A Labour of Life

It is …

(these 2 words were as many as I was able to write without being interrupted by my children. What does it take for a mother to work? In this article I’m going to show what it took for me, the most accommodated mother I know. Rather than adhere to the prevailing demand on mothers, particularly working mothers, to pretend their children are not there, and to be closet mothers, instead I will write in my children whenever they stop me from working. It won’t be sequential because of redrafting. Here the interruption was Hattie, my 3 and a half-year-old, finishing on the toilet, wanting me wipe her bottom, help her into her bath and give her the orange duck).

As I was saying … it is … an uncanny feeling to write on a subject – loosely the political conditions of mothering — on which I have been trained, as a women’s studies post-graduate, without any of the bells and whistles I am accustomed to falling back on.

(Hattie is crying because the bath is cold, her head is ‘wibbly’ and she doesn’t want the duck anymore).

On the subject of Mothering I cannot be objective. As I write I am immersed. My hands even have suds on them.

(My partner is getting Hattie out the bath, but she is insisting that Mummy gets her out, I have dried her but she won’t let me put her pyjamas on. My partner is now changing Faith who is 8 months old).

By my bedside there are handouts from forums on maternity leave, not to mention books, from Jane Lazarre’s The Maternal Knot, to Susan Maushart’s The Mask of Motherhood, which I have not found time to read.

(Hattie is telling me, in no uncertain terms, about the heffalump having one trunk and that I therefore have to put the trunk back on her red hairband. I have no idea what she is talking about)

I cannot refer to my own notes from these forums, because my baby was on my lap wrestling me for the pen. I have no statistics, no research, no thesis. There is no fancy ‘textual analysis’ in what follows, it is simply the narrative of a mother trying to work.

(An alarming thump has come from Hattie’s room and a muffled yelp, on investigation Hattie has upended her bedding and told me to go to sleep)

If the experience of mothering has made manifest one feminist mantra for me, it is that the personal is political. Behind the closed doors of domesticity I have also realised that the personal cannot have political force until it is made public. I humbly enter another confessional onto the crowded ‘reality’ stage of real lives seeking absolution …

Let me begin by confessing that I am the most ‘privileged’ mother I know.

(Hattie tells me she will need her dressing gown and slippers when she takes her towel off. Faith has rolled under the chair and got her head stuck).

For a start I live in the west and I’m white. I belong to the 2% of the population that has adequate shelter, warmth and safe running water. I don’t walk for 6 hours a day to carry water. My children are not among the 75% of the 24,000 people who die of starvation related illnesses everyday. They have not been stolen from me, and sold into domestic service, or trafficked to Western paedophiles.

(Hattie informs me there is a lot of ‘insolence’ in the ‘orchstratra’)

They are not child labourers in bondage to western clothing manufacturers. I am not hoping and praying they won’t drown on a leaking fishing vessel. It has never occurred to me that their lives might be saved by fleeing our country.

(Hattie is asking ‘why was she was?’)

I am not dealing with traumatised toddlers at Woomera or Villawood and worrying about how their witnessing of and growing up under penal and disciplinary surveillance will impact on their self and world views.

(Hattie is rolling about behind me with my partner and having songs. Faith is too amused to notice she is stuck under a chair again, she nevertheless needs to be retrieved)

I am not trying to feed my family under Israeli curfew or sitting on the pile of bulldozed or shelled rubble that was once my home. I am not frightened everytime I stand with my children on a bustop. I’m not watching my children sniff petrol. And of all of these scenarios, most pressing on my mind, and most constant to my nightmares—I am not the mother of the 4 month old baby in Aceh, who died ‘some time after’, it was reported, an Indonesian soldier poured boiling water over her. I did not live the interval between the water being poured and my baby dying.

In addition to the good fortune of not mothering under any of the above conditions, I am tertiary educated.

(Hattie has hurt her finger, which I must kiss).

With a certain amount of wrangling, I commenced my career as a mother in the virtually unheard of position of not having to work. Instead, I battled tooth and nail, largely with my first child (to my ongoing guiltiness), to finish a protracted doctorate.

(Faith nearly pulled the propped up baby bath onto herself)

I could find excellent community-based occasional care and I was able to slowly settle my kids there (although my partner had to re-form its committee of management, after the previous committee imploded with exhaustion and despair, and over a year fend off the attempts by the local Council to close it). I have sisters with children around the same age to whinge over the phone with,

(Faith is now lying under the bath and Hattie needs me to listen to her appraisal of the situation).

My sexuality and marital status were never under question when I failed to conceive Faith for a year and was assisted by the reproductive unit at the Royal Women’s Hospital. The births of my daughters were both assisted by midwives in birthing centres in which I decided how much intervention, drugs and support I required. I was lucky enough to only brush with obstetricians twice throughout each pregnancy (which may be a very good indicator, in this technocratised age of birthing, as to why my births were so uncomplicated)

(Faith is crying, my partner is holding her … he, by the way, is reading work notes).

My partner is as supportive as he is able to be, given that he works 70 hours a week and when he is home he is effectively labouring in my workplace and needs as much guidance as I would if I turned up in his workplace and tried to keep it running.

