19/30: resources and support - women’s work both paid and unpaid (part 2)
Mum and me, caring and creation, and choosing yourself in midlife
My mum, Carole, was the first member of her family to go to university, benefitting from having passed the eleven-plus and gone to grammar school. She got married at 19, part way through her degree, but by the 1970s this didn’t mean she was expected to give up her studies to become a homemaker. After university, she became a secondary school teacher in Brighton.
Carole and her first husband divorced in the mid-70s and soon afterwards she met my dad, who was also a secondary school teacher. They married in 1980 and I was born eighteen months later. Mum stopped working when I was born, though she intended to return to her job when I was a toddler. Before she could do so however, my dad successfully applied for a teaching job in North Wales, a promotion, and the three of us moved north.
With the loss of her existing network of friends and acquaintances, including the childminder she had planned to place me with, Mum postponed her return to paid employment. I think she intended to apply for part-time teaching jobs once I started primary school, but shortly before I did so she became pregnant with my younger brother. There’s a five year age gap between us, and I’ve wondered whether my parents experienced some degree of secondary infertility (difficulty in conceiving a second child), but again never asked Mum directly about this. So she remained a ‘stay at home mum’, caring for her children and keeping house much as her own mother had done thirty years before.
By the time my brother reached toddlerhood, Mum was starting to explore different types of part-time self-employment. She was an Usborne bookseller for a number of years, which I thought was the best thing ever because it meant a never ending supply of interesting books passing through our house and the ability to buy them at discounted prices. She also marked GCSE exam papers for part of every summer. Finally, she settled on yoga teaching, completing her training as an Iyengar yoga teacher in the early 90s. She taught mostly in the evenings and mornings, making sure she was at home when my brother and I returned from school.
I followed my parents’ example and went to university immediately after my finishing my A-levels. I stayed a student for as long as possible, not sure what I wanted to be when I grew up, rolling the dice and applying for funding to do a postgraduate degree, and then another. Finally, I got my first full-time job in my mid 20s, entering the exciting world of working 9-5, commuting by train to a different city, and learning how to do office politics. My then boyfriend was still a student at that point, graduating a few years after me. Around that time we talked about having children and made a deal.
Essentially, the deal was that we’d draw on our strengths to support any family we might one day create. I’d found my feet in 9-5 paid employment, enjoying the regular monthly income and the ability to put it all down at the end of the working day or week. I liked being able to separate work-me from true-me, to have clear expectations around what I should be focussing on at different times of the day or week. My boyfriend was coming to the end of ten years in art school and fairly confident that he would find no such even keel in a 9-5 job, or even be able to secure such a job. So the deal was that I would be the main breadwinner while he would try to establish a freelance career based around his creative skills and practice.
We’ve effectively reversed the way my parents split the financial load of supporting a family: I provide the steady monthly income while my husband’s earnings supplement this. By and large, it works well. Though increasingly I’m finding myself identifying strongly with my dad’s experience of feeling trapped in a job he sometimes found stifling. I sometimes envy my husband and my mum’s ability to create their own businesses, built around their skills and preferred ways of working. I recognise that they were able to do so in part because of the financial safety net provided by mine and my dad’s regular incomes.
Perhaps my frequent frustration with my job is part of the reassessment of your life and the choices that comes with midlife. An itchy restless feeling that asks whether that is all there is, whether I’ll be doing this job until I retire, whether I’ll end up bitter and regretful. So here I am, making a choice to commit to writing. It’s something I’ve loved to do since I was a child. It’s the answer I might have given to the question ‘what do you want to do when you grow up?’ if I ever thought it was an available option. Because if not now, then when?
My resources are finite. I don’t have infinite time. I am choosing to put some of my time and space and money into writing. And it feels good, but it also feels scary. Now that I’ve allowed myself to write, I want to be writing all the time. My other responsibilities feel like they’re hemming me in, taking too much of my time and space. There’s a growing conflict between the needs and wants of writer-me and mother-me, provider-for-my-family-me.
If both my husband and I are pursuing creative practices, work that demands a different kind of attention, that can so easily fill up all the pockets of free time in your mind and your life, then who will keep the wheels turning? If I want to take my writing seriously, then we will need to reassess and renegotiate how our family life works. And that scares me, because there’s no way of knowing if me making this commitment to writing is worth the upheaval it will cause.
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