A late post today beacuse I have been wiving my house for most of the day. Got plenty done, the kids were great and we had a blast.

I get criticized all the time for staying at home with the children and not having a career. Believe me when I tell you there are days when, halfway up the walls, I stop and think, I could have a career! I could have a proper job! And then of course I crash onto the floor and the thought is over because gravity is still working after all , thoughts or no thoughts, and a housewife can’t live in a metaphor, particularly the wall-climbing one, for too long before even the metaphor drives you up the wall. Metaphorically of course. I think. What was I talking about?

Oh, yeah. Many women think a woman is wasting herself or not contributing fully to a modern society if she’s not out there in the workplace ( I say women because we women are hardest on ourselves and each other and many men think that stay-at-home-mothering is “just playing” – actual quote from my husband, Dave). They maintain that you can’t possibly be fulfilled, or are playing some sort of outdated martyr-mother role. “Hey, girlfriend, wake-up! It’s the 21st century, you’re setting the women’s movement back decades!”

I’m not going to argue with them. In loads of ways, not all, they are right. I think there’s much to be said for much of that argument and it has been formulated by far smarter women than me. Pioneering giantesses who made it possible for us all to have a choice.

The choice is the thing though; it can’t be as simple as one size fits all, can it?. Most women are not that simple, are we?

For the most part, the days when my brain doesn’t turn to porridge, I don’t feel a bit like I’ve copped out of the women’s movement or settled by default for a housewife’s role. I know, if I worked I’d have crappy days too because of the inherent crappiness of being. No, I’m joking, but we’re none of us meant to have a fulfilling, glorious, giddy-making experience every minute of our lives, are we? We’d burn out at 2. We need some balancing toil and misery. Still joking, I think.

On the other side of the mummy wars – ostensibly mine, but often way too shrill and a bit too self-righteous for my taste – there are those who will quote study upon study (See!Science is on our side – beat that, working mothers!) citing the benefits to children of having their mothers stay at home with them. They will talk about things like neuronal development which you can’t argue with; I mean, we all want our children to develop their neurons and stuff, and the impulse behind it is entirely normal: give your offspring the neuronal edge kinda thing. It’s the wotsit, the primal evolutionary urge, innit?

I really don’t think the primal evolutionary urge is always the best way to go with children though, and besides, we’re human, and above all that swamp-thinking now aren’t we? I mean if it weren’t for human nature, reason and compassion, we’d eat our young if they came out sickly and we’d have no need for wheelchair ramps in buildings ‘cos we’d naturally select out non-walking people. And the whole Medicare/medicines for the sick and elderly thing would go right away. Poof! Gone. And, (as it’s come up) there’d be no gay people either, depending on who was in charge. Or black people in some states and countries. Life would be pretty crappy and even more brutal than it already is, and that’s why talking about evolution in homo sapiens social theories is a ridiculous idea. God, I’ve lost the point again.

Oh, here it is. Anyway. I don’t buy all the studies, convincing and scary and tempting though they are (all parents everywhere, including me, especially me, can be easily worked into an anxious we’ll-do-anything frenzy about whether or not we’re making the best choices for our children) . But children, both good and bad, and dim and bright have been brought up, since the dawn of man, all the while managing to fit in, and even be enhanced by, adapting to their parents circumstances. We try to give our children the best circumstances, obviously, but, to my mind, that doesn’t necessarily mean having mummy right there all-the-time-always. What kind of a “rounded child” is that going to lead to? A square one, that’s what. Or worse still an octagon – and octagons are hell in the teenage years, so I believe. As are rectangles; little buggers, rectangles. They’ll rob your granny soon as look at her.

We’re trying to prepare our kids for life, right? The kind of life we all know to be “full of hard knocks and tough surprises” (Fry and Laurie). I’m not suggesting we send them crawling out of the hospital with their belly-button clamps still on, a cheap suit and the job section of the newspaper tucked under their podgy wee arms. Nononono. Wait until they’re at least potty trained, for that; nobody likes a stinky diaper at office meetings.

