Parenting Conundrums
Reply turned post: What is ‘work’?
21
I left this rather long comment on Catherine Redfern’s post on The F-Word, which was about the Conservatives’ proposed tax break for married couples but quickly turned into a bit of commentary on whether the ideal of one parent at home with the children is harmful to women. In the post, Catherine included a poster from a 1947 magazine encouraging women to “try to free yourself for work” to help the economy and wondered if, with the idolisation of motherhood, the reverse would soon be true — posters extolling us to stay at home where we belong.
While I understand and agree with Catherine’s dislike of the tax break for married couples, which, as she rightly says, would be largely irrelevant and, even worse, ignores the diversity and complexity of modern families, I do take issue with the idea that one parent (usually the mother) being at home with the children is undesirable, unattainable or even unnecessary. Is it, as it stands, an unfair and flawed system that puts women at a disadvantage? Yes. But I don’t think the answer is simply making working outside the home unavoidable and staying at home some kind of insult to the sisterhood (not that this is what Catherine insinuated; this is what many stay-at-home mothers have told me it feels like).
It’s such a complex issue and one that I’ve been thinking about a lot as I’ve been reading this fascinating analysis of the value of ‘women’s work’ in economic journalist Ann Crittenden’s 2001 book The Price of Motherhood: Why the most important job in the world is still the least valued. I’m only halfway through and it has already challenged and altered the way I’d been approaching the solution for the modern mother’s dilemma of combining work and family. I still have lots more reading and thinking to do on the subject but I’m seeing things from a slightly different angle for the first time in ages and it is wholly refreshing. I’ll be doing a review of the book once I’m finished with it.
My comment on The F-Word post is below [altered slightly for clarity].
I have to say, it can be a bit tiresome hearing all about how incredibly privileged and wealthy those who stay home, even part of the time, must be — I stay home with my children and work a part-time job from home (as do many of the working and middle class women in my area who can’t afford full-time child care but must work to some extent, though not many are able to do their jobs from home and instead work nights or weekends) and while there are undoubtedly some privileges in that, they certainly aren’t economic. My caring labour is worth absolutely nothing in economic or social terms because what I do is supposed to be a ‘labour of love,’ not worthy of compensation. There’s an awful lot of talk about how important raising children is and how motherhood is so great, blah blah blah, but talk is cheap when actions belie the opposite.
When I do re-enter the ‘proper’ workforce my skills will be considered outdated, unpolished and worth even less than they were before. I will earn much less over my lifetime than a man, a woman without children and those mothers who returned to work when their paid maternity leaves (if they got one) were up. I’ll be more at risk for poverty when I’m retirement age as my pension will have suffered greatly in the years when I was ‘not contributing’. While I might be privileged in staying home with my children now, I am paying a ‘mummy tax’ that will have a knock-on effect for the rest of my life. Again, that’s not to say I’ve got it rough because lord knows I’ve got it easy compared to so many women working their fingers to the bone night and day, but merely to point out that even those of us ‘privileged’ enough to stay at home are paying for it one way or another.
One can’t put raising children or managing a household on one’s CV as it is seen as irrelevant. And it will continue to be seen as irrelevant, even undesirable, as long as only labour that falls outside of the domestic sphere is treated as “real” work. Women who stay at home ARE working. It’s just that our contributions to society aren’t counted in economic terms, even though they are great.
Saying that a child would be better off with one-to-one or small group care (which doesn’t have to be a parent) isn’t judgmental, it’s a pretty indisputable fact. That so many families are forced to put their children into cheap, large-group care where they aren’t given the individual attention they deserve (even though the care may be adequate for its purposes) is not acceptable or at least desirable. If women are expected to be proficient consumers and workers as well as primary caregivers, we need much better caring systems, heavily subsidised by the state, and with much better-paid and trained workers, along with more flexible working options for both parents. Don’t forget that one of the demands of the second wave movement was free 24/7 child care. We seem to have let that one fall by the wayside, leaving individual mothers in the lurch to fight that battle on their own.
