More than just a mother

I have aspired to be and do many things in my 26 years. For the vast majority of my childhood, I wanted to be a train driver. But recently, digging through old school books as a twenty-something, I discovered one of my earliest career aspirations. “I am going to be a mother,” I had written, aged four-and-a-half. “I am going to work in a home. I look after my kids. The kids run on the lawn.”

It’s no surprise that, at this age, I wanted to be a mother and a homemaker. My own mum* stayed home to care for my three siblings and me; I was simply parroting the only career for women I knew of. But many would have seen this as selling myself short. Shouldn’t I have been aiming for the top office in the Beehive, or the wards of New Zealand’s biggest hospital? Glass ceilings needed breaking, and aspiring to be a mother, with kids, and a lawn, was not the way to go about it.

I am of a generation of girls who have been told to dream big; that we can be more than “just mothers” or “just housewives”; that the work of mothers and carers is not “real work”. “Real work”, it seems, is paid work. If work is important it gets paid, and if it’s really important, it gets paid really well. ‘Mother’ and ‘housewife’, by this logic, are not careers to which any young girl should aspire.

The undervaluing of motherhood and unpaid work is one of the most significant barriers to gender equality we face today, says Professor Margaret Wilson, a law lecturer at Waikato University, and former Labour MP and Speaker of the House. “Society is organised according to the male experience,” she says. “That is the norm. Anyone who steps out outside that has the problem, because you’re not conforming.” And the male experience, for some time, has revolved around paid work – the more pay, the better.

Women who want to succeed according to conventional standards need to succeed in the very same way. The vast majority of the women we hold up as being successful – the Helen Clarks, the Angela Merkels, the Theresa Gattungs – have done so according to the male experience: They have attained power. If a successful woman happens to have a family, it’s a fact tacked on the end of a long string of other more notable achievements.

Professor Wilson points to the response to former National MP Katherine Rich’s departure from politics in 2008 as an example of the way in which motherhood is undervalued. At the time, Rich had two young children, and after almost 10 years in Parliament, with a National victory seemingly imminent, she wanted to spend more time with them.

Her decision was met with a series of derisive comments that suggested Rich simply wasn’t strong enough to make it in the tough world of politics, and sadness from others that Rich was selling herself short.

“It struck at the time that Katherine’s decision was not accorded the respect it deserved,” says Professor Wilson. She believes Rich’s resignation was a missed opportunity to have a serious discussion about the way we organise paid employment to accommodate the unpaid work of caring for others. “The desire for a better work/family balance is a societal issue and not one of personal inadequacy of the individual woman.”

Women in the workforce who have children are pressured from all sides of society. If they are in high-powered and well-salaried jobs, as Rich was, and they leave the workforce, they are seen to be not fulfilling their career potential and selling themselves short as “just mothers”. But it’s a catch-22, because the alternative – as women who don’t leave their jobs to commit to motherhood full-time found out – can be seen as an even worse kind of moral failing in a woman: selfishness.

Ayesha Bashir, 29, mother of six-month-old Alia, felt pulled in all directions when deciding whether to go back to work or stay at home. “Socially, I feel pressured to stay at home. I have had many people tell me that I should make sacrifices in my lifestyle to stay at home with my child. It’s as though my choice to return to work is doing my child some grave injustice.”

She felt the pressure strongly as a Bengali woman, too, where women are usually expected to stay home and take care of the children and the house. Her older sister recently went back to work after giving birth to her first child seven years ago, and now is expecting again. “I asked her if she wanted to go back to work after she has her second,” Ayesha says. “She said she does but she probably won’t because her husband would want her to stay at home to take care of the kids and the household.”

For Ayesha, who is living in the United States, it’s not about the “choice” to return to work as much as the practical realities for her and her husband Jason. “I wish I was given more leave, as people get around the world.” She received eight weeks’ paid leave and two weeks’ unpaid leave through the discretion of her employer (she works in the software industry) – a significant amount more than many women in the US where there is no state-provided parental leave, but considerably less than parents in Nordic countries who receive upwards of a year of paid parental leave.

The way in which we organise work and the way we organise the care of children doesn’t give women choice

“Leaving my two-month old was brutal. There are days I miss her so much it hurts,” Ayesha admits. “I don’t mind working, but I wish I didn’t have to return to work so early.”

Professor Wilson argues that it’s the lack of choice for mothers like Ayesha in how they organise their lives that makes how we value motherhood a feminist issue. “The way in which we organise work and the way we organise the care of children doesn’t give women choice.” While in many other areas of life, New Zealand women have total autonomy to make decisions as to how they live their lives, motherhood remains an area where women feel they simply don’t have the same flexibility – be it because of social, financial, familial or cultural pressures.

“Since the 1890s, women have been adapting and accommodating their lives to a society that has not fundamentally changed in the value it attributes to what is still seen as the work of women, whether it be in the paid or the unpaid workforce,” says Professor Wilson. “Until this attitude towards women changes, equality for women will remain an unfilled aspiration.”

While once motherhood was seen as a demanding and fulfilling full-time role in its own right, it seems that raising chidren has come to be seen as some kind of extracurricular side-project for the modern woman. “There’s this idea of the ‘relaxed’ mother; she’s so chilled out and everything is effortless and awesome,” says Willow Henderson, 29, who is mother to six-month-old Nina.

