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matrilI don't like calling motherhood my job. Or my career, or my profession, or any other highfalutin synonyms you could think of. I'm not a fan of those memes that describe a stay-at-home mother's work as some insane combination of short-order chef, chauffeur, maid, therapist, coach…and all unpaid! 24 hours a day, seven days a week!
Yeah…no.
It's not that I think mothers have it easier, or that they have less to handle than whatever a typical job entails. Quite the contrary. Motherhood, and parenthood generally, entail some of the most demanding, challenging, stressful things one can undertake. But I'm feeling more and more that trying to shoehorn motherhood into a career box is a disservice both to mothers and to anyone with a job. It's a quintessential case of comparing apples to oranges, and it inevitably leads to mean-spirited arguments of who has it harder, who deserves more praise, and who's generally a better human being than everyone else. This is not productive. And it's a false dichotomy to being with.
The social structures and diversified economy of the modern world have created a sharp demarcation between Home and Work. We have a lot of specialized jobs nowadays, carefully compartmentalized into factories, offices, public buildings and so on. Unlike the largely agrarian society of times past, wherein most of the work was directly related to producing food and acquiring other necessities, our most common methods of providing for ourselves and our families are indirect - we earn money, doing anything from processing paperwork to cleaning toilets and mopping floors, and that money is used to purchase whatever we need/want. It's kind of bizarre when your think about it. My husband teaches high school students acting skills and theatre history, and somehow this leads to us having enough to eat and keeping a roof over our heads.
Although there are exceptions, particularly now that telecommuting has become more prevalent, most money-earning must be done outside the home. It's just a function of our society. And thanks to the realities of biology, it's usually more practical for the father to focus on the money-earning, while the mother takes care of the home. But here's the problem. They're not tidy little compartments, exclusive of each other. Any parent who earns money at a job, dumps it in the bank account and considers their work done is a crummy parent. And any parent who is utterly confined to the usual tasks of caring for children and a home will eventually go stir-crazy. We can't expect ourselves to stay sedately in these strictly separated spaces of Work and Home. Because the dichotomy is arbitrary to being with.
At some point, perhaps because of misogyny, perhaps because of greed, perhaps because we're all kind of nincompoops, the task of earning money became predominant in prestige and honor. The stereotypical "woman's sphere" was looked at with a patronizing sort of sneer. Women eventually revolted against this sort of nonsense, partly because technology gave them mechanical devices that meant they didn't have to spend all our energy on exhausting back-breaking labor, and suddenly they had a little more breathing space and opportunity to recognize what confining lives they were living. Not because they were mothers. Motherhood is not confining in and of itself. It's when we expect mothers to exist entirely within the walls of their houses, when we cut off support systems and any chance at connectedness to the rest of the world, and tell them they should be happy.
And here's the real kicker - there's nothing inherently great about the Work side of things. That's not to say that you can't do amazing, incredible things in your particular career, but the fact is, having to earn money is just kind of a thing. It's not really good or evil, it's simply a feature of our modern world. We have a bad habit of judging people's skills and ability and straight-up worth by how much money they're able to earn. No wonder a stay-at-home feels like she has to defend herself somehow by pointing out that the work she puts in, if she were actually paid, would earn her a hefty paycheck. No wonder we feel like there has to be a war between working and non-working women. No wonder we scramble to assign the mighty title of Career to whatever we do at Home, so cowed are we by the status of those noble souls in the world of Work.
But it's not helping anyone to put labels on these things. Let's apply this strangeness to something fraught with far less weight, like sisterhood. Does anyone attempt to point out, "Hey, I've spent hours talking with my sister about her problems. If I was doing the same thing as a therapist, I'd be making a fortune! What a job it is, being a sister!" Absurd, obviously. Yes, I know that the demands of motherhood are far more intense, but let's just consider what this sort of false syllogism does. It implies that we can't really wrap our minds around the value of motherhood unless we can assign some more tangible, financial or career-based statistics to it. It implies that what it means to be a mother is found in a series of mundane tasks like changing diapers and cooking meals. And on the other side, it implies that any non-parents with their paltry single-job statuses are downright lazy. It seeks to demean one side in order to uplift the other.
We are not on a see-saw. We can't pull one side up by pushing the other side down. We're all in this together, right? There doesn't have to be a war. There doesn't have to be a divide at all. In order to have a healthy, happy family, there are a large collection of tasks to be undertaken. Some of them involve acquiring necessities, so money must be earned. Some of them involve providing for the safety and care of the children, usually at home. Many of them are far less tangible, an emotional support, an outpouring of love, that can't be measured or tidily quantified.
Let's not sneer at fathers, working mothers, or people without children, for heaven's sake! If we're tired of having them sneer at us, then don't reciprocate the nastiness. Enough with trying to vindicate ourselves on someone else's terms. There's no list that can define the demands of parenthood, nor a single compartment of Work or Home that contains everything a father or mother needs to do. Let's just find ways to support each other, because no matter where you're at, we're really all in this together.
