Women’s Work
From my struggles with post-partum depression and anxiety, I learned I’m not well suited to caring for small children all day, every day. I’d probably not even be much suited to it as an 8-hour-a-day job with regular breaks. I dislike noise, mess, and chaos. I like to focus on one thing at a time; I don’t pretend to like or practice multi-tasking. I prefer reading and writing to playing. And, let’s face it, no one likes crying, diapers, or snot.
Several thing I read at the end of last year reinforced my growing desire for professional work instead of childcaring.
Kyra Sedgwick, quoted in a feature in Newsweek 10/15/07 on Women and Power:
I had this dream that when I had my children I was just going to want to be with them, and I wouldn’t want to work. And that was sort of this ideal, in a way, based on nothing, because my mother always worked.
I had this dream that somehow I’d be so fulfilled, and I wouldn’t need to work. I bought into this ideal that one should just stay home and be with one’s children, that that should be enough. It’s taken me a really long time to embrace my ambition and to embrace my need to express myself and to accept it in a loving way as part of who I am, instead of putting myself down for it.
From “The Whole ‘Working Mother’ Thing Actually Works,” by Carol Lloyd at Salon:
Based on surveys of 10,000 individuals, the British study found that mothers with jobs are significantly happier than their nonworking counterparts….The evidence paints a bleak picture of the toll that a stay-at-home life can takes on a woman’s satisfaction….working outside the home seems to improve the level of satisfaction among women with children. Moreover, it seems that women experience improved satisfaction associated with having children only when the kids go off to school (i.e., when their mothering job becomes a little more part time).
And a slightly different view, from a post at Mental Multivitamin:
I’ve learned that many women, homeschooling and not, feel all but enslaved to their homes and their families — even women who are also working traditional jobs!
Simply put, even as they acknowledge that they have good husbands, nice homes, and decent kids, they also admit that they feel like it all falls to them to keep it going. This, I think, is one of those gender-specific issues. I have never met a man, for example, who frets, “How will I get all of the laundry done!?”….I don’t know how other women escape the malaise that can suck the color from their lives, but I have always clung to the conviction that while I am a wife and a mother, I am also me first.
I wonder at the serendipitous synchronicity that brought all three of these pieces to my attention within a short time. They affirm my experience that motherhood is not fluffy bunnies and sunshine, and go a long way to breaking down that romantic stereotype and re-humanizing mothers, much as Marrit Ingman did in her funny, brutal memoir Inconsolable, which I read last year.
And from the same post at Mental Multivitamin, some practical advice for emerging from the day-to-day grind, and to reclaiming work and joy for oneself:
I have always made time to pursue those things which contribute to my self-definition, including work, yes, but also things like music lessons, reading (and I don’t mean books for the kids), ornithology, and more.
Finally, is it ironic, or merely interesting, that it has taken me weeks to write this post, since I have been so consumed with childcare and my Christmas cold since Thanksgiving?