When I first introduced the man who was to become my husband to my extended family, not one but two different people said to me, “Wow! We never thought you’d meet anyone, let alone a Collins Street lawyer.” Never mind that my husband’s office was on Queen Street; the message was clear. All my life I’d been told by family, church and society that no man wanted an outspoken wife ...
***
“Welcome to Lake Wobegon, where all the women are strong, all the men are good-looking, and all the children are above-average.” With these words, Garrison Keillor hit the nail on the head: I live in a suburb where most kids are treated as above-average!
We expect big things from these ‘above-average’ kids; and so we are regularly caught up in conversations about high school. For decades, Victorian state government policies have pushed middle class families into private schools, with the result that rough boys and troubled kids make up a disproportionate part of the public school population. Parents of above-average, quiet girls know this, and are running scared.
As the mother of a bright and gentle ten-year-old, I experience this fear all the time. Surely, say friends, you wouldn’t send her to the local high school? Surely you wouldn’t sacrifice your daughter to your principles? When are you doing the private school scholarship exams?
And I waver. Of course I want her to have the best education possible; of course I want to give her every opportunity to thrive – and in our system, that implies private school. I have no doubt that she would be pushed harder and further at an excellent private school than at the local high, and I am also worried that classes at the local high will be more about discipline and less about teaching – so I feel scared, too!
But Jesus asks us to live in love, not fear; and when I set my fear aside, I remember that I have other concerns, too. I am concerned about the deep injustice of a two-tier system, where those who are privileged have access to private school, and those who are not, get a lower-status education. I am concerned that friendships with children who have a sense of entitlement and an assumption of privilege will affect my daughter’s expectations, and her soul. And I acknowledge that my daughter is deeply grounded and resilient; she’s not going to let a few rough boys push her around. So, holding these things in mind, I am trying to make a decision that best coincides with our faith, our values, and my daughter’s needs. And several things occur to me.
First, all children are precious in God’s eyes, not just my own kids. I can’t level the playing field and guarantee equal opportunity for all kids, but I can choose not to prioritise my own child’s access to education. Using the public system feels fairer.
Second, my daughter is already salt, light and yeast in the world. She brings her qualities – keen intellect, calm self-assurance, warm hospitality, quiet maturity, a sense of fairness – into every classroom she enters. These gifts will be valuable anywhere, but especially in a place where they are in shorter supply. Instead of removing yet another bright, gentle girl from the public education system, what is needed is for her, and many others like her, to stay.
Finally, I want her to keep loving across boundaries in the particular, not in the abstract. I don’t want her to love ‘those refugees’ or ‘those poor people’ or ‘those indigenous kids’ out there somewhere. I want her to love like Jesus: to love her neighbour, and for her neighbour to be, quite often, unlike her. I want her to stay with her friend for whom she takes a piece of fruit every day; her buddy who doesn’t speak English; those kids she’s friendly with who have low IQs or Asperger’s syndrome or who otherwise make her classroom interesting. Our local high school includes upper middle class to sub working class kids; kids as thick as two planks and kids who are well above-average; kids from 52 nationalities; and kids with various mental health problems. I reckon it’s a pretty good place to practice being a Christian.
Private school may be able to provide a fast-track to university and access to those who will one day be powerful; private school may grant more opportunities for extension; private school may be both more empowering and kinder than the local high. On the other hand, the local high will grant my daughter more opportunities to be a Christian: to be salt, light and yeast in the world; to love across boundaries; to be closer to the margins.
And Jesus never asked us to maximise our opportunities or to race to the top of the ladder. Instead, he told us to love God and one another – from this, everything else flows. So if learning to love is the be all and end all of our life’s work and calling, the local high might be the better choice. Even for an above-average girl.
We arrived and parked the bikes. While she went to her dance lesson, I ran errands. An hour later, I picked her up. We got back on our bikes and rode to our favourite café. As we were riding, I felt another little tickle. I scratched. We arrived, parked and locked up our bikes, then went and enjoyed our Saturday chat over coffee and hot chocolate. We went back to our bikes. I unlocked the bikes, put on my helmet, and felt a little tickle. I scratched. And flicked out a cockroach from my hair.
It landed on the footpath in front of half a dozen people, and ran around in dizzy circles while I hopped out of its way, scrubbing at my head and cursing.
My daughter is very kind. Had the situation been reversed, I would have collapsed laughing. She didn’t. Instead, she took a step back, then offered to hold my bike while I shook my helmet and swore and leapt to avoid the cockroach, which had some sort of perverse tracking device which drew it running back towards me over and over again.
This same daughter recently told me that I was indiscreet when we last had head lice. When I found them, I mentioned it to a couple of friends so they could check their kids’ hair. But when one of the mums said, ‘Oh! I thought it was the new shampoo that was making my head itch’, I got the giggles. And then I told lots of people, with great roars of laughter, and my daughter became quite cross. I explained that it was important to laugh at the minor indignities of modern family life. She said I was embarrassing her and her sisters, and I had to stop talking about it.
But now I’ve had a cockroach in my hair. How do I feel? Well, half a dozen strangers and my daughter saw me flick it out of my hair and onto the footpath, then hop around shrieking. I feel slightly humiliated, and sullied and unclean. So I am trying to think about it in terms of how she might feel about head lice. But, ‘You had lice?’ I want to say to her. ‘Well, I had a cockroach! Beat that!’
And actually, I don’t think the cockroach is my fault. So we have occasional roaches? That’s life in a warm city. That one wandered into the crevices of my helmet, then made little forays into my hair, is disgusting, but hardly a moral failing on my part. I find it hard to sympathise with my daughter, who has asked that I never mention head lice again. So we have occasional head lice? That’s life in primary school. That they occasionally make forays into my children’s hair is hardly a moral failing either.