Counting on men to step up the plate and start doing an equal amount of childrearing and housework hasn’t worked so far and, short of an economic and social revolution, doesn’t look likely any time soon, no matter how many baby steps have been made. Men are also constrained by long-established economic pressures and gender stereotypes. I fear that placing all of our hopes for change on fathers’ ability to break though rigid societal structures is going to leave us, and our children, waiting in the wings for a very long time. We can and should work towards a more equitable division of household and caring labour, not to mention an overhaul of gender stereotypes, but it has proven to be a slow, arduous process. In the meantime and in concert with those efforts, we should be working to value (both societally and economically) women’s work as primary caregivers and essential parts of our communities. We should make it easier for women to work, yes, but we should also make it easier for them (or their partners) to stay at home when their children are young if that’s what they want. And there’s nothing ’1950s housewife’ (read: derisory) about that.
This is not a whisper
13
A few weeks ago I discussed women’s bodies in the workplace and how our biological and social needs were never truly integrated, even when we were finally ‘allowed’ to work. I said:
The problem is this — nearly all of the business world was built around the male biological and social imperative. It was understood that a working man was either single and carefree or with a wife at home who took care of his house, his children and all domestic tasks, aside from the more ‘manly’ chores like grass-cutting, wood-chopping and car repairs. The male worker had no need for flexible hours that fit in around school or shopping hours. The male worker had no dramatic hormonal changes, pregnancies, breastfeeding or post-partum recovery to deal with.
I also said:
But one of the biggest problems remaining, in my view, is that women’s bodies have not been integrated and accepted into the workplace. Pregnancy and maternity leave are still career-killers.
…Some people would even begrudge a woman the right to pump milk at work, calling it an ‘extra break’ and complaining that she’s getting ’special treatment,’ which I think any mother who has ever breastfed or expressed knows is misguided. Trying to get as much milk as possible out of your breasts while hunched over an electronic pump in a storage closet, hoping no one walks in on you, is not a ‘break’. It’s just more work, though of the unpaid, ‘unimportant’ variety in capitalism’s eyes.
Finally, I concluded that:
Because industry and business were built upon male norms, the working environment reflects this attitude as well. We got on the ladder alright, but what we should’ve been after was an entirely different climbing apparatus, one in which we could move horizontally across a continuum we helped create, not forced to climb vertically up those rigid, historically-male rungs (in high heels, naturally) before hitting that infamous glass ceiling.
Essentially, I was arguing that we can’t ‘fix’ the current system or try to force our way into existing frameworks because those systems and frameworks don’t serve our needs or our lives, which is what author Hilary Mantel says in today’s Guardian as well. What both of us are trying to say, I believe, is that moulding ourselves to fit a system designed without our bodies, our wants or our priorities in mind can do us harm. It does do harm to women the world over, every day. Being forced to delay children until our 30s and 40s in order to establish successful careers is harmful. Being denied educational and professional opportunities if we choose to have children in our teens or 20s is harmful. All this analysis of feckless, fertile teen mums and desperate, over-achieving 40-somethings undergoing IVF sends one clear message and it is this:
You can’t win.
You can’t win because the perfect time to have a child, according to current advice, is in one’s mid-20s to early 30s. Unfortunately for us, that also happens to coincide with the prime years for establishing a career and moving up the ladder, or pursuing further education. Taking long ‘career breaks’ (because, as we know, having and raising children is not considered ‘real work’), even if short-term, harms our long-term financial and professional potential. Women who take career breaks at this time in their lives rarely end up in senior positions, earning as much and on the same par with similarly-aged male colleagues. If we want to have even a chance at joining their ranks we have two choices — don’t have children for another 10-15 years (or at all) or have children but get back to work quickly by placing them in care, the provision and management of which will be made preposterously difficult given the restrictions of the working environment.
Each of these ‘choices’, of course, has negative consequences. Risking infertility or having to pay someone else most of your salary to care for your child in the first years of its life are not ideal options, though they are the ones we have to live with in the here and now. Without truly flexible academic and professional accommodation and without access to affordable, quality childcare and meaningful, fairly-waged part-time work, we are getting nowhere. Giving dads a bit more paternity leave or giving mums a bit more money for their leave, while a nice gesture, is pointless in the end. It’s an adhesive, cartoon-faced bandage for a gaping, bleeding shotgun wound of a problem. No matter how many smiley-faced plasters we stick on it, the wound will ooze and fester without first extracting all of the detritus and cleaning it up. Putting superficial fixes on a wound of this size only masks the rotting infection underneath.
