On International Men’s Day, won’t someone think of the fathers?
It’s been a hard year. Healthcare staff have been under immense pressure. Businesses have struggled. Many have lost loved ones, some without the chance to say goodbye. Lonely people have been lonelier and vulnerable people more vulnerable. Anxiety levels are through the roof – but worst affected by increased stress caused by the pandemic are fathers in their 30s, according to a study by Aviva Life and Pensions that was published on Tuesday.
Some will look at the survey results and worry about the plight of these poor men. Personally, I’m a little surprised that we need a survey to conclude that increased parenting responsibilities tend to add to your stress levels, and that unpaid house and caring work on top of a paid job does indeed take its toll. All over Ireland, there are mothers who could tell you that.
My husband and I struggled, too, with the home-schooling, the limitations and overall pressures of that first lockdown and six months of two primary-school age children at home. In the greater scheme of things we were luckier than many, but it was hard – probably one of the hardest things we’ve been through as a couple in years. And yet, I couldn’t help but wonder about all the research from my native Sweden, which has shown that couples are more equal and share the unpaid work more fairly after fathers spend a few months at home on parental leave. Maybe, amid all the awfulness of 2020, this would be an accidental but very welcome knock-on effect? It’s that age-old thing of not being able to unsee something once you’ve seen it. Once you’ve had a potty-training toddler on the toilet the moment you realise that you’re out of loo roll, you won’t forget to make a mental note the next time it’s close to running out.
Parents in Sweden are entitled to a total of 480 days, or 16 months, of parental leave paid at around 80% of their salary, and each parent has an exclusive right to 90 of those days. Anecdotally, friends of mine have acknowledged the difference it’s made to their relationships when their male partners have taken at least a few months of paternity leave: not only have the shared parental responsibilities become less of a burden and cause for arguments between them, but other household chores have subsequently been shared more equally as well. “It’s like he sees things now that he never saw before,” one friend told me. “I guess when I was always there, he never got a chance to really notice all these things. Now he’s got his own systems and his own ways of doing things at home.”
A report from last year, looking at all the Nordic countries, reveals as much: fathers enjoy far closer relationships with their children after extended parental leave and even feel like better fathers, and the relationship between the parents is improved and becomes more equal. But there’s more. The mothers’ careers see big benefits, including higher earnings. Their physical health improves, as does their mental wellbeing, and domestic violence becomes less prevalent. Interestingly, research has shown that the time when a couple first become parents is a good indication of how equal their relationship will be in the future; an equal share of parental leave in the first year of parenthood paves way for an equal future as partners and parents.
Things are different here in Ireland, not just in terms of policy, but culturally too. I’m not here to say that the Swedish model is perfect, nor that we should be copying it. It might be worth considering the lessons from the Nordics, though – and asking ourselves what that survey says about the reality of parenting in Ireland. It doesn’t take a genius to figure out why fathers who are suddenly confined to their homes for months, along with their children, are suddenly experiencing unprecedented spikes in stress levels. Working from home while home-schooling, parenting and coping with the uncertainties of a global pandemic is stressful; it was stressful for almost everyone. But there’s a reason why it was more of a shock to the system for some than it was for others – possibly the same as the reason why our elected politicians (77.5% of whom are men) thought that it would be possible in the first place, simply assuming that parental responsibilities would magically sort themselves while we sit on Zoom meetings ignoring our children. Something tells me that they won’t rush into that kind of non-solution again. It’s that age-old thing of not being able to unsee something once you’ve seen it. There they are, in plain sight: the house chores and the responsibilities of running a home and raising a family. This International Men’s Day, I hope we can vow never to unsee them.
A waste of space of a man – on mammy memes and narratives of fatherhood
“Women are being edged out of the workforce,” says an article on The Lily that was doing the rounds at the beginning of the summer. In it, Aimee Rae Hannaford, a co-founder and chief executive of a Silicon Valley tech company, explains why she decided to dissolve the company and live off savings when the schools closed as a result of the pandemic, despite the fact that her son’s father was already on a career break at the time. “I can’t do it,” her husband had said. “I can’t watch him for this long.”
First, I rolled my eyes at this useless waste of space of a man. Then, I imagined the voices of Swedish feminists, asking who on earth would ever stay in a relationship with a guy like this, before going off to print T-shirts saying: DUMP YOUR BOYFRIEND. And then, I could hear Irish feminists step in: there are plenty of men like this out there, they’d argue, and they don’t exactly come with big, fat warning signs – so stop putting the blame and responsibility on the women who end up having kids with them; put the responsibility back where it belongs.
They live in different worlds, of course, the Swedish and Irish feminists. It’s not all that easy to walk away from a relationship in Ireland when you have kids, with childcare costs being what they are and most of the school system built on the assumption that there’s a parent at home on at least a part-time basis. Sweden is the country, after all, where there was talk of parents being paid 70-80% of their wages in the eventuality that the schools would be closed in response to the pandemic, which in the end they weren’t. Then again, recent research has suggested that Swedish mothers are working the equivalent of 2.5 full-time jobs – so maybe it’s not the gender equal bliss it’s painted out to be, and maybe those DUMP YOUR BOYFRIEND T-shirts aren’t selling so well.
