Rather muddled choices

Baby considers opening statement on her mother's seminar plan

Another week, another article about stay-at-home mothers. The one I’m thinking of is positive, which is great, but borders on a worrying sanctification of motherhood that some people admire but I don’t really buy into. It all comes down to what works best for the parents and the family. 

There are aspects of being at home that I absolutely love - there are other bits that make me want to run away to whatever university seminar I can find and just talk like a grown-up for as long as they’ll let me. Just as there are elements of working in a university that drive me spare. Nothing is absolutely perfect and what works one year might be problematic the next. Every family is different and circumstances constantly change, so I’m not that interested in debating the relative merits of how you parent, but the thing I find irritating in the endless cycle of these debates is the word “choice,” followed closely with the word “need.” 

“Choice” as in working parents choose to go back to work. Or stay-at-home parents are making a choice for their family. There is also an implication in many articles that for mothers financial need is the primary reason behind these choices, rather than a desire to further their careers or do what they love. In other words, all mothers would stay home if they could but many need to return to work for the money. Then there's the other side of the debate that tends towards the belief that the only way to be a fully functioning member of society is to choose to be in paid employment.

I don’t know about the rest of you, but I can only think of a few clear cut choices in my life, and even those are complicated by other parameters. I may have chosen to go to university and pursue graduate studies, but I had to be accepted first. Other people ultimately determined my choice. I chose to take certain programmes at school, but those choices consequently limited other choices I could have made. Similarly, I chose to study music seriously as a teenager, but even that choice was predicated on my ability and my parents’ choice to support me financially and with their time.

I obviously chose to get married, and fortunately my husband also made the same decision. But as I get to my main point, many people intend to have marriage as part of their life plan and life doesn’t always work out that way.  

My husband and I definitely chose to move to Canada last year with our family. That was a clear choice, but one we could only make because of the chance of birth and citizenship. It would be far more difficult to choose to move to, say, Norway, be that on a whim or a long-held dream of the Nordic life.

And what about the big choice about children and the way you parent? Well, I’m a bit skeptical about the control most of us have in such choices.

We certainly intended to have children, but I didn’t choose to get pregnant a few weeks before my PhD viva, just as people don’t choose to take five years to get pregnant; many of us choose to try, but you get pregnant when you get pregnant. I didn’t even really choose to move back to New Zealand to have our daughter. British visa law made that the only sensible option for us, and I made the best of the situation presented. 

I certainly didn’t choose to not be eligible for any paid maternity leave. I was a student in one country when I got pregnant and had the baby in another country. There was no one to cover maternity leave. It simply wasn’t an option.

I also didn’t choose to be a predominantly stay-at-home mother: I arrived back in New Zealand pregnant, with a very advanced qualification, but no job. In late 2008. Oddly enough I didn’t choose to coincide parenting with a global financial crisis, and any general intention of wanting to be home while the kids were little was conveniently helped along by that being pretty much the only option on the table. 

I did choose to get straight back into the academic world on arrival home, but as anyone who knows how university departments work can tell you, you can choose a career in the academe all you like, and the academe will laugh. Consequently, I took whatever part time contract teaching was available and we muddled through.

But again, my decision to teach two afternoons a week when my daughter was four months old was only made possible by the support of enthusiastic grandparents - the work I loved doing didn’t really cover the childcare. I didn’t make the same choice when my son was that age, because of the timing of semesters and teaching vacancies. I had to wait until he was nearly 1.

    

I am definitely choosing to look for academic employment at the moment, but whether I go back to work part time, full time, or at all, depends on what I am offered. We are also choosing to stretch ourselves financially to make that possible by putting my now nearly 3-year-old son in part time daycare. It’s not a financial choice we should be making right now, but psychologically it’s great for me to get some research time - though, there’s nothing that psychologically fulfilling about job hunting.

  

It’s also very useful that my son loves his preschool. It makes that choice much easier, but I’m very aware that for some parents their children’s health, temperament or learning abilities ultimately control the choices they can make about work. Just as some people’s jobs are very compatible with flexitime and others’ are anything but.  

As for leaning in? Well that’s great if you happen to be in a position to lean at the same time as you happen to have children. To repeat myself, I leaned in pretty hard, pregnant with a newly minted PhD from a prestigious university in hand, and I had to make do with opportunities presented to me.  

There will always be individuals fortunate enough in their goals, hard work and luck (always remember the luck) to fully negotiate the terms of their work/parenting life - to make an active choice - but most of us do the best with what we’ve got and hopefully feel we’re doing ok in the process.