Eventually, the infection will spread and what little good the bandages did will be for nothing. We will be pushed out of the workplace again, unable to operate within the male-structured system, or continue to rely on luck and technology to have children later in life. The poor, the working class and even much of the middle class (i.e. most women), for whom talk of career breaks and IVF isn’t even relevant or possible, will continue to have children at their reproductive peak and be punished for it by being priced out of decent housing, higher education and training, and quality childcare. They will also continue to have the blame for perceived societal breakdown lain at their feet, convenient scapegoats for a system that set them (and all of us, including our children) up to fail.
I am not being dramatic at all when I say we need radical, revolutionary change. Asking the men behind the curtain very nicely and calmly if we can have this or that concession, only to see if taken away again with budget cuts that deem “women’s issues” unimportant in comparison with military spending or lining bankers’ pockets has proven ineffective. The overwhelmingly white, male, middle-class parliamentarians will pay lip service to equality and fairness, sure. They’re not stupid and know they need our votes. I’m sure many of them do know the system is unfair and would like to change it. But when push comes to shove, people protect themselves, their own families and their own jobs and interests first, we know that. We all know who is doing the shoving and who will be shoved. An increasingly hostile, ‘anti-PC’ segment of the public who feel threatened by challenges to their long-standing privileges also contributes to this climate of intolerance, narrow-mindedness and unwillingness to change on any substantial level.
No one is giving anything to us. Wringing our hands and writing moving essays or angry blog posts is not enough. As far as I’m concerned, it’s time for battle and we need more soldiers. I’ve had enough. And though I understand completely that not everyone feels so passionately about it, or thinks we can actually change anything, or even has the desire to, I can’t help but feel completely, helplessly angry when I know that if we really could get a million women to rise, we’d finally be noticed. If, like our sisters of the first and second waves have done before us, we sat down, refused to move, refused to accept the status quo or meek little promises of incremental change, we would be an undeniable force to be reckoned with. We are 52 per cent of the population. We vote. We live here. We matter. And I, for one, am tired of playing it down and carefully explaining and ‘being reasonable’ and keeping my voice down.
I’m fucking angry and I want you to be too.
Getting it
21
When it comes to the ways in which parents and children are discriminated against and why those discriminations are inherently anti-woman, some people just don’t get it. Kate Harding, it seems, is one of those people.
She is one of the people to whom some feminist mothers may point when discussing the (sometimes pleasantly unnoticeable, sometimes seemingly insurmountable) divide between those who have had children and those who haven’t. She is someone who I personally agree with on many feminist issues but often, when it comes to a topic relating to parenting (usually concerning parenting in public), I find myself defensively reaching for that old cliché: “You couldn’t possibly understand, you don’t have children.” Whilst I dislike that line and think it is mainly unhelpful in a goal of creating positive discourse, there are times when its use is tempting when engaging with (or reading) someone who is just so not…getting it.
Just as I’m sure attempting to explain the realities of race or class inequities and pressures to someone who has not lived through them can feel quite frustrating and fruitless, so too can reading and responding to commentary that comes across as ignorant, insensitive and hypocritical from an otherwise smart, savvy and progressive woman.
Take, for example, Harding’s latest article on Salon’s Broadsheet, which was written in response to film director Kevin Smith being kicked off a Southwest Airlines flight because he was deemed too large for a single seat and hadn’t purchased two, in accordance with Southwest’s ‘person-of-size’ policy. As a fat-acceptance activist on another popular site, Harding took issue with this and linked the incident with the general air of hostility and hostility-disguised-as-concern aimed at fat people in public. Her impassioned, well-written piece shows how important this issue is to her, and many others.
But as I read her post, I couldn’t help but see extremely similar parallels between what she was railing against and what she herself had written just a few months ago in an article entitled ‘Screaming Toddlers on a Plane!’ In it, she discussed the removal of a two-year-old child and his mother from an airplane for the child’s ‘disruptive behaviour’ (which consisted of excitedly shouting “Go plane, go!” and “I want Daddy!”). While she expressed “sympathy” for parents flying with toddlers, she went on to admonish us to at least try to ‘control’ them. Because if she couldn’t see that we were ‘trying’ hard enough? She “reserve[s] the right to smugly judge [us], damnit.”
Essentially, she supports the idea that if a child cannot conform to social and behavioural norms and if its parents/carers do not actively take steps to ensure the comfort of others around them or at least apologise profusely for inconveniencing them (even if said ‘annoying’ behaviours are completely age-appropriate and nothing can really be ‘done’ about them, short of violence) she agrees that that child, and subsequently those with him/her, should be removed. At the very least, she reserves the right to express her disdain for what she perceives as the parents’ failings. Openly.
