There was a time when women were expected to give up any dreams or notion of a career when they married. The marriage bar, for many jobs in Ireland, was in place until 1973. A woman’s place was clearly in the home. And the same was naturally true for those who were mothers.
Fast forward several decades and things now look a little different. Marriage and motherhood, in theory, are no longer barriers to successful and fulfilling careers. Women have fought hard to be heard and seen in the pursuit of equality and opportunity.
Which makes admitting that you’d actually prefer to have a more traditional role in the family somewhat difficult to say out loud.
Carla finds herself envying her friend, who is a stay-at-home parent. “I’d love to have, not a stress-free life, but a less stressful life,” she says.
She wonders if more women would prefer to stay at home if the option was available to them, “but we have this societal thing of, if you don’t work, what about your pension? What about after your children are reared? What if you and your partner break up? You need to be financially independent. There’s so much conflicting information told to parents. We’re told to parent like we don’t work. And work like we don’t parent.”
The mother of two says she recently sought out a job, which was flexible, but for which she’s “totally overqualified”, earning far less money than she could. This, although frustrating, is necessary, she explains, so she can work around children’s sicknesses, appointments and school holidays.
Although her children are now both in school, Carla says she’s still paying approximately €800 per month “for really crap childcare”.
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“One of the regrets as a working parent is that I just feel I’m running to stand still. When they were younger, I was working literally to pay their creche fees, but I did it, going ‘this is temporary’. I’ve got all this education. I’ve got all these skills, and when they start school I’ll have more money in my pocket. Now, I still feel like I’ve the same money in my pocket, which is not a lot, and I’m still working and I just don’t see when the break is going to come that being a working parent has been worth it.
“I have tremendous guilt that they go to afterschool every day when other kids are picked up by their parents. My youngest today said to me, ‘Can you pick me up [from school]?’, and I said, ‘I can’t I’ve to work, but I’ll try and pick you up early from after school if I get through my work’, and he got really upset.”
Carla is “run ragged” trying to manage work and parenting. If she can’t commit to a late work meeting, because she needs to collect her children, she tries to avoid explaining why. When she has to explain, she fears she’s being judged. She used to judge others, before she became a parent. She’s “wrecked” each week. “People say, all you need is some downtime. But the only time I could get downtime is when I get sick.”
Older family members have passed comments about being a working parent, such as: “You go to college to get this education, and then you have your kids and you just put them in creche all day… you just can’t win.”
She’s already worried about how she’s going to manage to work the school summer holidays. “It’s so different from the childhood I had,” she says. “My summers were definitely a lot more innocent and carefree and less structured, because most of us had a mammy at home.”
Mother of two Emma is very eager to become a stay-at-home mother. “That’s the goal,” she says. “Even when working full-time, leaving at 7am and returning at almost 7pm, the rest of the time is not dedicated to my kids. I then have to think about cooking and feeding the family, preparing lunches, cleaning the house, washing the clothes, food shopping, doctors, vaccinations, dentists, eye tests, endless birthday parties, and dealing with kids getting every illness under the sun – while ill too!”
She’s left “exhausted with no quality family time, let alone date night, all while worrying about making ends even come close to meeting”.
Emma doesn’t feel her desire to assume a more traditional role in her family, is in any way an affront to feminism. “My being a stay-at-home mum has no bearing on what any other woman or mum decides is right for her and her family. For our family and life, we would prefer for my husband to work with what he is passionate about and educated in, while I do what I love: raise our children and run and manage the household. That’s what makes sense to us, fills both our cups and is the life we have chosen to work towards.”
Ailbhe, is a mother to two young children. She’s also a primary schoolteacher. But she’d far prefer to be a stay-at-home parent, she explains. “I just find the pace of life in society at the moment is mad. There’s no downtime. I’m job-sharing, so I’ve the best of both worlds, but I still feel you’re dragging the kids out of bed in the morning. You’re dropping them off. You’re rushing to work, the supermarket. You’re just constantly on the go.”
Ailbhe has a commute to work every day which adds to the stress. “I just feel as a society we’re all in a rush and, sometimes, it feels like you’re on that hamster wheel … but the way things are, you need two incomes for a mortgage. It’s just the way things are.”
