

Eg in France for some time, they reduced the working week form 30 to 35 hours a week.
The deal was, you work normal hours like befire but get one day in loo every month.
Because schools were (are? I’m a bit lost now. Too many changes there!) closed on a Wednesday, people, INCLUDING MEN, were taking either a Wednesday or a Friday to make a long weekend.
The conclusion of that was that the important meetings were never schedule on those days as the chances of men not being preset was too high. Companies worked around it.
Companies would work around the issues of working late, being told that you would be travelling abroad on the day etc...
Atm it doesn’t happen because there is no need for that. And because MEN do not need that flexibility.

So for me, things starts with women realising what is going and refusing to accept such an unfair organisation. And then for men to step up at home and start taking responsibility.
Things at work will adapt just like childcare etc.. will adapt too (becaus men need thatnsyatwm to adapt, it will)

And you will, in your ideal set-up, both be part-timers, both seen as not quite keen enough, not committed, not 'wanting to play with the big boys' (as DH's breathtakingly dinosaurish boss said to him).

Instead of the fairly typical scenario of one decent career and one struggling one, you may well find you have two struggling careers. I hope not, but it's worth being aware that it might happen.

Sorry but I don’t agree abiutbte idea of main career either.

Aga8n, if both mum and dad are caring for the child equally, the child should be happy to be with mum or dad.
If the baby is at nursery/childminder, then that person is becoming one of the main carer for the child.
Just like it was before when women were working (because women have always worked) and children were looked after by extended family etc...
It takes a village to raise a child.
Wanting to be everything, the full time main carer, the housekeeper and still be working has never been possible. Not befire and not now.

I would be very careful about any comments along the lines ‘once you have a child, they always take the priority’

See, I would say that this is true, at least for us. It's true for both me and DH. I accept that we may be unusual in that respect. But it's had an impact on both of our careers, realistically. The poster who said that even senior people can end up stuck in roles and companies because they can't or don't want to do without the flexibility was right.

The salient point here though is that many more women do this than men. Which goes back to the idea that many men have their lives facilitated by women. Because when you have children, someone usually being able and willing to put them first is part of that facilitation. And that has a knock on effect.

And you will, in your ideal set-up, both be part-timers, both seen as not quite keen enough, not committed, not 'wanting to play with the big boys' (as DH's breathtakingly dinosaurish boss said to him).

Yes, there's definitely an element of that. DH and I don't care, and have carefully designed a lifestyle to allow us not to need to make decisions based on income maximisation. But not everyone can do this- some of it involves being part of a supportive family network that not everyone is able to access- and more to the point, not everyone wants to. I can't see how it would work for anyone in the south east who didn't either have SH or buy a house before about 2005, for example.

So even if your own set up is equal, your will be competing against others which aren't*

True - but the more people have equal set-ups, the less competition there will be with men who can work 16 hour days and women that sit at home and enable them to do it.

The more men who look after kids and know what it's like, and the more women with senior influence in companies, the more rules will change - like when the head of department/boss is female and makes a rule saying "no meetings after 5", etc.

We're not going to get this dream equality without struggle - as someone above said, they've often dreamed of "jacking it all in" as it would be easier than their current work situation - but if everyone did that then nothing would change.

Yolo quite. That's what we've been saying all along. It needs to change. But it's not as easy to change a whole society as it is to change one family. And, as so many many women have demontrated on this thread, even that's not easy!

Well, unless we had a really progressive socialist government, but we don't.

Or the law changes (like it did in France with the working hours).

I’m actually wondering what the Scandinavian countries, where the equality between men and women is much better, have done to achieve that better balance?

@NetFretForth

All we can do is mentor and encourage younger women, be positive about recruiting women returners, and try to make sure we don't make the workplace more difficult for people with caring responsibilities than it needs to be. But if anyone on this thread has more and better ideas, I'd be grateful for them. (This is, incidentally, an organisation that is good at part-time and flexible working, and pays decently for parental leave - about half my team are part time and almost everyone works flexibly in some way.)