Willow admits she hoped – believed – that she would be this kind of mother. “I’d put my relationship with my husband first; my baby would be flexible to my lifestyle so I could continue to do the things I like; I would be able to put her in a cot and she would just go to sleep. Slowly, each one of these pre-conceptions falls away.” She laughs, fondly, but with the slight edge afforded by hindsight. “Reality is quite different from what you expect.”

Willow and her civil union partner Joe, with whom she owns two food joints, knew they would have a family relatively early in their relationship – but when, exactly, they didn’t know. When Willow found out she was pregnant in early 2013, she didn’t realise just how all-consuming motherhood would be. “There’s a lot of daily grind stuff and it’s really repetitive. Some days I just feel like I am changing Nina’s nappies and clothes because she’s got some kind of bodily fluid on it. I feel like I’m obsessed with my washing machine and I’m living this banal existence.” She pauses. “But then every single platitude they say about motherhood I have found to be true. She is literally the best thing in the world.”

Motherhood has also been an entirely different experience from what Ayesha imagined. “I used to have this skewed perception of what mothers should and should not do. I was always judging everyone else’s parenting skills and levels. Now that I have one myself I feel awful about it.”

For Ayesha and her husband Jason, it was clear that having a child was going to involve a huge change in lifestyle. “We had to ask ourselves whether we were prepared to give up going away on random weekends, going to concerts and music festivals, socialising and going out with friends,” she says. “To us, it came down to giving up all of the time we spent doing those activities.”

Ayesha’s day runs something like this: she’s up at 6am to get ready for work and feed Alia. She drops Alia at the babysitter’s house, heads to work. She pumps milk during the day, something she finds both time-consuming and distracting. At midday, she goes to the sitter’s house, nurses Alia, and then heads back to work – grabbing a quick bite to eat at her desk. At 4.30pm, she picks Alia up, runs a few errands if she can, and heads home. The rest of the night revolves around getting dinner ready, bathing Alia, putting her down, and pumping milk. Alia wakes most nights between 2am and 4am, meaning Ayesha is up to nurse her and put her back to sleep.

Although it’s more and more fathers are assisting with that workload, in the eyes of society the responsibility still sits very firmly with mothers

The only time Ayesha and Jason have to themselves is after 9pm, where the only activity they’re up for is a bit of TV before turning in and getting a few hours sleep before getting up to repeat it all again the next day.

It’s a formidable schedule, but a reality of being a mother – working or otherwise. And although it’s more and more fathers are assisting with that workload, in the eyes of society the responsibility still sits very firmly with mothers. “There’s this idea I can make or break my baby,” Willow says. “How good my baby is reflects how relaxed and awesome a mother I am.”

It’s in stark contrast to the way in which fathers are perceived. Men are often characterised as being hopeless at housework. They can’t cook, they can’t clean, they can’t change a nappy, and don’t bother trying to change them because it’s just their nature – as if though the XY chromosome renders them domestically incapable. Those men who do contribute to childcare, cleaning and cooking are celebrated; when women do the very same tasks, they’re simply doing what is expected.

Puketapapa Local Board member and New Zealand Women’s Council member Julie Fairey, mother of six-year-old Jacob and three-year-old Daniel, shows what is possible with the investment of both parents. Julie and husband Michael, who is also a local board member, have trialled who works and who stays home in different ways. Currently Michael works part-time while Julie works closer to full-time.

“We have to have quite a highly organised life to make it work,” she says. They have different days where each of them are “in charge”. “On Wednesdays, Michael’s in charge, and so when the kids say to me ‘Mummy, what’s for breakfast?’ I say, ‘Well, you’ll have to talk to daddy because he’s in charge’.”

She says Michael, and many of the fathers in their social circle, take their roles very seriously, recognising the importance and challenges of unpaid caring work. Julie’s well aware her situation is still relatively unusual, and that it’s in part attributable to a willingness on her husband’s part to be flexible. “I have other friends who are in different social groups and it’s been more difficult in terms of their husbands changing their worklives to accommodate having children, and that flows on to the women in terms of their ability to work outside the home.” Again, it comes down to choice – or the lack thereof, for many mothers.

The increasing number of fathers opting to try and juggle work with caring for their children means the undervaluing of unpaid caring work is no longer solely an issue for women

As partnerships like Julie and Michael show, fathers, too, stand to gain from a greater valuing of parenting. Both Julie and Michael got to spend extensive time with their children when they were still babies – a treasure many men never get to experience. “My dad was around a lot when I was little; he worked from home a lot,” Julie says, “Even when we went through some trying times, there was always that close relationship underlying it all. It served us well.”

The increasing number of fathers opting to try and juggle work with caring for their children means the undervaluing of unpaid caring work is no longer solely an issue for women. “Maybe the time has come,” says Professor Wilson, “to focus on the structural challenges within the current economic and social system that stand in the way of both women and men living integrated, instead of fragmented, lives.”

The changes towards valuing women and mothers, as she is well aware, go far beyond simply enacting new laws and coming up with new policies. There’s definite demand for a system that provides some kind of compensation for unpaid caring work, but the necessary change requires challenging the very notion of ‘success’, which is currently inextricably linked to money and power.

On an everyday level, we need to celebrate the incredibly challenging and important work of those who care for children, and hold up women like Willow, Ayesha and Julie as being truly successful. And when four-year-old girls write stories about their dreams of motherhood, we don’t chastise them for not aiming high enough. We stop using the words ‘just’ and ‘a mother’ in succession.

* This piece is dedicated to my mum, Mary: a success and inspiration in every way.

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