But this is an opportunity to offer up my humiliation as a gift to my daughter, and as an opening to you. So I am telling you about the cockroach, that inch-long light brown glistening beastie, that I flicked out of my hair. I admit that it’s a plan which will probably backfire. When I tell her that I wrote about it she’ll blanch, and say I’m humiliating her all over again. She’s a very kind girl, mature and calm; but she’s also becoming a teenager. And what teenager wants a mother who is known for having cockroaches in her hair? How embarrassing!
Meanwhile you too may blanch and think, what sort of woman has cockroaches in her hair? Isn’t she embarrassed? Well, yes. But that’s the thing about tucking vulnerability into the crevices of stories: one must actually become vulnerable. And even if you blanch and I feel embarrassed I will keep on telling them, because the stories and the vulnerability build bridges which link together you and me.
Yes, this cockroach of mine is a funny sort of gift: a little bit weird, a little bit gross. You are free to ignore it, or to leap out of its way. As with all gifts, I can only offer it. Acceptance is up to you.
This post has been approved by an eleven-year-old.
After all these years of struggling with work and not-work, I’m still struggling. I have days where I take the kids to school, drink a slow coffee, have a slow chat, then wander home and hang out the washing. I work for a few hours before it’s time to pick up the kids and leap on the after school treadmill. On such days I feel a bit guilty for not working as hard as my husband. But, said a friend, perhaps you’re not seeming to work as hard as your husband – and that’s a different thing.
There’s no question that my husband works hard, jolly hard. His hours are packed. Mine aren’t. At least, they’re not packed with ‘work’ things. I’m certainly doing the requisite hours and more of working and studying, but I also do a whole lot of other things, invisible things, that I somehow think don’t take any time. But when I reflect on them, they are actually significant parts of the day.
Take the other day. I razzed three kids up and took them to school, despite their usual shenanigans which required me to leave the room several times and breathe slowly and carefully so as to avoid losing my temper. Then I had a long pastoral conversation. I went home and worked on my thesis for a couple of hours. I ate lunch standing up, then ran out of the house to meet someone and do a couple more hours pastoral work and study. From there, I went straight to school and picked up the kids. One of them did a runner, so I chased her through the schoolyard and go to be That Mother who yelled. We squeaked home in time for piano lessons. I shunted all three through their lessons; brought in, sorted and folded three loads of washing; filled in school forms; washed the vegetable crisper; unpacked the weekly veggie box; prepared a healthy balanced meal; ate with my kids; bathed and de-loused them; supervised readers and homework; played a few rounds of racing demon; did the dishes with my six-year-old; got the kids to put their clean clothes away and their dirty clothes in the wash (which takes much more effort than seems reasonable); ushered them into bed; then sat down, at half past eight, with a cup of tea.
But my husband got home from work after nine. So I felt like I hadn’t worked as hard as him.
There are so many tasks that feel like not-work and like they should take no time. They appear on no balance sheet, and I expect them to fit into the cracks of the day. Filling in school forms. Paying bills. Planning and cooking meals. Buying groceries. Washing dishes. Sweeping floors. Mending. Any form of housework. Buying birthday presents. Most of the emotional work. And yet when you have three primary school aged children, washing, cleaning, admin, mediation, and food preparation take an hour or two every day.
The frustrating thing is that my consciousness is well and truly raised. I’ve read Marilyn Waring’s books. I’ve thought and written about the importance of homemaking, and despite my previous conclusions, I really do think that it’s work – in my head. But my gut still doesn’t really recognise it as work, or that it takes real time.
Last week my father, the historian, told me about a woman who came out from England in the nineteenth century. She complained loudly that there was no suitable help in the colonies, which made it impossible for her to perform her duties as a minister’s wife. It made me laugh, and then rock back on my heels. Because I am not the minister’s wife. I am, in fact, the minister. I am also doing postgraduate study. And I am the cook, the laundress, the mostly cleaner, and the gardener for a family of five.
I know all about feminist consciousness raising and The Wife Drought, and they’re all well and good. But it took a word from the nineteenth century for me to hear, quite clearly, that these other things are work, too. That, and talking with friends, and blogging about it time and time again. I am writing about it now as part of my remedial learning process. But I am such a slow learner. By the time I really recognise it as work, my kids will have all grown up.
When was the last time you encountered the word ‘tatterdemalion’? I have just read one of the most playful, exuberant, relishing encounters with language that I have ever come across: Kith: The Riddle of the Childscape, by Jay Griffiths. The author loves language and odd words; she plays with meanings and roots and etymologies; she relishes alliteration and other musical tricks; and the cadence of her writing is positively lyrical. Or, as she writes (in relation to the metaphors we have for feeling and knowing, but which equally pertains to her modes of expression), ‘Language…, a beautiful partisan, waits with rifle and song to ambush us into remembering what we used to know as children.’
Yes, the writing is beautiful, drawing the reader in; but the point of the book is not language. Instead, in the course of writing her last book, Wild, Griffiths visited many indigenous tribes and found herself wondering why the indigenous kids she observed were so cheerfully grounded, while the Western kids she knew were so unhappy by comparison. Kith is her attempt to answer that question.
Her answer is long, opinionated, and unabashedly Romantic. In brief, she argues that kids in the West rarely get what they really need: secure early attachment followed by extreme freedom; a relationship with the woods and the wild, including wildlife; a big tribe of kids and adults; stories packed with metaphor which allow for the expression of a child’s emerging sense of self; lots of free time; rites of passage into adulthood; freedom from consumerism; a rich, responsive education; and so on.
Instead, what they get is ‘controlled’ crying and the physical isolation of cots, prams and car seats, followed by helicopter parenting and little nuclear families; constant surveillance; highly structured schedules; media outlets and politicians which portray them in a constantly negative light; stop and search laws, curfews and dispersal orders for the crime of being young; lives trapped indoors; hollow stories; no rites of passage; and industrial-style, heavily politicised education.
