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.
No woman is an island
“Happiness is within,” they say. Within you, within that cup of herbal tea and a gratitude journal and deep, deep breaths. You should try yoga. We’ll all have our 15 minutes of fame – if we just find that strength within. We’ll all be somebody, more than just selfless mothers – we’ll make our lives into works of art, copyrighted, patented, and with no one to thank but ourselves.
One for the gratitude journal: we’re safe from floods and earthquakes. But calm as the waters may be, the 8th ships us across the Irish Sea, sweeping secret upon secret under a rug woven of intricate age-old lies. “I’m drowning in post-natal depression,” says one, as another numbs guilt with a bottle of Tesco’s Finest. A third perfects the art of covering bruises with concealer and a new fringe, while 12 a day are exiled. Shame – our greatest export.
“Happiness is within,” so the self-help books say. But what is self-help if the self needs help, reaching out and away for respite, for togetherness? Sure happiness must be within when the outside and beyond is cold and lonely, bills unpaid and children hungry, wombs a battlefield and homes hollow as ghosts. You must find strength within to get up early in the morning, pay your taxes, look after your own, never complain – good man. When there’s no such thing as society and Thatcher rests in peace, take a deep breath, try yoga. Down by the Central Bank, placards of blood and flesh make religious icons of grotesque purity, flaunted by big, strong men who know nothing of hormonal battlefields but are certain that a heartbeat is a heartbeat because God tells us so. Four of them, maybe five, the placards huge like altarpieces. Just a couple of yards away is a woman, alone, red tape across her mouth and a small hand-written sign asking the big, strong men to mind their own battlefields. Then a stranger walks up, joins in silence, grabs her hand. Up by the Dáil, another man with a sign – on strike for that same heartbeat, demonstrating his right to refuse to eat so that others can be force-fed. Up walk 25 handmaids, all dressed in red, a long line of white bonnets. Solidarity in silence. Yes, there is such a thing as society. There’s a soup kitchen just around the corner, serving mugs full of steaming hot care and smiles, and three lads on Facebook offering free grass-cutting services and hugs to old, disabled, sick people and single parents. Hope in a social media post.
I don’t think happiness is within, but in between, in what holds us together – in showing up and grabbing someone’s hand. I think it is in marching side by side, 20-30-50-thousand, unapologetically through the streets that are our own, refusing to throw another woman under the bus and in the sea, turning the streets of Dublin from battlefields into a weft of compassion and solidarity. I think hope is in drinking that tea together, taking a deep, deep breath and listening to each other – disagreeing, maybe, but respectfully, without judgement. Marching, stronger together, until the ideas of ‘mind your own business’ and self-realisation for 15 minutes of fame no longer shape our policies and our dreams and our health; until we refuse to swallow our pride along with guilt and shame and tears, and admit that some days giving up feels easier than leaning in and reaching for what was once a seed of happiness within; until we can say out loud that today it hurts, and I need help. It’s not your fault.
This, to me, is self-care: surrounding myself with other people who care, mothers who haven’t slept in years but spend every free minute writing down facts and engaging in debates and finding pills for those who need them; women who have been abused and ignored, who are scared and hurting but won’t stop talking; and those born with all the luck and privilege in the world, who would give it all up in a flash if it meant those born without could be heard. No man is an island. No woman is an island. When I despair, I put my faith in community and I seek out these warriors. And then, together, we cry the world better.
A feminist childcare model - and mammies doing it wrong
“Children of working mothers have better social and everyday skills,” read an Irish Times headline last week. A few days later, The Guardian reported on another study suggesting that mothers should spend as much time with their children as they can afford, and went with the headline “Child’s cognitive skills linked to time spent with mother”.
Such is the game of pitting mothers against each other: you’re damned if you do, and damned if you don’t. This of course is nothing new; the stream of new studies seems never-ending, and media loves reporting on them – likely because new mothers never fail to fall for the clickbait, desperate for some sort of evidence that they’re doing something right in this most difficult job they’ve ever tried their hand at. But perhaps there’s no coincidence that we’re seeing two of these stories in two leading newspapers in such a short space of time in the build-up to Christmas. Guilt is a powerful marketing tool – not least as we are bombarded with images of mothers hard at work on delivering the perfect family Christmas: finding the best deals on those most sought-after toys; creating the perfectly relaxing yet fun ambience in the home; doing all the food shopping, perhaps ‘getting away with’ using a ready-made stock pot; then standing in a doorway somewhere in the periphery looking selflessly blissful while watching their loved ones enjoy themselves.
Timely or not, these types of studies would perhaps be at least somewhat useful if it wasn’t for the fact that few parents feel as if they have any choice at all in the decision of whether to return to work or not. At the very least, thinking outside the box will involve a significantly lowered standard of living for most.
