Wise Ruby Wax - working and stay at home parents

[Judy1234]

In today's Telegraph....

"Dear Ruby

I stopped working when I had my third child. It didn't make sense to continue with my job when I had a stressed-out husband requiring my support and children who needed me at home. It was an agonising decision, but my salary only just covered the cost of childcare.

And we didn't need the money - my husband earns six times more than I did. More importantly, I felt really guilty going off to the office every day and leaving my kids behind.

My problem is this: since I stopped working I feel like a non-person. Oddly, it's other women who give me this feeling. Women who have somehow managed to keep their careers afloat through babies, breastfeeding, nappy rash and all the mayhem of motherhood, treat me with barely disguised contempt. It's almost as if, by staying at home, I've lost the right to have an opinion, or say anything interesting. It's deeply upsetting.

Life is hard enough as it is, so why can't women be allies at least? Why can't we respect each other's choices? Amanda M, Edinburgh

Dear Amanda

I have heard that cry from some of my "non-person" friends when they decided to give it all up for breastfeeding duty. The reason I would also probably treat you with disdain if I met you is that I am secretly (well, not so secretly any more) jealous.

You are lucky enough to have a husband who makes six times the amount you made and that really irks me, as I'm sure it would other females.

But in your position, I would have worked anyway, as all my self-esteem is stored up in my job. I could never have applied the word "housewife" to myself. I'd rather have put a sabre through my head.

Although I admire your sacrifice to the little one, on the whole, I find women who don't work to be just a teensy bit boring with their obsession with schools and stools. Not all, just most.

Perhaps other working mothers are reminded how guilty they feel about abandoning the home. Perhaps we take it out on you. Enjoy your home life."

The stress of no meals (BTW my dh bulk cooked for me) in NOTHING compared to the stress of looking after demanding babies on your own. I say this as a mother with experience of 2, so no first born jitters here.

Anna: "BTW - I don't believe that there such a thing as a dichotomy between emotional and rational argument.... "

I must have phrased it badly. Feel free to re-phrase it. Just answer the question

What question?

What is special about a mother?

Well, blueshoes, in my ideal post-partum world, you wouldn't have been on your own - that is the point I am making.

(An)other adult(s) would have been taking care of you; you of your tiny baby.

The trouble with the modern nuclear family is that support systems are almost non-existent. Alternative collective (state)-provided support systems work well at some stages of life and much less well at others.

anna, as far as i remember you only have one child. i have 3 children. i think you would find that if you had more children the dynamic of the relationship would change anyway. ime a newborn is the easiest to hand over to daddy or another carer when you have little green-eyes siblings around. is it perhaps more acceptable to share the care of a newborn with others if you are mothering older siblings? and to the reference to when we lived in caves. I can promise you that cave-mothers spent very little time with their babies. they probably had so many children and so many things to get on with that they were more claire verity than Anna8888 in their parenting.

blueshoes - if you really think you have had no answers to that question, I suggest you re-read the thread

I like your ideal post-partum world. "(An)other adult(s) would have been taking care of you; you of your tiny baby."

Why can't other adults take care of my tiny baby, with me? Which begs the question ... what is so special about mothers?

FairyMum - I have one child and two stepsons.

I suggest you try learning to be a stepmother to two children you don't know and from another culture to yours at the same time as being a first time mother before you pronounce on quite how easy I had it

I personally really don't care what other parents do about working/childcare etc - it's a personal choice and all about the individuals involved. I have a friend who really didn't want to go back to work after her ds was born, but I was desperate to go back part-time when ds was only 5mo. We've both made the right choices for us.

But the biggest surprise for me has been the role of nursery care in my ds' life. Although I wanted to go back to work (well actually study because I am doing a phd) I did agonise over putting him in nursery and arranged it so he was in the shortest amount of time possible. But he absolutely loves nursery and totally thrives on it - even if I didn't work at all I would still send him to nursery part-time because HE gets so much out of it. This I did not expect and I think this is an aspect many SAHMs do not consider - that their children may actually really benefit from, at least some, nursery care. (Of course not all children, for some it may not be a good thing at all.)

(Apologies if the thread has moved on, I have only read the first few pages)

blueshoes - but I have said on this thread that other adults can care for your baby too. No problem with that. What is important is that the mother be the primary care-giver.

fairymum, you just reminded me! yes, I remember now, I can go home and get the sources.