None of these observations are particularly original. In recent years, Skenazy encouraged parents to let their kids be more independent; Louv urged kids into the great outdoors; Hodgkinson called for tribes and freedom and faerie stories; Robinson advocated for an education which drew out the unique gifts of each child; and many, many writers begged us chilly Westerners to be more physically affectionate with our babies and toddlers. It’s obvious stuff.
What sets Griffiths’ book apart is the way she brings these themes together under the umbrella of Romanticism. She compares the childhood experiences of Romantic poets – Wordsworth, Blake, Clare, Whitman – with indigenous practices of childcare, arguing that they have much in common; and goes on to suggest that these approaches will lead to happier children. Further, she argues, we lack (but need) a Western philosophical framework to describe our parenting practices; Romanticism fits the bill.
I love her writing; I agree with many of her observations regarding how kids could be better raised; and I find many of her arguments regarding Romantic and indigenous ways of raising children reasonable. However, this book is so passionately one-eyed, and so flawed, that Griffiths fails to convince overall – and this is a pity.
To begin with, despite identifying what Western kids lack – such as secure attachment, a big tribe, and rites of passage – Griffiths offers few practical suggestions as how to get these things into kids’ lives. How do we make parenting easier so that parents have the emotional capacity to forge deep strong attachments to their children? How do we balance the needs of parents with the needs of children? How do we widen people’s perceptions of their role in the lives of other people’s kids, so that parents aren’t required to fulfil all the adult roles in a child’s life? In a post-church society, who develops and conducts rites of passage? And so on. These questions are all raised by the text; yet Griffiths offers no solutions, and it is simply not helpful to identify what is needed (and indeed to criticise harshly how we parents, of which Griffiths does not appear to be one, do it wrong), but to offer no suggestions for change. It is left to the reader to imagine what could be and then put it into place – and yet many of the necessary structures are almost impossible to tackle family by family: they require cultural change.
For example, to take the example of a tribe, it took nine years of talking and parenting before we found a family who was genuinely interested in and able to live in the same street as us, and, more than that, willing to get involved in our kids’ lives in ways that eased the pressure on our child-parent relationship. Griffiths writes rather breathlessly that, in one tribe, parents never discipline their own children; that is left to others so that the affection of the parent-child relationship is never damaged. That sounds bloody wonderful, but it would require a seismic shift in how we as a society take responsibility for other people’s children for it to be even remotely possible here.
Another weakness of the book is how Griffiths glosses over the hardships of life for indigenous children. Sure, traditional ways of childhood sound great for those who survive, especially boys: roaming, hunting, fishing, and untold freedom for kids. But traditional ways also involve high infant mortality, infanticide when the rains don’t come or too many girls have been born, the ‘betrayal’ (as it’s described in the book by a young victim) of female genital mutilation, the sexual trade of young girls to forge connections or strengthen associations between tribes, social controls which require high levels of conformity, even child sacrifice for religious purposes. In over 350 pages of praising indigenous childcare practices and criticising ours, Giffiths devotes a scant couple of pages to listing some of the downsides of being an indigenous kid, and offers no explanation or justification for these less than happy practices. This is deeply unsatisfactory, and feels unfair. At least kids in the West get to live when the rains don’t come; most Western girls don’t have their genitals hacked off with rusty razor blades; and the sexual trade in young girls is looked upon as an aberration and a crime. For these aspects of the Western approach to childhood, I am grateful.
Because I have never lived with an indigenous tribe, I find it hard to judge the veracity of Griffiths’ account of indigenous lives. Even so, I found myself questioning it. For example, in one place Griffiths writes that after spending an afternoon with over a hundred indigenous kids, she realised that she hadn’t once heard a kid cry, and that she couldn’t imagine the same situation with Western kids. Having just spent three weeks of the school holidays with two different tribes of kids, aged between 6 months and 15 years, I can vouch that even Western kids rarely cry when they’re running around in a pack. They get busy, and work things out; and so I’m not convinced that this lack of crying is a unique feature of indigenous life.
To the contrary, in fact. One of my friends lived for two years in an indigenous village in Papua New Guinea. When she returned, she told me that one thing she will always remember is the crying. It formed the constant soundscape; she said she could not remember a time when she couldn’t hear a child crying, and that coming back to Australia was a great relief from this point of view. Was this village, eight hours’ travel by small boat from Rabaul, ‘less indigenous’ than the people visited by Griffiths? Or, in her visits with indigenous people, did Griffiths excise weeping children from her experience and hear only what she wanted to hear? I have no way of knowing, but I am sceptical that the lives of indigenous children following traditional ways of life are always so blissful. (As for the lives of indigenous kids whose traditional ways of life are being torn to shreds, that is, most of them, I weep.)
This blanket enthusiasm for indigenous practices coupled with a blanket criticism of Western practices grates; and it also leads to ridiculous inconsistencies. Griffiths is scathing of the way Western children are penned up indoors, locked away from the wild spaces that they need for their development. Yet in a chapter devoted to the importance of imagination and metaphor, Griffiths writes positively about the Kogi people in Colombia, who identify a boy as a future spiritual leader. This infant is taken from his mother, and shut in a dim cave for the first nine years of his life; his only exposure to the wider world is through the stories told to him. After nine years, he emerges as a spiritual leader (or, I suspect, completely mad). Of this practice, Griffiths admits only that some Westerners may feel ‘ambivalence’. Horror is more like it. One is left with the impression that it’s not okay for Western kids to be inside playing the piano, learning to cook, reading faerie stories, building cubbies, or playing hide-and-seek; but an indigenous kid can be locked away in a dark cave for nine years. Oh, please! Clearly, this is absurd; yet Griffiths seems cheerfully oblivious to both the brutality of some indigenous practices and the inconsistencies within her text which lead her to condemn in the West that which she extols in other cultures.