In Ireland, as Minister for Children Katherine Zappone unveiled the government’s new childcare scheme as part of Budget 2017 a couple of months ago, the new programme was heavily criticised. Many highlighted the complete failure to support stay-at-home parents, along with anyone opting for childcare provided by a family member or neighbour, while some went as far as to refer to the full-time crèche subsidy as an incentive for the “institutionalisation of babies and toddlers”, citing studies of young children’s most basic needs.
Further north, said institutionalisation of children is in full swing: in Sweden, quality controlled, local government funded nurseries are available for all children from around the age of one, and a full-time place costs no more than 1,287SEK (about €130), or 3% of the gross household income, per month for the first child. The cost drops significantly for the second and third children in a family, and the fourth goes free. Forget about ‘a second mortgage’, as Irish parents have come to refer to childcare costs – these working parents have two salaries to spend.
With a feminist foreign policy, a ministry made up of 50% women, and parental leave in place of gender-specific maternity leave since 1974, including three months earmarked for fathers since earlier this year and an equality bonus for parents who choose to split the 480 days equally, Sweden may be the promised feminist land; yet choosing the longer-term stay-at-home route comes with a huge loss of earnings as that second disposable salary is lost. Moreover, crucially, I have yet to stop receiving messages on an all too frequent basis from friends who have had enough, who just can’t make emotional ends meet, who are burning the candle at so many ends they don’t even know what’s up anymore.
Institutionalisation critics, meanwhile, are mostly concerned with the failing confidence of parents; Sweden’s childcare culture has resulted in a generation of parents who think that they can’t keep their children at home during the summer holidays because they simply don’t trust their own ability to entertain and challenge them. When siblings come into the world, children in Sweden are entitled to between 15 and 30 hours in crèche per week, something that’s been heavily questioned: why would parents send their children away when they’re at home?
A quick recap: we feed parents an endless diet of academically proven ways in which they are most likely failing their children, and then we blame the childcare system for making them doubt their parental ability.
The feminist elephant in the room is of course unpaid labour: the emotional labour that pushes mothers working outside of the home over the edge, and the housework and childcare work that is stubbornly unseen, unpaid and simultaneously always criticised. Because all these critics have grand ideas about what children need, but no one’s asking how their mothers* are doing. Don’t get me wrong: the last thing I want is to play into the rhetoric that poses that happy mothers have happy babies, as if having a bad day or struggling sometimes is somehow a failure. But the chirpy ‘getting mothers back into the workforce’ spiel is starting to sound a bit tired. We’ve been working all along – and that work won’t go away just because society refuses to value it.
So what does a truly feminist childcare model look like? A good first step might be one that doesn’t tell parents that their most important job in this world is to be productive in the sense of contributing to economic growth; one of flexibility and lack of judgement, one that levels the playing field not just in a financial sense but also when it comes to equality of choice and wellbeing. And a feminist media? Alas, it’s a long road ahead.
*And yes, to be clear: I do mean mothers, not parents. A close friend who became a father recently remarked when returning from a stroll with his baby daughter in the sling how easy it is to be celebrated as a super dad, what with all the smiles and encouraging comments. I’ve yet to meet a mother who feels quite that loved and supported by the general public. Also, refer again to the Christmas commercials. I rest my case.
On The Niall Boylan Show and getting ignorant answers to ignorant questions
Is the general public “right to be angry at the sense of entitlement” of a homeless, pregnant mother-of-two in temporary hotel accommodation? asked The Niall Boylan Show on Facebook the other day. Linking to screen grabs of a journal.ie article about the woman and a selection of comments on the same, the radio show noted that Laura from Cork was “not getting a huge amount of sympathetic thumbs up” on the site.
Cue the radio show’s Facebook fans telling Laura to “close [her] fucking fanny”, stop having more kids and start looking after the ones she already has, get a job, and start paying for a living. Her “sense of entitlement”, of course, is never questioned – that’s already been established by the question asked.
The fact the journal.ie readers were indeed quick to judge – suggesting that Laura must start taking responsibility, sarcastically highlighting that they themselves actually have to pay when staying in a hotel, and citing anecdotal evidence of random friends who do social work and know of people turning down offers of houses – naturally doesn’t help. But the Niall Boylan Show is only delighted to amplify them, making readers feel righteous in their outrage at this woman’s lifestyle. They are “the general public”, so the radio show said – and, as another commenter points out, it’s the general public that foots the bill for that hotel room. So the circle of hatred is complete.