Yet, here she is in this instance, angry as all get-out that anyone would dare try to prioritize the comfort of other passengers over one person’s right to exist, or allow a long-held prejudice against a vulnerable group of people (who may or may not have any control over their ‘condition’) to be voiced. The collective disgust at the lack of ‘control’ a fat person or excitable child is seen to be exhibiting; the ways in which society seeks to punish those who encroach on our space or do not adhere to what is defined as normal or acceptable; the arrogance and privilege displayed by those who feel it is their right to criticise and complain when they are inconvenienced in any way by someone they don’t view as worthy of respect…can she, and others, really not see the ways in which fat-bashing (and other forms of intolerance) follows similar patterns to child/parent-bashing?
Now, Ruth at Look Left of the Pleiades has already drawn attention to the ways in which fat-acceptance is similar to child/parent-acceptance so I won’t repeat her many, many good points and analogies here, but I urge you to go read her post and then come back. Because I want to demonstrate why Harding’s perceptions of and attitudes towards children and parents in public are as harmful as the perceptions of and attitudes towards larger people that she so passionately disputes in her latest article and why this kind of disconnect contributes to the perpetuation of a ‘divide’ between feminist parents and childless feminists, as it does between those who are of ‘acceptable’ body size and those who aren’t.
Let’s start here, from the Kevin Smith article:
Perhaps they [those who complain about sitting next to large people] even had the special misfortune of sitting next to a rude fat person, the kind who doesn’t even seem contrite about infringing on someone else’s severely restricted personal space…There’s no shortage of rude people of all sizes, but it seems like everyone’s got a story about that whale who made a two-hour or three-hour or even five-hour flight pure hell for the adjacent paying customers.
Just like how everyone has a story of a screaming baby or toddler making their flight pure hell, huh? And, like, the freakin’ parents didn’t even APOLOGISE, can you believe it?!
From the ‘Toddler’ article:
I also believe, however, that unless he has special needs that make public screaming both more likely and far more difficult to end, a toddler hollering in a closed space for a prolonged period about something other than physical pain is very unlikely to evoke much sympathy. And the adult in charge has a responsibility to try to calm him and reinforce that this is inappropriate public behavior.
Reinforce that this is inappropriate public behaviour?! To a two-year-old who is stuck on a plane and is probably hungry, thirsty, scared, uncomfortable, bored or all of the above?! That is at least as laughable and useless to parents as “Just eat less and exercise more” probably is to severely overweight people. I’m also not keen on how Harding sets conditions on her sympathy: “If you do x and y, I’ll put up with you. But if I don’t think you ‘tried hard enough? I reserve my right to judge you and have you ejected.” Eerily similar to the conditions often placed upon sympathy for fat people: only if they are actively trying to minimise their mass and stay out of thin people’s way are they allowed any.
See, those of us who are and/or love people to whom airlines’ “person of size policies” apply don’t automatically envision the discomfort of getting stuck next to a fatty; we envision the physical and emotional pain of being the fatty crammed between two potentially hostile strangers, at the mercy of flight attendants who might decide we’re fine on one flight and a “safety risk” on the next.
I don’t automatically envision the discomfort of the people around me if my child cries on an airplane either, though I am all too well aware of the disapproval. My first duty is to my children and their well-being, not the flight enjoyment of those surrounding us. I do my best to minimise noise and disturbance but if, like what happened to me the last time I flew, my child is crying and howling because she was woken (in the middle of the night according to her body clock) by the flight attendant and made to sit back up and put on her seatbelt, I’m not going to care two jots if the people around me are put out. They might think I’m ‘doing nothing’ by simply sitting there with a hand on her shoulder, waiting for the upset to pass, but what they don’t know is that if I had kept shushing and fussing and cajoling, the wails would have undoubtedly gotten even louder. Funnily enough, some parents know their kids better than perfect strangers and what appears to be ‘ignoring’ to an outsider is actually preventing things from escalating further. The stares, the mutters, the annoyed glances, the outright commands to “shut that kid up”…these make for a pretty tense flying situation too. I would expect someone who has endured the same but for body size to be a bit more sympathetic to the enormous strain and embarrassment this causes the concerned party.