Griffiths also suffers from the hopeless sentimentality towards children that one sees in non-parents from time to time. As a parent, I do find it helpful to be reminded to let my kids take risks, to get them outside, to let them have their privacy and secret spaces and special dens. I like being a little breathless about the idea of childhood, and I know that when we relax our family culture, everyone is happier and more cheerful. But I also know just how much of childhood is about shit and sex and fighting and greed and fear, not only in my own children or the children I spend time with, but in my memories of childhood; and it seems that there is little room in Griffiths’ worldview for such normal kids. Not all kids are large-spirited hearty adventurers or passionate artists. Griffiths seems to be unaware of the variations in personality which are found, I suspect, across all cultural styles.
Her one-eyed view also means that Griffiths fails to see the opportunities for wildness and secret places that city children find: on the subway, up the fire stairs, under the stoop, in a cubby, or in the branches of a tree at the local park. Not every wild space or secret den needs to be a rural idyll. She seems to miss the ways city kids lose and construct themselves, and make little nets of privacy, not just in folk tales but in music and dance and sport, and dreaming in the back seat of the car. Her unabashed primitivism lacks subtlety; and there is so much good about being a Western kid that I find it hard to perceive the crisis of childhood to which she constantly alludes.
So I have lots of issues with the book; still, I recommend it. Griffiths’ observations about what makes kids thrive are good sense, overall; and the great exuberant eloquence of her writing is such a delight, such a gift, that I am prepared to forgive very many of the flaws. Cat-shadows in beetroot patches will win me over, every time.
‘Obedience is deadly, will is divine and the vital wildness of the human spirit is purring, over there, like a cat-shadow in the beetroot patch.’
***
PS: If you’re not really up for a long, loquacious, one-eyed, deeply flawed rant – though why not, I can’t imagine! – but you still want to think about how to parent generously, I’d recommend Hodgkinson’s utilitarian The Idle Parent. My longer response to it is here, but, in short, it advocates freedom and choice; is packed with suggestions for ways to maximise love and affection and minimise the rage and frustration of parenting; and urges parents to seek ways of making family life fun. It’s intelligent, enjoyable, good-humoured and opinionated, and lacks only cat-shadows and beetroot patches. And who has a beetroot patch, anyway?
My seven-year-old was getting ready for school. It was 16 degrees. She was going on an excursion to Queenscliff, a picturesque seaside town where the wind blows in from Antarctica. ‘It’ll be freezing,’ I said, ‘wear your ski jacket.’ ‘Ok,’ she said.
In the maelstrom of getting kids out of the house, I didn’t look at her closely. We arrived at school. She was wearing a hoodie. The wind cut through her like a knife, and she started jiggling up and down with her arms wrapped around herself. ‘Where’s your ski jacket?’ I asked. She looked at me blankly. Of course, she hadn’t worn it. Nor had she worn her other warm coat; and it quickly transpired that she had taken her raincoat out of her bag some time ago and had never put it back.
‘I’m wearing my bathers,’ she said helpfully, pulling up her top to show me her tankini.
***
Mostly, I’m a great believer in natural consequences. A kid won’t wear a jacket? Fine, she’ll be cold. But she was heading off on a full day’s excursion, and she was going to catch pneumonia. Worse, the bus was leaving right after the bell; I had no chance to rush home, grab a jacket, and save her.
I berated my daughter, then beat myself up for not double checking and not communicating clearly. Angrily I asked myself what sort of mother doesn’t look at her children properly before they head out the door.
Then, tears of frustration and shame in my eyes, I went and stood with the other parents to wave the kids off on their big adventure.
And there I found the answer to my question: a normal mum. I wasn’t the only one who hadn’t enforced jacket and gloves. One mum was grumbling that her son had snuck out wearing only a light long sleeved top – she only noticed when he lined up, teeth chattering. A couple of kids were in t-shirts; a few were wearing shorts. I was regaled with half a dozen stories of children in inadequate clothing as I watched the ragtag bunch get onto the bus, some dressed for the tropics and others for the snow. I told the story of my daughter and the tankini and everyone laughed, and I felt much better.
I don’t know why I was so angry with myself that day. But I am grateful, so grateful, that my daughter is in a class with a bunch of ragamuffins, the children of parents who are just as scatty as me as they race out the door every morning.
I love a hot shower; my husband likes it cool. Sometimes in the morning rush, my husband jumps in as I'm getting out. And every time he yelps, steps back, and reaches for the cold. 'How can you have it so hot?' he asks, looking at my bright pink skin.
Let me tell you, my dear. When I was a girl, we had an outdoor laundry; as well as the washing machine, it housed an ancient hot water system. My father would get up at six to light the boiler, and I, who had been mooching around since five, would often go with him and watch.
A brick bunker ran down the side of the laundry, full of hard black coal humped in hessian sacks from a Bedford truck. Mr Wright, the coalman, had twinkling eyes, a crinkly face, a snow white beard, and a big smile for me. Each morning, dad would fill the coal bucket from the bunker and I'd think of Mr Wright; then we'd go into the laundry.
There my father would kneel in front of the boiler, and open the metal door. His large brown hands would carefully lay the fire: first twists of paper, then firelighters, then a careful pile of coal briquettes. When it was built, he would strike a match, reach in, and gingerly touch it in several places. Very gently, cold breath wreathing, he would blow at the fire. Tentative flames would lick up once, twice, then, becoming more sure of themselves, take hold. We'd sit quietly and watch until we were sure the briquettes had caught. Then he'd close and latch the boiler door.
Hands black with cold dust, he'd run the water through a skinny folding spigot into the concrete laundry trough. The boiler was still heating up; the water was always freezing. My father would rinse his hands, then roll the yellow soap around and around. He'd rub his hands one inside the other, until his nails were clean and the ridges in his skin were clear; he'd send lather up to his elbows. Finally, he'd sluice his arms, and dry them on an old ragged towel.
More than anything, my father hated a cool shower. For all the care that he took, he was so anxious to ensure that his shower was hot that he'd sometimes overload the boiler. Twenty minutes later, it would boil over, rattling and shaking to waken the dead, shooting steam and scalding hot water all over the laundry roof, ready to take off like a rocket.
