One Step Forward, Two Steps Back

Or is it the other way round?

Like many women in 2024, I’ve recently found myself caught in the trap of modern life: working and having a family. It’s a long road and someone is always hard done by. Taught that we should be grateful for the opportunity to go out and earn money and be freed from the shackles of our own home, to me, it suddenly doesn’t feel quite as liberating as I had hoped.

I’ve been examining what it means for our family to have a working Mother at the heart of it and what it means for my politics to have strayed from our family business into the grubby world of paid employment.

I’m doing a good job, but I’m tired and I miss my children. I haven’t been able to write for two weeks because I’m working entirely, flipping from work, to business, to the real work of life, and falling asleep as soon as I stop. All I think about is making food for the freezer and trying to remember legislation around the Mental Health Act and what I would recommend regarding the Serious Medical Treatment of Mrs X, or the detainment of Mr Y and how many salad bags we can produce. I miss my fulltime role as facilitator and I miss the 6-by-6 rhythm of our life that gives me so much fulfilment and unquantifiable riches.

We’ve always talked about feminism in our household and how important it is to cherish the work of the homemaker and see it as essential and equally valuable as the hard-graft and excitement of the ‘Other Jobs’ which inevitably fall to the man in our house. I tell the boys every day, all life is borne of women and they need to cherish, value and uphold the values and freedoms of women – I take the role of raising boys very seriously. I was told a few weeks ago that my son had called out another child for misogyny at school, this was celebrated, but the person was surprised that he knew that word. Well, duh, if we want to end violence and discrimination against the female sex, then it starts at the kitchen table with a boy of 5. Surely, I thought everyone knew that?

I digress, by exciting Other Jobs, I mean the overtly rewarding aspects of building a business; the physical, tangible improvements & developments, the show stopping things like hedge laying, growing beautiful vegetables and planting hundreds of trees. At times, early in motherhood particularly, I had moments (a lot of moments) of great resentment and frustrations and I felt ashamed that I had abandoned all my feminist principles to be the woman who just made Good Meals for her hardworking husband and never strayed too far from the home. I was tied, quite literally, to the children who depended on me solely for milk to survive. In the first few years of marriage, I was still reeling from the new gender-typical role I had assumed. Coming out of a decade of being at university and living in London with all sorts of zealots and exciting people who knew a lot of critical theory and advancements, I had been exposed and immersed in the world of liberal politics and leftist feminism. If you had told me that in a couple of years, I would have essentially rejected the ideas which I felt so tied to and be glad to have limited my options so drastically and become married to a guy who would become the Man and I would become the Woman, I’d have laughed and told you to go and read Judith Butler or quoted Germaine Greer, ‘Childbearing was never intended by biology as a compensation or neglecting all other forms of fulfilment and achievement.’