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.

Be grateful and stop moaning – or, why we need to talk about home-schooling

You know the professor whose kids gatecrashed his BBC interview, causing him to panic repeatedly, resulting in the whole thing going viral? Well there’s a spin-off version that shows what would’ve happened if the professor were a woman and a mother. You guessed it: she’s grand. She comforts, feeds and entertains her young children without for a second letting her focus slip or losing her train of thought - because mammies are brilliant at multi-tasking. Hilarious, eh? Dads are clueless and mothers are superheroes. Except I don’t find it hilarious; I find it infuriating.

I guess it’s hit a nerve during lockdown more than it would’ve before. The reality of video calls featuring home-schooling intervals, meltdown backdrops, accidental coffee spillage and the repeated need for cuddles and snacks is just that bit closer to home right now. But as thousands of households all over the country are grappling with this new normal, the narrative of maternal super powers isn’t helping. Let me tell you, I feel nothing like a superhero. I feel exhausted and sad and insufficient a lot of the time.

Last week, journalist Jennifer O’Connell wrote a piece arguing for staggered school openings before the summer holidays. (We could laugh at the notion of any such thing as ‘summer holidays’ at all at a time of social distancing and months-long school closures, but that’s for another post.) On Twitter and elsewhere, words like ‘eugenics’ and ‘mass murder’ were thrown around, because naturally, unless you’re willing to live under strict lockdown for a few years, until this thing has fully gone away or we’ve found a sustainable vaccination solution, that’s clearly what you’re advocating for. 

Having been mostly off Twitter for a long time until recently, I made the mistake of adding to the stream of voices suggesting that it’s not all that black and white and maybe she’s not in fact a psychopath, whereby a kind troll quickly checked my bio to make the connection with my Swedish roots, concluding that it’s unsurprising that I’m up for Nazi-style extinction strategies like those in place in my heartless home country. Most interesting, though, was the growing, confident choir of those pointing out that parents these days don’t think before they procreate, and they just want the schools to open because they hate spending time with their children. Case closed.

I committed a social media faux pas and deleted my tweets, not because I changed my mind but because trolls are annoying at the best of times, and during life under lockdown they can make a woman lose her shit. But no matter what strategy you believe in, the reality of home-schooling while working full-time is an impossible equation. You have to work until midnight and manage on extremely limited sleep, broken by strange nightmares and anxious children, and keep answering 2,987 questions an hour as your children figure out what the coronavirus is and whether famous people are always good at things and whether bumble bees like dog poo. You have to show which way to start to write a lower-case d and help pare pencils while you’re in the middle of creating yet another spreadsheet, and then you have to make snacks, endless snacks, after which you have to try to write while the Body Brothers are singing in the background. Then you have to try for the fourteenth time to add a new entry to a task on a buggy school app that needs refreshing every few minutes, while your children’s attention spans wither away and you accept, reluctantly but realistically, that you’re not going to get through anywhere near half the school work this week either. And when your kids can’t sleep at night because everything’s strange and they are human too, you have to be patient and try not to think about the emails you have to deal with before you call it a day, because children can sense anything, everything, and if you’re stressed and thinking about work they simply won’t go to sleep, ever.

Then, you have to cheer for childcare workers on the back of the government announcement of the new wage subsidy top-up scheme, because you agree that their job is one of the most important jobs in the world; and then you have to do the childcare, with no pay and in no time at all, while acknowledging and feeling urgently grateful for your own privilege, which is genuinely very real indeed. And the memes in your feed that said ‘Reach out – don’t suffer in silence!’ for World Mental Health Day only six months ago have been replaced by ‘Safe at home, not stuck at home’ and endless gratitude practices, because actually, unless you’re in intensive care or your parent is dying or you’re about to lose your home, soldiering on and suffering in silence would be preferable, thank you very much.

We’re at the end of week seven, and in our family, we’ve sort of found a groove, not because we’ve figured it out and are past the shock, but much thanks to the fact that one of my biggest clients from the past few years has gone out of business. Like most parents, I love being with my kids when I’m not actually meant to be doing something else and don’t have to prove to someone at a laptop with a shaky internet connection many miles away that I’m indeed still working and not in fact taking the piss just because a kid is having a concert in the background and another is on the toilet shouting for help to reach the loo roll. I really enjoy chatting to them about the SPHE curriculum strand of citizenship, and I love perfecting my goalie skills as I pretend to be Lindahl, the Swedish women’s national football squad’s goalkeeper, in an attempt to give them a tiny but important piece of Sweden as our Easter trip is cancelled. But that’s the thing: in this perfectly impossible mess, I’ve lost a huge chunk of work – and I’m the lucky one. 

My children are lucky, too, even though we’re never going to get through all the school work. There’s no getting away from the fact that the government doesn’t have a plan for the kids who are safer in school than at home, nor for those who were lagging behind before all this started and whose parents are simply unable to even begin to decipher the templates and curriculum notes teachers send them. Moreover, our elected representatives (I’m genuinely too tired to take the debate about the dubiousness of the word ‘elected’ in that context since the General Election we can all only just remember even though it was less than three months ago) also appear to be relying on some form of parenting wizardry, gifted, as if by an invisible hand, to parents the moment their children are born. Enter multi-tasking superhero mammy! She doesn’t need money or time to be everything a child needs at all times, even when she’s working an intense eight hours a day. Handy. And here’s me thinking I’m lucky; maybe I’m just flawed and stupid and a terrible mother and if I was only good enough I would’ve been able to do it all, work and teach and play and care and feed, for six months straight without losing focus or burning out.

It’s not, of course, working parents who are the greatest victims of this crisis. From healthcare workers to single parents and those immuno-compromised and scared shitless that they might catch this thing, there are endless people bearing the brunt of both financial and anxiety-related fears right now in a way that many parents like myself can’t even imagine. But this soldiering on we’ve become so keen on, this insistence that you’re not allowed to complain as long as you can still breathe, where will that get us? How can we build a sustainable, if temporary, new normal if we insist that our gratitude must silence us? I don’t accept that this is the best we can do. I won’t accept that the government gets to bang on about the importance of the childcare sector that’s been in freefall for years, and then send the kids home for months on end with no plan and no support. I refuse to pretend that it’s good enough. 

I can pause my social life and survive without hugging my friends. I can cancel my trip to Sweden and miss out on seeing my parents, cancel my gym membership and stop going to the playground. It’s hard, but needs must. But children’s lives can’t be paused. Their development continues one way or another, and it needs guidance and hand-holding; their bodies need movement and fresh air, and their need for love, attention and closeness is constant. As Philippa Perry says, it’s impossible for children to understand being with someone in a physical space and them not being available. What will six months of normalising that do to a child? What will six months of being forced to do that to a child do to a parent? 

Here’s a funny one. Have you read the Irish Constitution? There’s a widely debated article in there about the work within the home “without which the common good cannot be achieved”. Talk about us all being in this together – we’re bringing the kids home, caring for them and teaching them at home, all for the common good. Article 41.2 states that “mothers should not be obliged by economic necessity to engage in labour to the neglect of their duties in the home”. It may be sexist, but at least, for those of us lacking super powers, it’s there in black and white. Perhaps we’ll all leave our jobs and let Leo foot the bill. I’m not saying I’m in favour; I’m just saying this ain’t good enough.