…the risk of smaller-scale humiliations — sitting next to someone who complains about their size; absorbing flight attendants’ naked disdain; overhearing someone say “I hope I don’t have to sit next to her”; being told, as Smith’s seatmate on his later flight was, that they should really purchase two seats in the future to avoid making other people uncomfortable; plus the aforementioned dirty looks and heavy sighs — is often enough to keep them at home.
Yep, know that feeling too. One man, on approaching his seat across the aisle from me and my six-month-old daughter, who was happily smiling and looking around, commented very loudly to his wife, “Oh great, we’re sitting next to a baby. See if we can change seats when the flight attendant comes by.” When they weren’t able to change seats, many heavy sighs and dirty looks ensued for the duration of the flight whenever my daughter made so much as a peep. I remember sitting there, tears silently coursing down my cheeks, as I held my finally-asleep baby — unable to move, go to the bathroom, eat, drink or read for fear of waking her and invoking the wrath of that horrid man. It made me forever fearful of the reactions of people around me and made me question whether I was the selfish one for wanting to go visit my family.
In the last paragraph of the Kevin Smith piece, Harding’s emotions come to the surface. Her rage at the lack of human decency and understanding becomes apparent and she says:
And I read comments from lots of people who are less openly hateful, but still think that fat people should buy two seats or lose weight or stay home — not that the airline has any responsibility to, say, ensure that adequate seating is available for everyone or treat people of all sizes like equal (not to mention individual) human beings — and you know what I think? Forgive me, but sometimes there’s no other way to say it: Fuck you. That’s what I think.
Sing it, sister! I agree with you 100%. I too wish that airplanes (and many other public spaces) were more accommodating of larger people, those with disabilities, families…the way most things are modelled on one body and type and under the assumption that one is travelling alone is very frustrating. I just wish you could apply those same strong feelings about accepting our bodies for what they are to accepting children and the nature of parenting for what they are. I wish you could be open-minded enough to know that even if you never experience parenting first-hand, it is something that you share a common bond with; that you (and all people) have a vested interest in making parents and children feel more welcome and included in our society, not ostracised. Those who were unaccepted for what they were as children can become the very people you struggle against now — the rigid, the selfish, the unkind. Setting out prescriptive behaviours and expectations for one group of people according to how their presence impacts others, not according to what is best or appropriate for them, is exactly what feminism (and fat-acceptance) strives to eradicate.
Just as you don’t want to be judged for your size, nor do we want to be judged for our reproductive and parenting choices, especially by those who haven’t walked a yard in our shoes, let alone a mile. In a homogenized world, I suppose everyone would be thin, every child would sit quietly and every parent would happily and healthily manage to work and bring up their children. But we don’t live in that world nor would any of us want to, I imagine.
As feminists, we celebrate diversity, challenge privilege and patriarchy and constantly question our own prejudices in order to grow and become better allies to those on the outside who need our help most. We mind our language, respect those with different needs, backgrounds and experiences from us and know when to say “I haven’t lived that. Tell me how I can stand with you and help you battle these injustices.”
In order to do that we need to become invested in fights that are not our ‘own,’ look for connections and similarities instead of divergences and dissimilarities. We need a feminism that ‘gets it’, or at least tries to. Not just about fat, not just about kids, but all of it. Because if we can’t support these basic tenets, and each other, what hope do we have of changing anything at all?
The chicken or the egg: Paternity leave and gender roles
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So as you probably didn’t hear (because I’ve not seen it covered anywhere within the feminist blogosphere – sigh – and only given marginal press within mainstream media), Labour announced a couple days ago quite radical changes to the maternity and paternity leave laws, which will apply to children due on or after 3 April 2011 (provided they win the next general election).
Right now in the UK, a woman who gives birth to or adopts a child while in paid employment* is entitled to nine months’ paid maternity leave (most of which is on the Statutory Maternity Pay (SMP) of £123.06 per week; only the first six weeks is paid at 90% of one’s regular salary) and then three further months unpaid, with her partner being eligible for two weeks’ paid paternity leave, also paid at the SMP rate. Some employers pay more on top of that but many don’t so it can be assumed that this is what the majority of employees who take maternity or paternity leave will earn.
The proposed changes would give a woman the option of returning to work after six months, transferring the remaining three months of paid leave over to her partner. Her partner would then have the option of taking a further three months’ leave from his or her** job, unpaid. The total leave would still amount to 12 months (9 paid, 3 unpaid) but would be more easily split between them. In theory, this would give female breadwinners and those who would like to return to work after six months the ability to go back sooner without having to put their babies into non-familial care. It would also give men who earn less than their partners or who want to be more involved in their child’s care in the first year an opportunity to stay at home for 3-6 months without losing their jobs.