'Jooo-oooohn!' my mother would scream, a regular morning wail, 'you've done it again!'
On those days, the water was so hot that steam bumped through the pipes. Instead of warm water, we'd get jets of icy water interspersed with gusts of scalding steam. Impossible to wash in, we'd wait anxiously watching the clock, sniping at each other, until everything had cooled down a bit; then we'd rush through our showers and race out the door.
Whenever I remember this, my face cracks into a loopy grin – and there is my answer to my husband: a hot shower takes me right back to childhood.
In my last post, I wrote about work-life balance. I've spent my whole adult life wondering about the nature of work; yet in that post I used the word without definition or clarification. Now I'd like to unpack it.
The day I wrote that post, I used the word to mean 'activity which is not directly related to managing children or the household'; that's what I always mean when I say 'work'. My husband works: he goes out of the house and does stuff which is not related to spending time with children, cleaning the house, washing clothes, or buying, preparing and serving food. Certainly the money he earns contributes mightily to the upkeep of the household, but when he is 'at work', he is not engaged in a hands-on way.
When I say that I 'work', I mean that I am studying or writing. I don't differentiate, when I speak, between all the aspects of 'studying' and 'writing', such as reading, mining bibliographies, meeting with supervisors or other students, attending seminars, collecting library books, sighing over crappy drafts, or gazing out the window wondering what the hell I'm trying to do. Nobody needs to know precisely what I do in those hours, just as nobody outside accounts needs to know when my husband meets with a client, drafts a document, ducks out for sushi, or gazes out the window wondering what the hell he's trying to do, too. Like him, I just say 'work'. It's easier that way.
So for me, 'work' is industrious activity outside the orbit of the household. Because I study, it's not financially remunerative; maybe one day it will be.
Why do these words matter? Quite simply, because language is powerful. I have found that if I say 'it's my study time', someone will always suggest meeting for coffee or doing an errand; and when my study times are measured in three hour blocks, this is disastrous. On the other hand, when I say 'it's my work day', nobody asks anything of me. We take 'work' much more seriously than 'study', even if the person using the word 'work' really, secretly, means 'study'.
It's magic! And it's crazy. Meanwhile, an old friend of mine recently worked out how much time she has spent breastfeeding her very young baby; it was many more hours than full time employment, and didn't take into account the time she has spent changing nappies, washing, or caring for her two-year-old. Yet her activities don't fall into our economic or political models of work, despite being physically and emotionally demanding, very time consuming, and of enormous benefit to society. Why do so few of us describe caring for young children as 'work'?
I cannot count the times I wanted to punch someone when they asked me, the mother of three pre-schoolers, when I was going back to work. If, as regularly happened, they went on to say 'it's such a privilege to be able to stay home', I'd have to sit on my fist. Caring for three young children always felt like work enough for me, especially as I often also cared for an extra child or two. If, however, I had been employed as a childcare worker – and put my own kids in paid care to do it – everyone would have given me a pat on the back for re-entering 'the workforce'.
Many mothers I know privately describe their paid work as 'time off'. When they're 'at work' they can concentrate with no interruption; they can grab a coffee and have a few minutes' peaceful contemplation; they can use their minds and training and see the fruits of their labour; they earn money and status because they are 'employed'; and they can pee alone. Once they collect the kids, they're feel like they're on a hamster wheel of taxiing, cooking dinner, listening to readers, washing dishes, bathing kids, tucking them into bed, putting on a load of washing, sweeping the floor, hanging the washing out, and preparing lunches for the next day.
I used to think these friends of mine were being funny when they described their jobs as 'time off', but now I have more time for 'work', that is, study and writing, I see how right they are. It is so affirming to do things which use a bigger skill set; I am beginning to feel like a fully-fledged adult. Study and writing and meetings and seminars do feel like time off (not to mention that blissfully empty time, the commute); even so, I jealously protect the time with the powerful word, 'work', to describe it all.
So what are the activities I rarely describe as work? Unlike my old friend, I'm no longer breastfeeding or changing nappies, thank goodness, but there's still the cooking (don't run in the kitchen, I'm using the big knife), cleaning (I only mopped yesterday, just look at this floor!), laundry (that's two outfits for the day young lady I don't care if it's dirty you're wearing it again tomorrow), washing up (how many cups did you use today???), taking children to and from kinder (where's your lunchbox?) and school (where's your helmet?) and piano lessons (didn't you practice???), braiding hair (I asked you to brush it), working in the school canteen (no you can't have a cupcake just because I'm here), reading with my kids (use a bookmark, not my shopping list/your shoe/a used tissue for god's sake!) and school kids, organising playdates (no you can't watch YouTube when you have a friend over), telling my kids to sit up straight and chew their food properly and put your knees down at once!, shopping for food and shoes and birthday presents, organising church suppers, pruning the roses, telling my kids to use a tissue and put it in the bin!, changing the sheets, overseeing tooth brushing, scrubbing muddy handprints off the walls, combing out nits (sit still!), calling and waiting for tradies, wiping down the benches, taking kids to the doctor and dentist and hairdresser, planting, weeding and watering veggies, reminding kids to put your damn clothes in the wash/away/does this floor look like a laundry basket?, managing multiple food allergies and intolerances (is that really worth eczema and stomach cramps?), feeding the school chooks and guinea pigs (don't squeeze the poor creature!), doing the family paperwork (when did your teacher give you this form?), fixing things (exactly HOW did you break it?), paying bills (do you think we're made of money?), and a thousand other activities.