Her ideal would be to become a stay-at-home mam who is at home growing her own vegetables. “I’d love to have that pace of life and just to know what my kids are eating. That they’re eating healthy foods, and to have that little bit of freedom … I think my kids will never have the freedom that we had when we were younger.”
Ailbhe likes to prepare meals from scratch and says if she could stay at home, she could do this more. She understands that people might view adopting this more traditional role as a waste of her education. “I get that … but I guess that’s just how I feel at the moment. Maybe part of me is burnt out from my job, from work, from the mortgage, it’s all non-stop … from having two young kids. I’m at that stage where it’s all a bit mad.
“As a mother, you lose yourself for a few years definitely. And I feel that just having a bit more time. I feel that the last five years have been nothing to do with me and all about everyone else.”
Ailbhe feels society has become quite unaccepting of the idea of a woman choosing to become a stay-at-home parent. “We have a ‘notions’ society. It’s all about what you have and how big your house is and your car and the whole lot. I think less is more. Spend time with your kids. I think that’s what’s missing and I see that in school. I see that the kids are not spending time with their parents.”
Deirdre has two children and has recently finished up work. “I used to go to work in the dark and come home in the dark.” She and her husband were like “ships that passed in the night”, due to their different working hours.
“It came to a head when the children were both in primary school. I found we had no time for any life, family life. It was a very functional life. You’d pick the kids up from the childminder. Get into the dark house. Turn on the lights. Get the washing machine on. Get the dinner on. When I look back at it now, it was joyless and soulless.
“When the kids were younger we were always working full-time and the kids were in creche. I remember at one stage the creche was the same as our mortgage. When I look at it now I think, ‘Jesus, how did we buy into it?’”
Things changed for Deirdre after a period of ill health forced her to take some time off. “It was during that period of sick leave, knowing I had to go back to work, that my husband and I said ‘something’s got to give’ and I decided to take a career break.”
In the absence of a second wage, the couple used their savings, help from family and she became an expert bargain hunter when shopping for food. “You had the time for all this,” she says. “It was the best time of my life. It was the happiest I ever was. I had the gift of time with the kids, for my husband, for the house.”
“I had time for my health. I lost six stone. I had time to walk and be healthy. From the corporate working woman, I turned into this 1950s housewife. I had the milk and home-made cookies ready for the kids coming in from school and I absolutely loved it. I found I didn’t miss the cut and thrust of work at all. I missed my colleagues and maybe some of the social side, but I really got some perspective, that the career didn’t matter as much as I thought. I was so much happier and more fulfilled.”
Knowing a return to work was unavoidable, Deirdre and her husband set about planning to allow Deirdre to retire early so she could return to being a stay-at-home parent. “My career didn’t, and it doesn’t, define me.
“You realise that all that stressful work catches up with you,” she says. “I saw it from the far side too. When you leave work, they forget about you as quick as they look at you. I’m so grateful that I got out because I think I would have been in an early grave myself. I got a new slant on what was important and I’m about a billion times happier than I was.”
“Wanting to stay at home and care for your children is totally normal,” psychotherapist Bethan O’Riordan says. “I feel that it almost needs to be carved out in a new modern way and a modern light. That it’s not a being chained to the kitchen sink-type thing.
“I think being a woman is so complicated and tricky. A lot of people went to college and got jobs, maybe before they had children … so then when children come along, there’s a whole new draw in our lives that we didn’t even know existed before, because we never experienced motherhood. I love being a homemaker and I take great pride in it. And I would love if women were allowed to celebrate that bit as well.”
Guilt is “a very normal motivational system that we have to do no harm to somebody else” she says, referring to the infamous mum guilt. The difficulty is that “guilt doesn’t know when to dial down”.
O’Riordan advises mothers to think about the “quality and not the quantity of parenting” they’re providing. “The quality isn’t all the stuff you can get for them, or the expensive bits, but how is the quality of your engagement with your child?”
Children want their parents’ attention, O’Riordan explains. “Whether we’re working in the home, being a homemaker, whether we’ve got a fantastic career, I do think it’s still possible to use our attention to let our children know that we care. And I do think we all need help figuring that out.
“Every mother needs to be supported because there is so much thrown at us in terms of what we’re meant to be in life.”
