Marie Wilson, founder and President of the White House Project is on a speaking tour of girls’ schools in Australia and she gives great sound bites. Here’s a perfect one.
Show me a woman without guilt about balancing work and family and I’ll show you a man.
Apart from helping create the Take Our Daughters and Sons to Work Day, Wilson has also raised five children (how the hell…? never mind), and she is urging women to abandon their family responsibilities, no wait, to not abandon them and… to also take up leadership positions in order to change the structure of society and achieve a better sharing of power and workloads (don’t bother telling Wilson that this is an impossible workload in itself, she raised five children remember), so that ultimately women and men lead happier, more balanced lives. Ah yes, absolutely.
I’m heartened by the increased interest I hear from fathers these days in sharing the primary care role - doing a stint of the stay-at-home thing. There’s still a bit of a way to go. Every father I talk to is reluctant to cop the career damage of doing the stay-at-home thing for a while and I can’t blame them. And there’s a bit of internal prejudice to overcome too. One father told me he’d like to do it but would get bored quickly from the mindlessness of taking care of young kids (oh yeah?!, there is no complexity to being a stay-at-home parent; no problem-solving, no multi-tasking, no time-management, no conflict resolution, no excitement, no .. please). My partner is pretty keen too to have a crack at being the stay-at-home parent at some stage in our lives. Secretly I still think he nurses the illusion that being the parent at home is a little holiday from work. But whatever, I think it’d be nice for him, nice for me (though bittersweet), and nice for the kid/s to experience this. (Lovely post here, called Manly Men on what this experience is for men).
There’s an election about to be called in Australia any day now. (Come on, already). Every vote is in hot contention and almost everyone (no-one appears to care about Aboriginal voters, for instance) is being courted as if they belonged to some particularly crucial and strangely homogenous voting group. We’ve long known that working families were the voting darlings but now it appears to be the turn of working mothers. We’re the new soccer moms – prepare to be feared and ridiculed. Please, working mothers if it comes down to us, lets change the government this time.
Some interesting Census data here on the households of working mothers (ie. working outside the home) versus stay-at-home mothers (ie. working inside the goddamn home). At least this might all mean that some policies for easing the workload of some thinly stretched working mothers get up.
Also, try to overlook the emotive word “clinging” in the 4th paragraph. (Eye roll).
my live-out husband stays home from work with our daughter one day a week…and his work-place supports that…but it’s rare. what’s even better, is he choses to stay home with her even though i work from home. what i’d really like to know though, is of all the dads who do chose (and can make it work with their careers, etc.) to be a stay-at-home dad, how many of them also contribute to housework at the same time?
i come from a very liberal group of friends and families, so stay-at-home dads do exist…but none of them contributed to the housework, the mom still had to do all the cooking and cleaning.
One way my husband devalues what I do – and his motive is to get me to get me to go work for more money – is to make motherhood “nothing.” The playing and nurturing and the talking and the teaching the children – all equated to nothing.
Well, it’s not nothing. It’s the thing that makes the world go round. It you want to compare something with nothing, let’s compare writing a corporate chicken newletter with the growing of human beings.
I come here to write what I’m not allowed to write on my own blog cause I’m still married to the father of my children.
I thought feminism was going to open MORE doors, not slam the door on motherhood. It’s time to take back motherhood. Vote your hearts out Aussies! Let American women follow your lead! Please God, let American women follow your lead.
The Bloke had his first turn of staying home, alone with the lad, on a work day this week. And I Loved It. I think they had fun too. I left the house in the morning not needing to leave instructions or plan what the lad was having for lunch or checking his nappy bag was full. I just had to get up and go to work.
When I got home the Bloke said “every time I tried to wash the dishes he woke up.” I said “Ah, yeah, that sounds right.” Then he cooked the dinner.
I like having time at home with the lad, and I’m glad I can work part-time for a while. I also like having time at work. I like going to a place where I don’t get thrown up on, and I don’t have to tell anyone not to tear my books or bang on the window eleventy million times a day. I love that my part-time work means that my partner gets to have a turn of being the primary caregiver at least occasionally, for the good bits and the hard bits. So Tracee I don’t so much want to ‘take back motherhood’, as I want to value parenting. I want my partner to have more options in life than ‘just’ being a breadwinner every bit as much as I want the option to earn money myself.
Thank heavens my hubby gets involved with everything from the meals, the changing to cleaning out the toilet bowl. I over heard him saying to a friend: “the only thing I can’t do yet is give birth..lol”. Great post…di
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One afternoon, I was in the backyard hanging the laundry when an old, tired-looking dog wandered into the yard. I could tell from his collar and well-fed belly that he had a home. But when I walked into the house, he followed me, sauntered down the hall and fell asleep in a corner. An hour later, he went to the door, and I let him out. The next day he was back. He resumed his position in the hallway and slept for an hour.
This continued for several weeks. Curious, I pinned a note to his collar: “Every afternoon your dog comes to my house for a nap. ”
The next day he arrived with a different note pinned to his collar: “He lives in a home with ten children – he’s trying to catch up on his sleep.”
I cried from laughter
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