Some want to describe all this as 'work' – and there are times when I do, too – yet I am largely reluctant to use that word. It's an uphill battle to reframe language. Most people use 'work' to mean 'job' or 'employment'; it's not automatic to use it for household duties. In any case, all these activities are about our primary relationships, and I don't want to reduce the enormous richness and complexity of running a household and caring for children to a set of economic activities, which is what 'work' usually suggests; family life is so much greater than that. Finally, paid work is not 'time off' or a pleasure for many people; it's the job they do so they can afford a roof over their heads and kids under the roof. To describe maintaining that home and caring for children as 'work' when those activities are experienced as a great privilege and a pleasure is, to many people, bizarre.
So I feel the need for another word. 'Housework' doesn't begin to cut it; to me, the word evokes a low heeled woman wearing a frilly apron and carrying a feather duster, and it completely overlooks all the relational aspects of caring for children and maintaining other household relationships. 'Housekeeping', too, doesn't quite fit because, like 'housework', the word is focussed on the physical structure of the house and doesn't provide for the people within it. If you employ a housekeeper, you also need a nanny; housekeepers don't care for children or anyone else.
Another possibility is the word 'homemaking'. It's a word that largely connotes women's work because of a social history in which women have spent the last however long as the primary workers in the home and carers of the people in it; in fact, some dictionaries go so far as to define it as a role some women (not men) adopt. And yet, on reflection, homemaking is not a verb which is intrinsically gendered: every man, woman and child engages in homemaking in some form or another.
Just think of the child who carefully places a pretty snail shell on a shelf; the man who takes out the garbage; the woman who sweeps the floor; the kids who build a cubby; and the baby who by her cries draws the household near. They are all homemakers, building the place where they live and shaping the relationships they have with the other people there.
So the home includes the place, and the objects and people within it; the members of the household co-create and maintain the place they call home through physical labour and relational work; and I can call this activity 'homemaking'.
I've found a word I can work with. I will continue to call any industrious activity outside the house 'work'; and all the things I do in and for the household I will call 'homemaking', instead.
Re the picture: Query: Are the dishes work? Answer: Not for me. They're homemaking. And I must admit, I rather enjoy splashing round in the sink! But as for scrubbing the loo... blech.
It's a small thing, but I finally agreed to let my oldest two girls have short hair. They are now the proud owners of bobs. 'What's the big deal?' I hear you ask. 'Isn't long hair in kids a nightmare?'
Well, yes. But in term time, like any family, we're busy. In the morning, we run around checking lunch boxes and finding bike locks and brushing teeth and hopping around as we look for that other shoe, and before I know it everyone has run out the door without a hug. After school, the kids go into the garden to play; or curl up in a quiet corner with a story; or build a cubby, while I bring in the washing and cook dinner. After dinner, it's a run around the house then off to bed; but sometimes they're so grumpy that we shout and leave their room; and oftentimes we have people over so we tuck them in quickly then return to our conversation. All too easily, physical affection is overlooked.
Of course, there are afternoons when I grab a cuddle when I pick them up from school; and evenings when I tuck someone into bed then snuggle down next to them before tackling the dishes; but often I don't.
Yet I don't want to be a family where everyone inhabits their own little bubble, protected from contact with others. It's how I grew up and what I know, but I want more. I want a good hug from my busy daughters every day, even if I have to trick them into it.
One ruse I had was to insist that my daughters have long hair. Every morning, like it or not, they had to stand still while I brushed and put up their hair, then gave them a quick cuddle. It was my little secret, a way of making sure I spent a couple of minutes in physical contact with them, squeezing in a hug and even a quick kiss for the top of each head before they ran off to other things.
But those independent girls – all of six and nine, I might add – didn't like me doing their hair. They wanted to do their own hair, thanks very much. And after months of their campaigning, I finally capitulated.
Each of them was booked into a salon. Each of them had a foot or two of hair removed. And each of them emerged beaming, and weeks later are still clearly savouring their new hair-do.
I am delighted at how proudly they hold their heads, and how quick they are to get ready in the morning now they don't have to wait for their daily plaits. But there's a little piece of me that aches for the morning cuddle, those few minutes each day which they no longer seem to need or want to give. Each morning, I find myself wondering, are these growing pains I am experiencing? How did they become so independent so young? And how will I trick these clever kids now?!
What does it mean when a woman who has been reasonably happy to be home with young children no longer wants to be home with young children, and yet still has a four-year-old at home? How can she be a good parent to the little one? How can she retain her sanity?
I don't know why I post it as a theoretical question. This is personal: these are questions I've been asking myself for six months or more. This year I get more time than I have had for nearly a decade to work, study, and do my thing, but it's still not enough. My youngest is at home a couple of days a week, and by the middle of a day with her, I am ready to scream; instead, I ignore her while she plays, and often say no when she asks me to join in. 'Mummy doesn't play,' I say. 'Mummy reads to you or cooks with you, but mummy doesn't play.' I don't want to sit on the floor; I don't want to pretend; I don't want to converse with a four-year-old for more than half a day. Quite simply, I've had enough.
How I did it for nearly ten years, I don't know. How did I sip imaginary tea and set out bead patterns and chat about the neighbour's cat? And why can't I do it anymore? I've grown out of her life stage more than a year too soon.
I realise it's the first time I've had a four-year-old without a younger sibling around to absorb her attention. Meanwhile, many of our friends have moved on: parents have picked up more hours at work; children are in school or childcare; and even if there were lots of people left to play with, I've moved on too. I want to do stuff, not arrange coffee mornings just so my kid is occupied.
I felt like I should feel guilty that I managed to be there for her two older sisters when I don't want to be there for her. But I'm not guilty. I've stayed home with her as much as I can, but now it costs too much. And if I'm honest, our three daughters have had three different parenting experiences as I moved through my own life stages; this is really nothing more than the next stage.
Realising this led me to think about our parenting model. What do I want my children to learn? What version of womanhood do I want to model for my daughters? Is a woman is someone who subjugates her needs to theirs way beyond the point of her own happiness and health? Or is a woman a person who is engaged in the work that she loves, whether it's in the home or in the wider world? I realised I'd like my girls to see that I'm doing things that stimulate me and give me life. I used to love being at home; now I don't. I love spending some time with her, but not all day. When I clarified that, I realised it was certainly time for a change. Staying home with her more than half a day each day no longer felt like an option.
