Ok, my personal list of women I admire.
1. My mum
2. My daughter – for her resilience, fun, and potential
3. Julia Gillard (my daughter is her greatest fan)
4. A number of my friends who’d be embarrassed if I wrote their names here, but who have shown tenacity, determination, ambition, empathy and more.
5. Eva Cox
6. Germaine Greer
7. Samantha Stosur
Rachel Hills has compiled a list of 21 Women to Admire. And yes, Eva Cox is on the list!
Like the writer of this piece, Amy Gray, I don’t feel ‘working mother’s guilt’. I may feel guilty about other things (like when I demonstrate poor language choices by swearing at other drivers in Canberra’s annoying traffic!), but I don’t feel guilty about working to earn money so we have a roof over our head. I’m a widow. I don’t have a big fat pension to lean on and we hadn’t paid off our house when DH died. Like my mother, I’m giving my daughter an example of how to work and how to be a mother, and that neither is a walk in the park, yet both can be enormously rewarding on many different levels.
My paternal grandmother was widowed young with two small children. She also worked and had support from her mother with childcare. I have support from paid childcare. Believe me, I appreciate the fantastic young women and men who run exciting activities after school. I couldn’t come up with that variety of activities (soccer, monkey bars, tag, cricket, craft, etc.) for DD and me to do on our own – some things need a number of kids to make it work. DD loves being with other kids. She’s extroverted and very sociable. Hence the endless cries for playdates on the weekend.
I wrote an earlier response here to a WA professor’s declaration that older mothers are selfish for a variety of reasons.
One thing that has come back again and again to me from friends, older mothers and those who have not had the opportunity to become mothers, is that there’s a disconnect in some people’s lives between one person wanting to have children, and their partner not wanting children, or not wanting to settle down.
I was interested to read an article today by Sara Holton, Jane Fisher and Heather Rowe that asserts that women delaying having children for selfish reasons in order to pursue personal ambitions or hedonistic activities such as travel are not supported by the evidence.
The article is based upon To have or not to have? Australian women’s childbearing desires, expectations and outcomes by the above women in JOURNAL OF POPULATION RESEARCH DOI: 10.1007/s12546-011-9072-3. I have the article here on my screen (the joys of access to a university library – thank you).
From the news article:
[T]he selfish, career-focused woman who chooses not to have children or delays childbearing is a myth. Women are not helped by the accusations that have been directed at them in recent weeks.
Women would benefit from public policies that are more sensitive to and address the barriers they face in having children.
In addition to the welcome recent improvements in maternity benefits, such sensitive public policies could include education for men about female fertility and the risks to their partner’s health of postponing childbearing.
Other initiatives could include flexible repayment options to permit suspension of higher-education debts while women provide unpaid care for dependent young children, and maximising housing affordability.
Many women would have more children if they could and if circumstances allowed. Women reported a main barrier was their partner’s reluctance to have a child, or another child.
Given that, I feel it is irresponsible for pundits and researchers to yell at ‘older mothers’ for being ‘selfish’ and having children later in life.
The suicide prevention group R U OK? conducted a survey of 800 people (if you want to know more about that group, go to their website at http://www.ruokday.com.au/content/home.aspx) .The highest risk group for extreme stress at work was middle-age single parents. Oh great, sighs the middle-aged widow here. Just what I didn’t want to know.
But I can see why it is so. No denying it. It is the stress of getting not only oneself up and going in the morning, but also a child (who may or may not be co-operative 
), the desire to do a great job at the workplace and to contribute to society through one’s work, and the desire to be a really good mum and family member. The stress of being the only person who is keeping track of a child/children’s progress, time commitments, needs and wants. The lack of downtime as an adult to do rewarding leisure activities that do not directly involve a child.
Can I add that it is not helpful for judgmental people to say “Well, you shouldn’t work until your child is old enough to look after herself/himself”? If I didn’t work, I wouldn’t be able to pay my mortgage. I would have to go on the waiting list for public housing, which is currently a 2 year wait. I would have to find a place to rent, which would take up a large amount of any welfare benefits I may receive. And DD’s life would be put in turmoil with a change of domicile, school, leisure activities and closeness to family and friends. I’m not going to do that.
This is research from the NY think-tank, the Centre for Work-Life Policy. 43% of Generation X women (born between 1965 and 1978, my generation) do not have children. I find it interesting that the article sees this as a choice and a preferred choice at that, rather than the usual comments one hears of “There are no worthy men around!” I can think of quite a few Gen X women who would have loved to have children but so far have not found a partner with whom they would like to have children, and they do not want to have a child on their own via assisted reproduction technology. Sure, I see that most of us were aware of how much we could achieve and we totally went for it! We could do anything, take on any career, and we believed (still believe) in people being promoted due to their merits rather than just because they’re a bloke.
Ninety-one percent of the surveyed women in relationships were part of dual-earning couples, and 19 per cent out-earned their husbands. Similarly, 74 per cent considered themselves ambitious, compared to 65 per cent of women from the baby-boom generation.
Article here.
New international research shows working mums spend 15 hours a week looking after their children but it also underscores the difficult balancing act they face in the workforce. Working mothers are spending 137 minutes directly caring for their children on average per day, while fathers spend 69 minutes, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development found. [...]
The report analysed how much time parents spent caring for their child as a “primary activity” – including dressing, feeding and playing – and excluded time when the parent’s main focus was on other activities.