There is the social phenomenon of the cult of motherhood. Media, a lot of childcare books (including Deborah Jackson) is written from the premise (or ideal) of one mother, looking after one baby, and staring into each other's eyes and feeding on each other's needs and feelings, to the exclusion of the external world. This is because these books are largely written for first time mothers.

Fastforward to dc no.2. No time to read. Firefighting. Baby cries anyway, because mother is tying shoelaces of other dc.

Anna, let me re-phrase the question: what is so special about a mother that only she can be the primary caregiver?

Because the unique hormonal urge to care for her child means that the mother is a more responsive carer than any other and can provide things (breastfeeding included - not breastmilk; co-sleeping) that no other person can.

But if that hormonal benefit is cancelled out by, say, post-natal depression that cannot be lifted, will the baby be HARMED if the same level of care was provided by a person other than the mother? Has that been examined and objectively proven?

I am smiling to myself a little. I don't want to give you a hard time. So I will not re-state the question to you again. Any others are free to answer it.

Nooname, I had the very same experience with nursery. Even with 2 difficult, clingy, bf-fed babies, particularly dd who refused all attempts to give her a bottle and who had bad separation anxiety from 5 months, took to nursery like a duck to water.

Was I surprised, oh yes! If I did not take that step to settle her in (I had to go back to work), I would never have guessed it! yes, to this day, you could blow me over.

I thought we'd been through PND.

Oh well, here we go again.

PND can largely be avoided if mothers are given good support. In modern nuclear families support has largely given way to less adequate state support.

Let's get back to better family support (and the first step towards this is recognising maternal support is vital).

Saying - new mothers are badly supported ergo they get PND and are therefore unable to care for the babies optimally, ergo let's give the babies to someone else to be cared for

is just a loopy conclusion. Throwing the baby out with the bathwater.

Anna, I agree there is a deja vu element to this discussion. Polite way of saying we are going round in circles or 'here we go again'. Like your pun.

Let me clarify, I am in no way suggesting that babies of depressed mums should be taken into care (you are not saying that either). Just asking that if there was someone else who could equally provide/share the loving care within the home (such that mother is no longer primary caregive), how is baby harmed that that person is not the mother?

Your post partum world be ideal. But is not the reality. Women come down with PND, not uncommon. I think women trying to do it all is not the solution (even with support in all other areas), because sometimes it is the care of the baby that triggers the depressive thoughts, fueled by the mother's hormonal state.

blueshoes - depression (post-natal or otherwise) is a phenomenon of modern, so-called developed, societies.

If we wish to avoid depression, maybe there are some clues in more traditional societies?

I am no expert on traditional (hunter-gatherer?) societies, but I assume that there is more support for the mother, in that grandmothers, aunts, cousins are around, come and go, many hands to hold the crying baby etc.

That is great too! But I don't see the harm if it turns out that another woman/person ends up being the primary caregiver if the mother is otherwise indisposed.

In traditional (hunter-gatherer) societies, there isn't the same sense of self (individualism) that there is in modern societies, which also impacts on upbringing.

Anna888 - I agree with you. At the weekend I heard a newly pregnant mother-to-be ramble on (and on!) about her 'fears' of getting PND and not bonding with her baby. She is also worried about what it will do to her figure. She did not once mention a new baby - it was all about her.

I still can't believe that some people's version of 'equality' involves women and men (mothers and fathers) being told we are the same and that we must deny our differences in order to be treated as equals.

We are not the same. Women go through the huge emotional and physical change that is pregnancy and birth. OK, so some women sail through it, others don't. Some women want to go back to work (many more have to go back to work) very quickly. Many women do not want to. Iinfact, from my experiences, I would say that many women feel an almost physical need to stay at home with their young children. Why must we deny that need in order to class ourselves as feminists?

To push new mothers back into full time work without any consideration of how they feel about it is not feminism. I still maintain (as I have said on many of these threads) that more flexible, family friendly policies towards maternity/paternity leave, parental leave in general and most importantly, working hours is what is needed in order to better acommodate families (the lynchpin of our society, after all). A drastic change in these areas of government policy and emploment law would make it easier for women and men to balance out their family and working lives and give families (again, both women and men) genuine choice.

Patronising, guilt-tripping and attacking SAHMs into going back to full time work as soon as possible is not family friendly and it certainly isn't feminisim.

Excellent post, LoveAngelGabriel, and of course I agree with everything you say.

LoveAngelGabriel - Well said.