So I tried to work out how best to care for her. I explained to her that this year she'd be at kinder for three mornings, and then I asked her what she wanted to do on the other days. Childcare, perhaps? Um, no. Adamantly not. She hates childcare by any name. We dipped her toe in the waters of childcare once or twice and she is still furious about it. Kinder good, childcare bad: that's her motto.
'If not childcare, then what?' I asked. Very firmly she said, 'Stay home with you.' 'Does it need to be me?' I said. 'An adult who loves me,' she said.
Good answer – but how frustrating. Secretly, I wanted her to go to childcare like every other kid, and I wanted to be able to tell myself and the world that it's what she wants to do: to spend time with a group of kids running riot. Instead, I realised that I had three options: (1) stay home with her; (2) force her into childcare and betray her trust in me that I will arrange what is best for her; or (3) come up with another solution which respects her desires but also keeps me from going right out of my mind.
I have tried and tried the first option. For more than six months I have sought ways to enjoy being home with her. She is a delightful child, independent, bright, funny, and imaginative. As I watch her games, help her cook muffins, and listen to her made up jokes I don't know why I don't want to be with her. But I'm past that stage.
Option one was wiped out. Given how articulate my daughter is about her need to be home, I couldn't face enrolling her in childcare; that eliminated option two. Option three? I wondered how she could be at home with someone who loves her, and how that someone could not be me. Her daddy is already home with her more time than he can really spare from work; he couldn't pick up any more. We have no grannies. Her auntie works. Our friends all work or have kids of their own.
Finally, after weeks of pondering, I thought of her uncle. He's between jobs. He adores her. She adores him. He's gentle and kind and loves to cook. Perhaps, I thought, he could be with her a morning each week. They could read stories and go to the library, and I could do my thing. The arrangement could last as long as they both enjoyed it, or until he found better work.
I asked him. He grinned from ear to ear and said yes. I asked my daughter. She grinned from ear to ear and said yes. This boded well.
So on Friday morning I went out. I had a coffee and prepared a workshop. I bumped into new neighbours and had an adult chat. I ran a few errands. And I came home full of energy. I found my brother-in-law finishing the dishes, and my daughter snipping paper into little strips and singing. There was a warm chocolate cake on the bench, waiting for me. As I had a slice, he wiped out the oven and I nearly passed out. The cake was incredible – and I've never seen a man wipe out an oven before. He's worth his weight in gold.
One of my friends pays her sister to nanny the kids a few hours each week. She calls it her sanity tax. I'm paying my brother-in-law and I was thinking of it as a sanity tax, too. For us, it might mean less meals out – big deal! Because if sanity comes in the shape of a workshop drafted and a neighbour well met, a chocolate cake and a clean oven, a man with a spring in his step and cash in his pocket, and a singing child: this is so much more than my sanity. This is abundant life for all of us, and is worth whatever we can afford.
At least, that's what it feels like. Today, for the first time this year, my four-year-old went back to kinder. Today, for the first time ever, my six- and nine-year-olds went to before care at school. Which means that today, everyone else left the house at 7.25 in the morning. My husband took the big girls to school, dropped the little one at kinder, and headed off to work – and I didn't have to pick anyone up until 1.30!
This will be our pattern several days a week, which means that this week, for the first time in nine and a half years, I will have many, many hours to study and write.
Nobody will ask me for a story, or a game, or a visit to the park. It will just be me, sitting alone with a book and a pen, quietly reading for hours. After nine and a half years of nappies and washing and dishes and little toys, and the questions and requests and repetitions of little children, the morning was shocking in its emptiness.
Time luxuriated before me, lolling on my kitchen table and teasing me from my books. Time seductively whispered that I could stretch and yawn and scratch myself. This week, my day won't be broken into the six minute units of lawyers and parents of young children. I can plan in blocks of an hour or even two. Time awaits me.
There was housework, but I didn't do it. There were dishes in the sink, but they were left to sit. The time was for reading and writing, and nothing else. If one can describe an activity that gives one great pleasure as work then, after a decade home with kids, this morning I went back to work.
Usually, when I'm not looking after kids, I run like a bull at a gate. I rush around and get things done and write something quick; I don't want to waste the opportunity. But by 9.30 this morning, I'd read a scholarly article and a government report and taken notes. My eyes and brain were getting fuzzy. I realised that if I'm going to spend the next five years researching and writing a thesis, I might just have to pace myself. And I also realised that tomorrow and the next day I get to do this all over again. My time is not perhaps quite so precious as it has been up until now; for the first time in a decade, I really do have enough.
I thought about how to rest for a while. Should I take five minutes and make myself a hot drink? Should I take ten and go for a stroll around the block? I was feeling creaky, and time kept murmuring that it would wait for me. So with a great sense of decadence, I performed a yoga routine. I bent and stretched and gloated for an hour, because finally I have time. The sheer luxury of so much overwhelms me.
The next book is waiting to be read, but I stole a few more minutes to write this post. As I made notes in my empty house and thought about today, I began to wonder about tomorrow. As I pondered, a tiny voice whispered,
After all these years with young children in the house, is it possible you will feel a bit lonely?
Perish the thought!
I'm enjoying a short break, by which I mean I'm spending much more time with my kids over the summer holidays. It's a break from blogging, at least! Below is another piece from the archives, on girls and play. It was originally published in Zadok Perspectives No. 115 (Winter 2012).
***
For years now Olivia, my six year old, has insisted on choosing her own clothes. Recently she wore purple shorts embossed with glittery rhinestones; a pink and purple t-shirt; and large white sunglasses with pink arms. Her fingernails were painted purple; she had saved up her pocket money to buy nail polish. Her blonde hair swung in a perky ponytail, as demanded from her personal stylist (me); and as we walked to school, she dangled her sparkly sunglasses case from her wrist. I felt like I was accompanying a very short Paris Hilton.