That’s the bare-bones of it and how it’s laid out on paper. However, whether and how it is taken up in practise is another matter entirely. Let’s run this through a reality check.
First, let’s look at the various combinations that could be employed with this new legislation. One reality is that some women won’t be able to afford being on the SMP rate at all (a more likely situation for single mums) and so will return to work even sooner than six months. This change does not help her at all, sadly. Another likely scenario for many people will be for the mother to stay at home for the full nine months until the unpaid portion of leave kicks in, which she may or may not take depending on the family’s circumstances. This may be due to personal choice, social conditioning/pressure or practical reasons (such as financial concerns or breastfeeding).
But a woman who takes her six months’ leave and then decides to return to work after this period of time (because she is the higher earner or because her income, though less than her partner’s, is needed, or simply because she wants to) now has the option of putting her 5-6 month-old baby into care or transferring the remainder of her leave entitlement over to her partner (if she has one). In families where it is financially possible for the father to take a 3-6 month financial hit after the mother already has as well, without any severe consequences, this is potentially great news. But in a family where unpaid or reduced-pay leave for the father (even for ‘only’ three months) is not an option, does it seem likely that the male partner will be willing or able to take over the childcare duties for those three months? Will he even want to? Or will it “make more sense” for the woman to stay at home for the three remaining ‘paid’ months, as she has done for the previous six, especially if she is paid less, is breastfeeding and/or already has a daily routine and support system in place?
Though I do think that there are certainly couples out there in which the woman either needs or wants to return to work after six months and the father would be willing, perhaps even eager, to be the sole care provider for his child for at least three months, I don’t think as many men will take it up as one might expect or hope. First, there is the social stigma to deal with. A man wanting to look after his baby in theory faces the reality of having to ask for the leave from his employer and then explain to his colleagues why he will be gone. For most men, caring for children is still widely viewed as ‘women’s work’ and taking on a role almost exclusively performed by women can be viewed as a threat to his status, both socially and professionally; if not by him then certainly by at least some of his peers.
A man who looks after his children is often viewed as a bumbling, inept ‘helper’ to the mother, doing her a favour or humouring her for the sake of the ‘easy life’. Fathers I’ve spoken to (including my own husband) have told me of the times they’ve taken their children out in public without the mother present and gotten comments about how great he is for “taking them off mum’s hands,” or “giving mum the day off” as if that’s the only reason he would be solely responsible for them — as a favour to his wife or partner. Heaven forbid he actually wants and is able to look after them by himself! Some dads even report being asked if they’re divorced and on a ‘weekend pass’ with their children.
The social conditioning that men (and all of us) have been subject to sends the strong message that fathers are the second-string, the back-up team, only needed when mum isn’t around for some (usually selfish) reason. Even then, fathers aren’t expected to perform as well at parenting as their female counterparts. I’ve heard many a story of other women rushing in to offer to make a cake for a single dad who is supposed to contribute to the school’s bake sale, or telling a stay-at-home dad that he doesn’t have to take part in the snack rota at playgroup because he “has his hands full already.” The message to men, from all sides, is that parenting is not really their area of expertise (or at least, combining parenting with household responsibilities isn’t) and that just keeping the children alive and fed and the house standing is all that is expected of them.
The second hurdle in encouraging men to take this option is financial. If a man is the higher earner (as is the case in the majority of partnerships), it will be much more difficult and sometimes even impossible for him to collect SMP wages instead of his normal salary. Of the small proportion of families who would be able to do this, few within that group would be able to function without any income at all on his part, if he were to take the final three months unpaid. It isn’t clear from the wording of the new legislation but I’ve read from other sources that if a couple wants the father to take his three months at SMP but cannot afford for him to take the final three months unpaid, they lose the option for the mother to take it, effectively shortening their total entitlement to just nine months instead of twelve. This is supposedly to encourage more fathers to take at least their three months at SMP.
Again, it sounds good in theory, giving a bit of incentive for men to take the paternity leave they are entitled to, but I remain doubtful that the incentives will be enough to overcome the social and financial hurdles that a lengthened paternity leave presents. Until the social stigma of men caring for children and performing domestic duties is broken and until women receive equal pay and opportunities at work, free from gender discrimination, paternity leave and maternity leave will remain quick fixes for a much wider, more complex problem that is endemic in our society.
