When my 15-year-old daughter recently announced to me that she wants to be a housewife when she grows up, I got a bit of a shock. Whatever task I was doing was put aside; it was a bit of a bombshell to drop on a Saturday afternoon.
60 years ago, of course, this would not have been a strange ambition nor a bombshell. In fact, for most women, this would have been their lot in life, and a very happy, fulfilling and no-questions-asked one at that. I have always struggled with the notion of being a housewife, but there is no getting away from the fact that I am one.
When I was younger, I was very ambitious and wanted to run my own travel agency or be a spy. I spent hours playing shop and thought I would be brilliant at running my own business. Little did I know that I would end up as a hare-brained mother and writer, a far cry from my organised eight-year-old tidy self.
I remember thinking that I didn’t necessarily want lots of children as life looked too messy both physically and metaphorically in this precarious camp. To my younger self it looked too expensive, both in terms of time and money, caused too much stress and put people in a position that looked as if they couldn’t cope. Inwardly I shuddered, thinking that becoming a mother was not my preferred course of action at all.
I will add here that at this point I was only about 10 or 12 years old and not yet a Catholic. I will also add at this point that a family with lots of young children also looked appealing and charming to me, also seemed mired with too much risk. Childbirth was unpredictable, so was a successful marriage. And what about those women who suffered the heartbreak of miscarriage or post-natal depression, and we haven’t even touched on finances — that scared the living day-lights out of me. I wasn’t stupid, I knew raising children was expensive. To my younger self, it all looked too risky.
I write part-time, yes, but there is no way I could do any sort of 9–5 job outside the home. Recently, I looked into teacher training as I hold a degree in Modern Languages and apparently there is a chronic shortage of them in this country. Besides, I thought it might be more wholesome than freelance writing (this publication aside of course).
After I submitted my application, I received two invitations for interviews. At first this was very exciting, until I looked into the hours, which were 8am to 5pm with no flexibility. Surely for parents who have other children’s school runs to organise this made no sense. I could probably put my children in the breakfast club as they would be excited about the prospect of lashings of waffles and chocolate sauce, but if I made them go to an after-school club until 5pm each day they would have something to say about it.
Technically, I could “man up” and put them in this club, but my youngest child has only just turned six and I want to pick him up myself, not to mention my 10-year-old daughter. I don’t think my son would like the after-school club very much and my older children need picking up at 3:45pm so the whole idea was a non-starter.
When I told my 15-year-old about the teacher training, she laughed. “What would you want to do that for?” she asked me. “You’ve got enough on your plate.”
I found myself feeling grateful that all my concerns when I was growing up never came to anything. I have five children, and my husband and I are about to celebrate 20 years of marriage. I am not saying that having lots of children or being married has been easy — it hasn't — but I feel very fortunate that I have not had to put them all in day care and do a daily commute.
I also feel very grateful that my physical and mental health as a parent have, on the whole, been good. So yesterday when my 13-year-old daughter also announced that she wanted to be a housewife, I looked her in the eye, smiled and tried to give it validation.
Photo: Template sketch trend artwork 3D photo collage of young woman housewife confused face display hand hold huge half lemon fruit citric acid. (Deagreez iStock)