Once again, I am thankful to have an employer who allows me to have flexible work hours, while I ensure that I am here at core times and maintain professional standards and high expectations of myself. It takes two – the employer and the employee – to make this work.
One dear lady said to me “Since when has being a mother been a competition?” I would say “For years”, unable to be more specific.
I know when I had DD nearly 5 years ago, it was competitive among the mothers groups online to have the ‘best’ birth. The overt antenatal competitiveness wasn’t so pronounced at antenatel check-ups, though it came to a head at the birthing classes. My DH would hold my hand tight and give me a warning look so I didn’t say anything awful to the other soon-to-be mothers. What, you didn’t know there was a hierarchy of how good a birth a woman has? Let me tell you how it works and how you get points.
1. Natural childbirth without any drugs whatsoever – 50 points
Bonus points if you don’t have an obstetrician and only have midwives.
Bonus points if you bring your own doula
Bonus points if you have aromatherapy, a special playlist on your iPod, hypnotherapy instructions, and hold on to your completed birth plan
2. Childbirth with pain relief or epidural – 30 points
3. Induced childbirth, with or without epidural or pain relief – 20 points
4. Caesarean section – 10 points
There are more point-gaining possibilities for the competitive mother. For example:
Before I get howled down for being a horrible mother and an awful human being, I’ll tell you what I consider to be the ‘best’ birth. The ‘best’ birth is one where the baby is born healthy, and the mother is well. That’s it. We all want that same result: a beautiful, new human being to welcome into our family, our lives and our hearts. I really don’t mind how each mother gets to that point. Just leave the points-scoring and celebrate this wonderful new life.
Next: how to be competitive after the baby’s birth.
Seriously, the title of this article stinks. On the surface, it looks like one of those tee-hee, look at me, I do some daft things as a mummy and maybe some of them are ill-advised, so hey, let’s get some so-called experts give their take on it, and voila, here is an article with a snappy headline. And blow me down if I didn’t get caught in the trap of reading the darn thing.
Let me save you time. Basically you aren’t a bad mum if you feed your kid the occasional dinner of baked beans instead of a gourmet meal of pureed organic vegies and a teeny bit of steak from a named cow, or if your kid goes through a phase of only eating one or two things. Things are getting questionable if you use tv all the time to babysit your kids, or if they’re drinking from a baby bottle when they’re old enough to go to preschool. It’s inadvisable to give kids sweets every day – keep them as a “sometime” treat.
WHY is it necessary to make the mother the sinner, the evil one who has to cut corners to get things done, who does things sloppily or holds onto old habits because she doesn’t have time to work on new habits or behaviours? How about coming up with “7 Daddy Sins”? Let me start the list, thinking of some men I have known in the past.
“I leave my kid watching TV all afternoon while I sneak off to my study to play wargames.”
“I take my kid to fastfood restaurants because I couldn’t be stuffed cooking a proper meal for myself and my kid, and besides, I don’t really like vegies and I love hamburgers.”
“I do everything to get out of looking after my kid and I call it babysitting when I do look after him.”
Go on, make your own list!
Splat!Blog entry by Evan Maloney here. He commented on the article on Gen X women drop out of workforce.
From the article:
Only 38 per cent of Generation X, tertiary qualified women worked full-time, compared to 90 per cent of Generation X, tertiary qualified men, in a University of Melbourne study.
Life Patterns claims to be Australia’s longest running study of the lives of young people, tracking a group who left school in Victoria in 1991.
Its leader, Professor Johanna Wyn, said most of the group’s women, now aged around 37, had ranked career as their highest priority when they left school. [...]
Professor Wyn said Australia’s workplace policies had also taken their toll on the health of Generation X when compared to counterparts in a similar Canadian study.
I feel I have been a wee bit brainwashed by some of the comments that regularly accompany *any* blog entry that may be interpreted as pro or anti SAHM or working mom. Even one entry here where the plea was why can’t we all get along, there were problems further down the comments. There are *always* screams that nobody understands the plight of the working mom who is torn between her career and her children, or how expensive childcare is, or how her partner isn’t picking up the slack, etc. And similarly there will be screams that nobody understands the work that an SAHM puts in, the rewards and annoyances that she gets each day, and (OMG my favourite ever) IF YOU REALLY CARED, YOU WOULD GIVE UP YOUR JOB AND YOU COULD LIVE ON ONE SALARY. Please excuse the screaming capslock. As a widow, I think that one is hysterical and I have only avoided smacking some inconsiderate women because I can’t reach my arms through teh interwebs to administer some justly-deserved punishment.
So, the comments on this Australian blog are normal. Go figure. People who are Gen X, some who are Gen Y, men, women, people of different ages, some who don’t have kids, a few who whinge their pants off, others who show an unexpected kindness and understanding, and those whose candour would, in comment on a Momformation blog post, would see them scorched to the seventh level of Hell for admitting that motherhood is complex and sometimes unhappy and unrewarding.
Please don’t get me wrong. I value the many blog posts at Momformation, the bloggers’ humour, sense of perspective, sense of justice, their curiosity about the world, their honesty and more. I’m thinking of Beth Hering, Betsy Shaw, Joyce Slaton, Jamie Lee, Kristina Sauerwein and more. I think some of the regular commenters are fabulous, also. I may not agree with them all, but I look forward to their comments, as familiar members of the community!
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