It was a far cry from the unisex overalls of my day. Olivia wouldn't be caught dead in them and somehow that, for me, embodies a fundamental shift. I had short practical hair and no dresses with frills; and when I was a girl in the feminist 70's, my mother refused to buy me a doll. She had had to fight every step of the way to enter her profession, and so she wasn't going to have her daughters forced into the narrow roles expected of women. My sister and I were given blocks, trucks, and books, but nothing related to the domestic arts. We looked longingly at our friends' dolls; but, given the chance to play with them, usually discovered we had no idea how to make them interesting. We'd end up climbing trees, making mud pies or playing hide and seek, instead; and overalls were excellent for all that.
My mother never would have dreamed that, thirty years later, her grandchildren would be encouraged to play in narrower and emptier gender roles than even she had experienced. As a child of the 50's, she was to practice being a wife and mother, but fairy princess brides – a common conflation among the six year old set these days – were practically unheard of.
Now fortunes are made out of fairy dress ups and princess accessories and high heels for little girls; and everything, from lunchboxes to headbands, from bracelets to backpacks to bedroom furniture, come in a nauseating shade of pink. The colour is so prevalent that it takes a certain determination to dress one's girls without it. Thirty years ago, I read children's books; now many books are clearly marked by their covers as 'boys' or 'girls'. My sister and I played with Lego in primary colours; now girls can have pink Lego mansions and fairy castles, with white Lego horses to match. Many Lego women strut about with swollen red lips and little handbags, while the men continue to look sturdy and practical, nice strong firemen and astronauts and policemen that they are.
It's enough to make me cry – and yet it's unsurprising. Every revolution is followed by a backlash; and what we see now is a cultural backlash against the rhetoric of feminism. While my friends work as doctors and lawyers and architects – often maintaining all the while that they aren't really feminists – their daughters play at being fairy princess brides, just waiting for Mr Right to whisk them away. These girls will be able to work in almost any profession. They see women on road crews, women driving trucks, and women running businesses; they see a woman leading the country; and, if they are not too exhausted by the grinding combination of paid employment, childrearing and housework, they will be able to seek legal recourse when they are discriminated against on the basis of gender. Yet much of the play encouraged by the mainstream centres on being utterly useless: lovelorn mermaids or beautiful consumers, perhaps, but that's about it.
Now, there's nothing wrong with a girl playing at domesticity. I could have used some domestic games, but it was clear in our house that I was to nurse no dollies; and as an adult, I studied in the 'male' domain of pure mathematics. I never rested there. The first time I felt comfortable in my work was when I became a stay at home mum. It took a long time for me to understand that it was legitimate for me to love being at home, share in my husband's income, and not want to be professionally employed; and it took an even longer time before I became confident in the role, as I had rarely practiced as a child. Domestic games would have helped me explore and understand motherhood a little before I was thrown in the deep end with real children.
My upbringing was too narrow, in its way; but what is offered to many girls these days feels even more constricting. There is almost no unisex, now. Somewhere between my mother's banning of domestic games and the pink of the fairy princess bride, there must be a medium.
That medium resides, I think, in the integrity of daily life. We shouldn't deny that many women marry, cook, clean and have kids; we also shouldn't swallow the lie that all girls want to become vacuous celebrity idols (which is where the fairy princess bride is heading). Instead, we need to continue the as yet unrealised feminist, and Christian, project, which is to accept and enable women not as the dominant powers approve of them – sexualised, decorative or invisible – but exactly as they are. The perfect human, Jesus, loved every woman he met not for her value to him, but for her very self; and we are to model our lives on his example.
These days, whether they are domestic goddesses or professionals hell bent on success, carers for young or old, married or single, ministers or lay, bursting with energy or quietly effective or slowly dwindling, women come in stunning kaleidoscopic variety and, as followers of Jesus, we are called to love them all. Meanwhile, as parents and guardians, we can encourage and equip our kids to explore the roles of the real women they see around them. So brides, yes; cleaners, yes; wives, yes; but fairy princess muck – well, limit their gauzy wings and turn a blind eye when they act it out anyway.
So I have given my daughter more freedom than I experienced as a child. Olivia nurses dollies and rocks them to sleep; she takes them for walks in the pram. It's useful to try on the roles we see around us, and so it is good for her to practice being a wife, a mum, a cleaner, a cook – and a writer. When she's not being a mother, she often sits at her 'desk' at the end of the kitchen table to write, like me; and woe betide anyone who touches her pens and paper.
The good news is that, despite a dominant mainstream which sells training bras to three year olds, pink plastic horses poised for coitus to four year olds, and sexy pop idols to five year olds, children find ways to step aside. (Of course, this is easier when their exposure to such things is limited.) There are days when Olivia is dressed to the nines; there are days when she is a rock star, dancing and pouting round the kitchen; there are days when she is a bride, dressed in a white satin dress from the op shop.
But on other days she builds trains out of chairs, makes tickets, punches them, and roars us all off to London. She erects cubbies and digs holes in the garden. She climbs trees – tearing every long dress that she insists on wearing in the process – and yells over the front fence. She shuffles through papers and barks into her mobile phone, just like dad; she watches bugs in our pond, and catches spiders and beetles and cockroaches to examine in her insect magnifier. Her fingernails may be painted purple, but they are always chipped and grubby, a sure sign of activity and adventure.
Even when she is dressed liked Paris Hilton, she is trying on only one of a hundred roles: mother, wife, daughter, writer, lawyer, cleaner, rock star, fashionista, tree climber, gardener, plumber, teacher, entomologist, train driver, and everything else she sees. Watching her, I have great confidence that if Olivia can continue to explore life without the ideological limitations placed on my own childhood and yet without kowtowing to the consumer state we live in, she will play her way into a sure self-knowledge and the power that comes from that freedom.
