Let me preface this post by saying I don’t intend to be controversial. I don’t intend to be dismissive of anybody. These are merely my observations. If you feel offended, I really truly deeply apologise.
Right. What’s it like being a working mother? Bloody hard work. Preach sister ! What’s it like being a working dad ? I don’t know. But I suspect in most cases maybe a little bit easier ? Of course I’m generalising. Maybe in your household it’s not. Or it’s 50/50. In most households I know, including my own, the brunt of childcare falls on me. And I can’t even complain about it because I deliberately left my job in the private sector to join a much more holistic and inclusive organisation that recruited me on a part time basis and understood that I had children and therefore needed a real work life balance. This is wonderful. I wish more organisations would emulate my work place. But most employers pay lip service to the plight of working mothers because they really don’t care about how mothers manage their lives as long as they are getting their work done. Enter Covid. The great leveller. Suddenly we all had the issue of childcare ( Home fracking learning) .Suddenly employers had to care about children and so did dads ( Things I like about lockdown). Dads who previously were always at the office were suddenly home and saw first hand how difficult it was to manage careers with children and general domesticity. Suddenly dads had to worry about getting lunch and dinner on the table too. Kids are hungry all the time. They don’t wait for work to be done. Kids get sick during working hours. Not just evenings and weekends ( Parenting). Here is where it all falls down for me though. I have been primary caregiver for all of my childrens’ lives that when they are ill or sad or upset or hungry their default position is to want me. Not daddy. It’s not his fault. He wasn’t at home with them. He was at work, working bloody hard providing for us. But I work too. I have a professional reputation to maintain. I have career ambitions too and every time my kids get ill or need to be picked up early, or when school holidays roll around, who picks up the brunt of parenting ? It’s me. Does this overtly ruin my chances of career progression ? Well no employer in their right minds can ever admit to that. But compare me to the man who also works, but who has a partner at home who can deal with all childcare related issues, who can come into the office because his partner can look after the kids, who gets to work early because he doesn’t have to drop kids to school, well then he’s looking pretty good. He is probably no better than me at the actual work but to the world he is just a more attractive employee. Is it his fault ? No. Is it his partner‘s fault ? No. It’s just the way society is stacked against us ( The price of being female). What are the solutions ? I don’t know. It’s not something that changes over night. It has to be a generational shift. Forced paternity leave has been floated around. I don’t know if that’s the solution. I don’t know what the solution is. All I know is that there are days when I wish I had a wife at home too. Then I wouldn’t be eating cold dominos for the third night in a row and I would have some clean clothes to wear tomorrow.