I think there’s a lot to be said for putting the kids into the garden for an afternoon with no toys, me close at the window for safety, and just letting them play with a stick and the mud and their wild wee imaginations and just not interfering too much with ‘teachable moments’ and parenting techniques (those have their place but should remember their place too). Even when they argue. Unless they’re actively disembowelling each other, I think, for my kids at least, there can be value in learning how to deal with it when something’s just not fair, and mummy’s not right beside them to sort it out. The inherent fair-play instinct of children never fails to amaze me. I often jump in when I shouldn’t though, and the opposite, not to interfere, is harder; I do it all the time but I don’t necessarily think that’s the end of the world either. Because I am not a robot mother, I’m a human (honest) and they are going to have to deal with human vicissitudes for all their lives. I’m good at vicissitudes. Got them covered.

I’m just advocating being a good example, not an automaton. I’m advocating parents using our instincts and the best parts of our personalities and not being terrified into doing whatever the media or the most recent study says. Or feeling guilty because we can’t, and have to work to pay the bills. And anyway the study will say something else next week.

Don’t get me wrong, I love studies. Nobody loves a good, juicy study better than me (often with a nice Pinot Grigio). I pore over them and am suckered right in, often for fortnights or more, until I re-realize that parenting that way, whatever the way de jour is, doesn’t feel at all natural, and doesn’t feel a bit like me, or like Dave, or even like the children.

Living our life according to studies, and even sometimes the opinions of other parents on the playground (all just as earnest, well meaning and anxious as me) can be life-consuming, personality-consuming and my instinct is that that route is a bad idea. Taking a pinch of each study and simply being aware of what different ideas there are regarding child-rearing seems like a better, healthier, more natural way to proceed.

But the reasons I stay at home are not, in the end, much of anything to do with either side in the Mummy Wars. They are as individual as anybody’s reasons for staying at home, or going to work, and are more circumstance than idealogically driven.

1: I’m lucky enough that we can afford for me to do it, and I want to, so I do. How much more woman’s freedom of choice can you get?

2: Our girls were very hard won through IVF. Every stage was problematic and less than ideal: their conception; their in utero life; their birth, were none of them easy, and for a while even their survival was in serious doubt. So I figured, as long as I was able, I wanted to stay home and enjoy the fruits of my labour, if you’ll pardon the poor pun.

3: The bipolar thing makes me unreliable and probably crap at a career. But surely that makes you an equally unreliable and crap mother? I hear you scream. I guess the girls will decide that themselves, when they’re all gown up. We have an au pair to help out with the children as a safety net and for stability for them should I wobble, which I don’t really do that much any more, as I am one of those lucky nutters for whom the medication works. It took having the children and wanting stability for them to finally listen to what several doctors had told me in the past and get some treatment that worked. Good decision. Bummed and guilty it took me that long to sort myself out.

4 (a) They are growing so fast it terrifies me. One day they will be gone and I hate to think of it. (b) Life is fragile as an unexpected phonecall and any news broadcast will confirm. (c) My moods are labile, painful sometimes, and sometimes just numb and I want to suck up every day with the girls to compensate both them and me if I get ill again.

5: Now that I’ve started blogging and discovered the blogs of others, some of the itchiness of stay-at-home mummiery is scratched and I can feel like a grown-up again for wee patches of the day here and there.

6: I really, really like it, most days. Life with Kate and Jane is hilarious and hideous and satisfying and unsatisfying and all the things that life usually is for most people living in the great, fat, lucky, lucky Western world. And that’ll do me.

*

I’ve a feeling I’m going to have to come back and edit this tomorrow because I’ve also got a feeling I’ve been wandering off topic sometimes like a Housewife Errant of Old. But for now, it’s 1:39am, and the thought is over and the point of the post (Why PCB chooses to stay at home – was that it?) hardly seems to matter any more. I bet for any of you still with me at the last dregs of this post, it has never mattered less to you either. Anyway, I’m too tired now and am away to bed.

Night-night, Electronic Void! Night-night Wocky! See you tomorrow.

This entry was posted on Friday, March 10th, 2006 at 10:24 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.