**Paternity leave applies to female partners of women who give birth or adopt but for the sake of simplicity and because heterosexual relationships that produce children are more prevalent, I will be using ‘he’ to signify the partners of new mothers
The name change game
22
Everyone knows that you have to pick and choose your battles. Not every single fight can be fought by one person, at least not without compromising one’s mental health, and perhaps even physical health, with all that bashing of heads against brick walls and whatnot.
So it was that I found myself, while eight months pregnant with my first child, changing my surname to my husband’s; something I hadn’t done when we got married six years previously and that I hadn’t envisaged doing at all. The feminist voice inside me screamed but I shut her up by telling myself that it wasn’t that big a deal, really; that I was only changing it from one man’s name (my father’s) to another and that the tradition had roots too far entrenched in society for my stance to make much of a difference. But mostly, I was just tired. I was tired (already) of having this conversation with people:
“So, will Mr. D (my surname) be attending the next scan with you?”
“Yes but he’s not Mr. D, he’s Mr. R.”
“Oh, I see, I’m sorry. I thought you were married.”
“We are but I didn’t change my name.”
“Oh. Okay. So what surname will the baby have?”
“Um, his I guess.”
“Oh.”
It wasn’t that I thought he or she was being judgmental of the fact I hadn’t changed my name or that I was embarrassed to be mistaken for an unmarried mother, but something bothered me nonetheless.
I had endured a rather painful pregnancy, with SPD so bad that I had trouble sitting still for any period of time and could often be found on my hands and knees underneath my desk at work, rocking back and forth in agony trying not to cry. Spasms of pain leapt through my back and wrapped themselves around my vertebrae like the fingers of hot lightning that streak violently through the summer sky during an electrical storm. It felt as if my pelvis were the good-luck wishbone at a turkey feast, being pulled apart with feverish abandon. I couldn’t walk anywhere without a support belt on and even then it was difficult. Needless to say, I had a pretty miserable third trimester.
So when I thought about going through all that pain (not to mention labour!), upheaval and life-changing craziness and then not even getting to share my name with the baby I’d helped create and solely incubated, sustained and birthed…well, it made me quite upset, actually. I knew that, rationally and intellectually, it was just a name and shouldn’t matter what anyone else thinks or what social conventions dictate, but the desire to be a full part of this little family I was creating and not feel like an outsider or in any way detached or different from my little girl was very strong. So strong, in fact, that I gave up on trying to convince my husband to adopt a double-barrelled name with me (he’d grown up with one and hated it so much that he’d officially dropped the second part when he was a teenager) and decided to just take on his. At the time, I had no patience for anything I construed as complicated or a pain in the ass and this was one way to simplify things.
My husband never asked me to do this for him, by the way; it was all my own anxieties and the pressure that I was feeling to conform and be a ‘good mother’ and a ‘good wife’ by the messages all around me, every day, about what that entails. I bought into the idea that not submitting to this tradition would cause more difficulties for myself and confusion for my children than it was worth. And now, almost four years later, I can say that it has and it hasn’t. There hasn’t been any name confusion, certainly. All four of us have the same last name and it is admittedly quite convenient to just jot down ‘The R___ Family’ instead of listing all of the variations. I don’t get misaddressed forms and Christmas cards and paperwork is pretty straightforward.
But that feminist voice inside my head has never stopped whispering “Why’d you do it? Was your reason really good enough? What kind of example are you setting by bucking so many sexist traditions and gender roles but embracing this one without much of a fight? You’re not you any more, you’re somebody’s WIFE.” Sometimes I let that voice get to me and at others, I leave that inner battle well enough alone, content that I’ve made my choice and that there’s no going back now. Let that be someone else’s Waterloo, I say.
Still, I wish women didn’t have to make this decision at all as it brings so many questions of identity to the surface. If by not changing our names we are making some kind of political statement of independence, does that mean that if we do change our names we’ve willingly given up a part of ourselves just for the ease of form-filling and avoiding awkward social situations? Does that make me a (gulp) conformist?
What has been your experience with name-changing after marriage, if that’s an institution you’re involved in? If you aren’t married, have you had any problems with the name presumptions, especially if you have children? Do you ever regret your decision?