Around the same time as the circulation of said The Lily article, Erica Djossa shared a meme on Instagram with the headline “The invisible load of motherhood: Working from home during Covid”, featuring 12 illustrations of the different kinds of challenging situations so many of us have suddenly found ourselves in.
Like added stress as a result of reduced capacity. Like constantly switching roles throughout the day. Like managing your children’s distance learning and meeting their emotional needs. And the thing went viral, as relatable memes do, and I sat there feeling… well, almost as confused as I did when reading Hannaford’s story.
I am but anecdotal evidence. I don’t expect memes to revolve around me, nor do I think that feminism works like that: that’s not my experience, so it isn’t real. I know, I KNOW. And yet, it has to be said: in the first month of lockdown, 100% of the home-schooling in this house was done by my partner, the father of my children; he does the majority of the bedtime routines at the moment, and that constant switching of roles throughout the day has been a far greater problem for him than it has for me.
And I know that there are plenty of men out there like Aimee Rae Hannaford’s husband, plenty of useless fathers who leave their partners burning the candle at both ends, spreading themselves so thin they’re only just about still there; I know this, and I get that, to their thinly spread partners, this meme is about motherhood.
Technically speaking, though, none of the 12 things listed relate specifically to motherhood. It’s called parenting. Unless we’re willing to resort to the same kind of rhetoric that calls fathers being with their children babysitting, this is parenting. Anna Whitehouse, a.k.a. Mother Pukka, summarised the same points pretty well: “The majority of men don’t just spunk and leave. Even if not living with their partner, they’re dads, parents and they aren’t ‘babysitting’, they’re raising their spaghetti hoop-encrusted child, too. It’s hard for everyone.”
So can a mother not vent anymore, is that what I’m saying? Are we not allowed to name the reality of the unfair division of emotional labour and more, which there’s plenty of research to back up? Hell, is it not our responsibility as feminists to name it, to visibilise it, to point at all this unpaid work we’re doing and the reality of what it’s doing to our mental as well as physical health, not to mention our careers and pensions?
Of course we can, and of course we should. Maybe we need more of it. And while I wish that more mothers would take this meme and stick it on the fridge and talk to their partners about it, I recognise and respect that the mother who ended up with a waste of space of a man and is now at breaking point is not going to be having that conversation with him, nor is he going to listen – and she, more than anyone, needs to be allowed to vent.
But still, I can’t get escape the feeling that the labels matter. If, when we vent, we make parenting synonymous with mothering, we’re doing everyone – not least mothers – a huge disservice. Because the thing is, if we want to change the reality of that The Lily article, we need to change the idea of what fatherhood looks like. If we want to change the fact that women are walking away from their jobs in droves because it just makes no financial sense for their higher-earning partners to quit, we need to change the notion of ‘woman’ meaning mother meaning maternity leave and sick days while ‘man’ means none of those things, ever. And if we keep labelling all the things that relate to children’s needs as motherhood, that shift just ain’t gonna happen.
And do you know what else isn’t going to happen unless we stop this stereotyping nonsense? Mothers aren’t going to stop feeling that guilt, and they’re not going to stop prioritising everyone else’s work while their own work accumulates. I’m so tired of that image of the naturally selfless, self-erasing mother in the periphery that I think I might explode – but then, sorry, that wouldn’t be very motherly of me, would it? Memes like this aren’t just relieving fathers of the duties (and joys!) of parenthood; they’re perpetuating the notion of mothers as altogether self-effacing and naturally, ceaselessly caring for everyone but themselves.
Want to see another mammy meme that made me want to scream? This one:
Just stop it. Stop telling mothers to ‘just keep going’. Stop making motherhood a competition in self-destruction. This is not what motherhood was meant to be, this relentless keeping going, putting up with stuff and burning out, and it’s certainly not what I want to teach my sons that they should expect of women.
I’m hoping that the way we are with our two sons, the conversations we’re having with them and the choices we’ve made, will make them into sensitive, caring, responsible fathers if they ever end up having kids. But I can’t help but wonder what they’d feel if they saw these memes. I wonder about the fathers-to-be who grew up with useless, absent dads and are looking to break the cycle, what’ll they take from memes like these and the many hundreds if not thousands like them.
I wonder if it would kill us, in the mammy groups, if we edited the headlines of the memes to talk about ‘the invisible load of parenthood’ instead. And in the groups that have consciously labelled themselves for ‘parents’ as opposed to ‘mothers’, if we talked about all these things we do without immediately and explicitly excluding fathers from the conversation, would the guesstimated 1.3% of members in there who are in fact dads perhaps feel a tiny bit less out of place as they try to do all these things they’ve been raised to view as women’s work? Might they even add their daddy friends to the parenting groups?
I think we can do both. I think we can name the inequalities, point to the statistics and complain about the injustice of it all and still label parenting for what it is, so that there’s no doubt in anyone’s mind: this thing is for all of us, for mothers as well as fathers. If you have a kid and you’re not trying to meet their emotional needs, you’re doing it wrong, and you’re the waste of space. That doesn’t mean that those of us who are already doing it should stop, or that we should suffer in silence – but it means that we need to leave that door wide open.