The fact that there are a thousand and one ways to get pregnant against your will and not a single one to stop being pregnant if you’re a single mother without someone to mind your children while you nip off to the UK to splash out on an abortion, these people seem to have forgotten. Likewise, they seem just a tad ignorant about the difficulty in getting a job when already five months pregnant, not to mention the equation of one income to cover not just rent and bills but also childcare costs for two children.
But what’s outrageous about this isn’t primarily what’s in the comments; anyone who’s spent more than two minutes skimming through comments on any article about anything to do with women will know to expect nothing less. For The Niall Boylan Show to fake upset at the lack of sympathetic thumbs up in the comments on the original post, however, only to go on and amplify said lacking sympathy, cement the idea of a homeless mother-of-two in temporary hotel accommodation as entitled, and do nothing by way of moderating the ensuing vitriol on their own page – that’s what I call irresponsible hypocrisy in its most disgusting form.
A political hero of mine, Swedish politician Gudrun Schyman, talks a lot about a concept she calls ‘problemformuleringsinitiativet’ (go on – give it your best shot). The Swedish multi-syllable word loosely translates as ‘the problem defining initiative’ and refers to agenda-setting power, highlighting that the power to define a problem by extension comes with the power to appoint responsibility and thus also propose wherein the solution might lie.
The question of whether the general public’s anger at Laura’s sense of entitlement is justified or not comes with a number of already established assumptions: that the ignorant people who take time to spew hatred at someone like Laura in the comments section on journal.ie represent the general public; that Laura is definitely to blame for the situation she’s in and we should put all spotlights on her rather than our politicians; that she does indeed feel a sense of entitlement; and that having a sense of entitlement when it comes to the country you live in supporting you when you’re in deep shit to make sure that your children have a roof over their heads would somehow be a bad thing. It’s no wonder that their most unenlightened fans come out of the woodwork at the sight of a post like this. The answers you get are only as good as the questions you ask. It’s an ignorant question, so they’ll get ignorant responses.
I wonder did the radio show ever think to question our elected representatives’ sense of entitlement. I wonder did they pick up on the frustration of the general public at Enda Kenny’s schmoozing with American Vice President elect Mike Pence and ask whether it was right. I wonder did they note the anger marching through the streets of Dublin back in September and put it to their Facebook fans whether the fury of Ireland’s women is justified. That’s the kind of social media clickbait I’d get behind.
I don't know how he does it
“If you want to have it all, it’s your job to work out how to do it. If you can’t, give something up.” That’s David Cox’s advice to Kate, the high-flying fictitious character in the film I don’t know how she does it.
I suspect we’ll read many a harsh critique of the super-woman film, but I wasn’t quite prepared to read this in the Guardian. I’m not saying that this Hollywood plot doesn’t need some ripping apart – the have-it-all approach to life indeed deserves questioning – but your way of criticising something says a lot about your outlook on life. And I guess, somehow, I keep forgetting that even the most liberal publications in the UK look at parenting as a one-woman job.
Many would agree – and I’m sure I will too if I ever see the film – that the plot is nothing but a boring cliché. My idea of the real world, however, differs quite a bit from Cox’s. He answers the question of how she does it with the accusation that Kate uses her poor husband, a man who wishes to focus on furthering his own career but is forced to bring their injured son to the hospital when selfish mammy is at work. He explains her success by pointing the finger at the way she expects of her employer to be flexible, thereby, he suggests, somehow undermining the efforts of women who don’t need flexibility at work because they don’t have a family: they’ve had to make a sacrifice, means Cox, so why should we let selfish Kate get away with not making one?
“Motherhood is voluntary,” Cox reminds us. But “fulfilling all other aspirations at the same time may or may not be practicable.”
This is where I lose him completely. We’re supposed to look at Kate as a “scumbag” for wanting it all (but, he insinuates, not doing it well enough), yet her husband is described as a victim. Isn’t fatherhood voluntary as well? What does he mean?
Here’s what I think he means. Fatherhood isn’t that demanding, after all. Most fathers manage very well to combine fatherhood with successful careers, thank you very much. And so no one ever says, ‘I don’t know how he does it’. Why? Because parenting is a mother’s job. It’s a mother’s fault when a child is malnourished; the mother is the one who’s neglected a child who doesn’t learn to talk when other kids do. Laundry, school runs, hospital visits – it’s all done while the father’s at work. That’s how he does it: he’s got a wife.
About mothers, Cox writes that “if they can’t work as hard as their childless colleagues to get a seat on the board, they could manage without one.” But of course, a majority of the board members aren’t childless. They’re fathers. And fathers don’t have to make sacrifices, we all know that. Right, Cox?
[All of the above is of course based on yet another of the patriarchy's great myths: the idea that not getting to spend a lot of time with your kids isn't in itself a sacrifice for fathers. But that's another discussion for another post.]