IME, the mentoring by someone who gets the mental load stuff makes a huge difference. When I do that sort of mentoring, women often say 'why's it so hard, why am I failing?'. And then I ask what they're now doing that they didn't before. And the list pours out of them - from the obvious stuff (nursery runs) to the less obvious (needing to get to the supermarket because living off takeaway isn't OK with a weaning baby, but not being able to get the supermarket before or after work because of childcare and bed times, and so staying up very late doing online shopping for healthy food. Which they then cook. And clean up from. And store. And remember to de-frost. And note which ones not to make again because the baby hated it. And have an argument with their partner about how they're martyring themselves and surely they don't need to do all this crap and if they're that tired they should just go to bed earlier, it can all wait.).

Just having that conversation affirms that it is hard, they're not crap - but also that its survivable and does get better, and it's worth hanging on in there in the world of work, out-sourcing as much as you can afford and keeping pressing your partner to pick up at least some of the load.

Though that last is very, very hard - lots of women just give up on it because it causes too many rows and too much unpleasantness, and they're already fighting on too many fronts, and can't spare the emtional energy.

"Though that last is very, very hard - lots of women just give up on it because it causes too many rows and too much unpleasantness, and they're already fighting on too many fronts, and can't spare the emtional energy."

Absolutely. It makes me sad and mad.

I have been thinking how Yolo’s attitude wonderfully illustrates what we are up against as mothers. And she is a woman! A man would have even less awareness.

All the carrying child, birthing, breastfeeding and sleep deprivation palava is EASY, and you got a whole maternity leave for that. Anyway, you are so lucky you have got all this time on your hands and you don’t suffer the hard work in the office.

Once your kids can eat finger food, it’s EASY again: stick them in the nursery where you would be charged £800-1400 for somebody with four educational levels below you to look after your child and be paid absolute peanuts for it.

After that it gets even EASIER. Your 5 year old will love sitting in a school hall at 7.30am chewing their cornflakes, then spend 8 hours in a classroom, to then be stuck in the school’s tarmaced playground/community room until 6.30pm only having had a toast for a snack. Of course, while your kid is having a whale of a time at school all hours, you are achieving and are proud as hell what a great mother, worker and woman you are.

Isa I’m not saying that I’m not putting my dcs first. I do.
But what I am refusing to do is to think that as soon as I became a mother, I was only JUST that. Not a person on my right with her likes, her hobbies etc... But only a mum.
I really don’t think it’s healthy to define yourself in a one way dimension like this. No one is ‘just’ a mother, a worker, an engineer, an artist, a father, whatever.

We all have different sides to us and we should be nurturing those. ALWAYS. Of course, when you have a very young baby, then maybe this is what is coming first. But even I would argue that you, as a person, needs to come first too sometimes. So you can recover, sleep, get energised so that you can carry on being a good parent to that baby.

I think that this idea that children comes first (for the mother, always for the mother) is a way to keep women at their place.
Both because opportunities that could work get rarer.
But also because women get so exhausted from doing it all that they cant fight back.

After that it gets even EASIER. Your 5 year old will love sitting in a school hall at 7.30am chewing their cornflakes, then spend 8 hours in a classroom, to then be stuck in the school’s tarmaced playground/community room until 6.30pm only having had a toast for a snack. Of course,

It absolutely was not like that when me and my brother were in primary.

You make childcare sound like child abuse.

Xpost ridiculous
I agree. A good way to keep people at their place is to ensure they are so snowy undr obligations, work and stress that they can’t fight back against the unfairness of the system.

Just both my dcs have been in childcare since they were babies.
I can promise you that your description isn’t the reality at all.

Yolo but I bet you anything that's how you'll feel about it!

No, childcare is great in the UK. Just as described in my previous post.

And fwiw, I’m finding the issue of ‘childcare’ much more difficult as they are older than babies.
Childcare was an issue when they were in Y5~6 and I couldn’t leave them at home alone (but provision at school wasn’t adequate as directed towards much younger children)
And even worse as teens because there is no provision but they still need someone around, maybe even more than before.