Yeah…no.
It's not that I think mothers have it easier, or that they have less to handle than whatever a typical job entails. Quite the contrary. Motherhood, and parenthood generally, entail some of the most demanding, challenging, stressful things one can undertake. But I'm feeling more and more that trying to shoehorn motherhood into a career box is a disservice both to mothers and to anyone with a job. It's a quintessential case of comparing apples to oranges, and it inevitably leads to mean-spirited arguments of who has it harder, who deserves more praise, and who's generally a better human being than everyone else. This is not productive. And it's a false dichotomy to being with.
The social structures and diversified economy of the modern world have created a sharp demarcation between Home and Work. We have a lot of specialized jobs nowadays, carefully compartmentalized into factories, offices, public buildings and so on. Unlike the largely agrarian society of times past, wherein most of the work was directly related to producing food and acquiring other necessities, our most common methods of providing for ourselves and our families are indirect - we earn money, doing anything from processing paperwork to cleaning toilets and mopping floors, and that money is used to purchase whatever we need/want. It's kind of bizarre when your think about it. My husband teaches high school students acting skills and theatre history, and somehow this leads to us having enough to eat and keeping a roof over our heads.
Although there are exceptions, particularly now that telecommuting has become more prevalent, most money-earning must be done outside the home. It's just a function of our society. And thanks to the realities of biology, it's usually more practical for the father to focus on the money-earning, while the mother takes care of the home. But here's the problem. They're not tidy little compartments, exclusive of each other. Any parent who earns money at a job, dumps it in the bank account and considers their work done is a crummy parent. And any parent who is utterly confined to the usual tasks of caring for children and a home will eventually go stir-crazy. We can't expect ourselves to stay sedately in these strictly separated spaces of Work and Home. Because the dichotomy is arbitrary to being with.
At some point, perhaps because of misogyny, perhaps because of greed, perhaps because we're all kind of nincompoops, the task of earning money became predominant in prestige and honor. The stereotypical "woman's sphere" was looked at with a patronizing sort of sneer. Women eventually revolted against this sort of nonsense, partly because technology gave them mechanical devices that meant they didn't have to spend all our energy on exhausting back-breaking labor, and suddenly they had a little more breathing space and opportunity to recognize what confining lives they were living. Not because they were mothers. Motherhood is not confining in and of itself. It's when we expect mothers to exist entirely within the walls of their houses, when we cut off support systems and any chance at connectedness to the rest of the world, and tell them they should be happy.
And here's the real kicker - there's nothing inherently great about the Work side of things. That's not to say that you can't do amazing, incredible things in your particular career, but the fact is, having to earn money is just kind of a thing. It's not really good or evil, it's simply a feature of our modern world. We have a bad habit of judging people's skills and ability and straight-up worth by how much money they're able to earn. No wonder a stay-at-home feels like she has to defend herself somehow by pointing out that the work she puts in, if she were actually paid, would earn her a hefty paycheck. No wonder we feel like there has to be a war between working and non-working women. No wonder we scramble to assign the mighty title of Career to whatever we do at Home, so cowed are we by the status of those noble souls in the world of Work.
But it's not helping anyone to put labels on these things. Let's apply this strangeness to something fraught with far less weight, like sisterhood. Does anyone attempt to point out, "Hey, I've spent hours talking with my sister about her problems. If I was doing the same thing as a therapist, I'd be making a fortune! What a job it is, being a sister!" Absurd, obviously. Yes, I know that the demands of motherhood are far more intense, but let's just consider what this sort of false syllogism does. It implies that we can't really wrap our minds around the value of motherhood unless we can assign some more tangible, financial or career-based statistics to it. It implies that what it means to be a mother is found in a series of mundane tasks like changing diapers and cooking meals. And on the other side, it implies that any non-parents with their paltry single-job statuses are downright lazy. It seeks to demean one side in order to uplift the other.
We are not on a see-saw. We can't pull one side up by pushing the other side down. We're all in this together, right? There doesn't have to be a war. There doesn't have to be a divide at all. In order to have a healthy, happy family, there are a large collection of tasks to be undertaken. Some of them involve acquiring necessities, so money must be earned. Some of them involve providing for the safety and care of the children, usually at home. Many of them are far less tangible, an emotional support, an outpouring of love, that can't be measured or tidily quantified.
Let's not sneer at fathers, working mothers, or people without children, for heaven's sake! If we're tired of having them sneer at us, then don't reciprocate the nastiness. Enough with trying to vindicate ourselves on someone else's terms. There's no list that can define the demands of parenthood, nor a single compartment of Work or Home that contains everything a father or mother needs to do. Let's just find ways to support each other, because no matter where you're at, we're really all in this together.
