A little while ago, in the depths of a phase of baby sleeplessness, I bumped into an acquaintance at the supermarket. She had had a baby not long after I had, but, with one thing and another, I had not seen her since we had both given birth. Unlike me, she was not shopping with a grumpy baby in tow. Unlike me, she had returned to work two days a week. Unlike me, she had family around to help her out with the childcare. And, unlike me, she didn’t look completely knackered (although I’m sure she was, since it goes with the territory).
Breezily, she asked after the baby - mistaking her for a boy - and how old he was. Then, without really waiting for an answer, she told me how she was getting on, how she was really enjoying being back at work - ‘because it’s something for me’ - and how her mother-in-law was looking after the baby - ‘it’s so lovely to see them developing such a close bond.’ Continuing in this vein for a while, she wound up her monologue with the the exclamation, ‘I just don’t know where the time goes!” Before I had a chance to summon up enough energy to strangle her, she said ‘well, I better be off. So much to do,’ and left.
It felt somewhat like a drive-by: while I was struggling to do much of anything, I encountered the one woman who apparently was managing to do it all. Her ‘my life is so great’ speech lodged itself somewhere in the recesses of my brain to be taken out and reflected on at a more suitable time. Seeing as there never is a more suitable time, now will have to do.
The comment that struck me most about what she’d said was not how much she was enjoying work nor how wonderful it was that she had family on tap to look after her baby. Rather, it was the cliche, ‘I just don’t know where the time goes.’ My sluggish mental response to that would’ve been something along the lines of ‘really? I spend all my days breastfeeding, dressing the baby, changing nappies, doing laundry, cooking food, cajoling the baby to eat the food, washing the dishes, trying to settle the baby to sleep, and then starting all over again. It’s like Groundhog Day, only without Punxsutawney Phil’. Instead, coward that I am, I just gave a weak laugh and said ‘mmm’.
The incident got me thinking about an early classic of second-wave feminism, namely, Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique. Written at the end of the 1950s, Friedan reports on a ‘problem with no name’ besetting affluent suburban housewives, many of whom had had a university education before getting married and having children. Unlike their mothers, who had gone out to work during the second world war, these women did not ‘remember painfully’ giving up their dreams of having a career, and were peachy keen to settle into their mommy roles. Even despite this, Friedan traced a malaise among them. Freed of a lot of domestic drudgery, thanks to the advent of labour-saving devices, Friedan described these women as experiencing:
a strange stirring, a sense of dissatisfaction, a yearning that women suffered in the middle of the twentieth century in the United States. Each suburban wife struggled with it alone. As she made the beds, shopped for groceries, matched slipcover material, ate peanut butter sandwiches with her children, chauffeured Cub Scouts and Brownies, lay beside her husband at night--she was afraid to ask even of herself the silent question--"Is this all?"
I think there’s still something in this, particularly as the wider culture is encouraging women (well, middle class women anyway) to once again re-embrace their ‘natural’ mothering role. Whether it’s the exhortation to breastfeed and exprience natural childbirth - things Friedan also identified - or use cloth nappies, make home-made food, and sew hand-made clothes. Not only this, but there seems to be an article every other day in the newspapers castigating older mothers - usually ones who have had something of a career - for all their failings biological (‘your baby will have birth defects!’) and nurturing (‘you’ll have died of old age when your child still needs you!’). While statistics show that mothers in New Zealand are, on average, getting older, the message still seems to be that it’s best to have babies young, and devote your life to them.
But, way back in 1959, Friedan was warning against this devotion to the ideal of the domestic goddess. She considered that resolving the ‘problem with no name’ was the ‘key to our future as a nation and a culture. We can no longer ignore that voice within women that says: "I want something more than my husband and my children and my home."’
Trying to do the right thing before my baby was born, I chose to take eighteen months off work. I met with much approval for this; many women told me ‘you never get those early years back.’ I’m still glad that I have taken the time off, but I do find myself getting bored. It’s hard to get much intellectual stimulation from cooking cheese sauce, changing nappies, and reading Maisy Likes Driving for the umpteenth time. Like a latter-day Prufrock, I feel like I’m measuring out my life with soft plastic baby spoons. Far from not knowing were the time goes, some days I can feel every single nano-second drag by. This is not to say that I don’t enjoy time with the baby, just that it would be nice to feel intellectually challenged and vaguely productive in a non-mummy sense once in a while. Oh, and earn my own income too.
I’d venture to speculate that my acquaintance’s balancing of some work, with some baby time, plus a childcare arrangement she felt comfortable with, meant that she had little time to count the hours. As for me? I’ve forgone the dubious pleasures of Valium and cooking sherry to which bored suburban mummies of yesteryear turned, and discovered blogging on the internet instead. It's cheaper and the hangover is not nearly as bad.