On top of this extraordinary maternal serendipity, after Hattie was born a dear friend came and cooked me dinner once a week. My mother so wanted to help she was a bit miffed when I explained that I needed to know I could do it by myself first. I never suffered from mastitis, my babies fed well and slept as well as can be expected. I had access to a local maternal and infant welfare nurse whom I called on for advice. (Hattie is screeching in her bedroom) I had great books I could turn to for practical guidance and solace. My partner’s ex-wife handed me down a cot and pram (even if the wheels did fall off) and sisters and sisters-out-law bombarded me with highchairs, grow suits, bunny rugs and breast pads (Faith is crying, she is ready to be fed and bedded). My supermarket stocked organic baby food. I found a disposable nappy system that uses plantation pine instead of old growth forest. I could even go to the cry baby sessions at a nearby cinema, for crying out loud.

It gets better. Late in my second pregnancy a job fell into my lap that would not start until Faith was 6 months, and would prove to be the ideal workplace in terms of flexibility, breast feeding, consideration and acceptance of my being a mother.

(My partner is reading Hattie a story).

When I said I would find it difficult to leave Faith for 20 hours in the week, they offered me 2 days instead of 3.

(Hattie has a racking cough, and I’ve Vixed her chest)

When I first started, Faith slept in the office, I fed her there and colleagues nursed her when my hands were full, they even tip-toed around her and whispered when she was asleep.

(It’s time to sing Hattie her nighty-night songs).

I have been working any hours I choose and taking home work to make up hours.

(Here I fed Faith for half an hour and put her in her cot).

I have exercised every hard won choice available to Mothers. I also know that because women’s inclusion in the workforce was a hard won gain over a century, it is now sticking in our throats to give voice to the desire to be at home, to return, it seems to the domestic tyranny feminists fought so hard to liberate us from.

(Hattie has a fever. Faith, you’ll be relieved to read, has dropped off to sleep).

It is superfluous to say that my circumstance should not be considered privileged, but it should be considered the standard. The category worker has been modelled off men with wives. Women who mother are different, they are entitled for their differences to be accommodated. Men who attempt to contribute equally to childcare and the domestic load are finding that they are also different to the worker with wife. As Belinda Probert has said, there has not been a corresponding revolution in the home in the organisation of care as there has been in the labour market. Not only are mothers different, but there are differences amongst working mothers—mothers who’ve had caesars, mothers who are breastfeeding, mothers whose babies don’t sleep.

(Hattie’s fever has shot up, I’ve given her Panadol. As an aside, our household goes through periods when one of us comes down with a new infestation close to every week)

It is 4 days since I have been able to get back to writing. Hattie is at the co-op my partner managed to salvage with brilliant staff and an unflagging committee. I had to buy her spot back this morning having organised to pull her from Mondays for 2 weeks as an experiment to see if her having more time with me would make her any more bearable than she presently is. My partner and I were up until 2am arguing, futilely, about how to find the 4 hours of my job I couldn’t make up last week plus the 20 hours for this week, plus write this article [which was originally a conference paper] and give it, and edit another against deadline, and read an overdue manuscript, while he also prepares and gives a presentation on Tuesday, and supervises 16 adolescent boys on a overnight computer fest for his son’s birthday. I’ve read somewhere that the peak time for separation that leads to divorce is after the second child when the woman returns to work. And the principle reason is her feeling unsupported in the domestic sphere. The corrosive impact of the structural inequity that his workplace puts on our lives has, as I write, brought our relationship to the brink. We are both managing the excessive demands of our lives under a debilitating sense of alienation and sadness. I heard somewhere that a recent study found that couples with children talk an average 12 minutes a day to each other. Incidentally, I am yet to arrange the childcare this week for our relationship counselling. I find it alarming when my own life begins to mirror all the studies I read fleetingly while giving my kids their breakfast.

Faith is now in her cot. I had to let her cry herself to sleep so I could work … her cries pierced my brain like hot pokers and I am hoarse from cursing my too slow computer. Faith is awake again, but I can’t figure out how long she’s slept if at all, because I can’t fathom the time elapsed. Having sat down to make a start, I have to stop and most infuriatingly, find a way to actually kill time, until Faith sleeps again. Right at this moment I feel like I am sitting on blistering bitumen, between two carriageways of semi-trailors screaming past at high velocity. And I must get up and calmly reassure my baby.

I’ve decided to try and keep working, Faith is behind me on the floor jamming her fingers in a perspex box. I’ve fed her and it forced me to sit down. Faith gazed at my buttons and rings, reached up, tugged on my lip and gave me the impish look of a pirate. As she drank little puffs of baby breath opened around us like tiny coloured paper umbrellas. Her little chin shuddered, barely discernibly, between sucking. When we got up she fully contracted her little body into the curve of a crescent moon and gleefully dove into my neck, grabbed an ear and a handful of cheek and gummed my mouth. It is the simple, primal splendour of my children that restores me. The already everlasting fact of their own enmeshed and devoted relationship astounds me as much as their independently produced ear wax did after birth – these beings so unto themselves, busily going about the business of life, and showing me at every turn that business is primarily about beauty. It is the frantic attempts to work and keep my head just above the consuming sea of domestic grind that thieves the pleasures of my children from me. There isn’t the time to just watch them let alone marvel at them. And by sequestering our interactions onto one emotional plain, and rendering it the only level on which I feel, its pleasures are numbed. ‘I never thought I’d be a grumpy Mum’, a woman forlornly confessed to me in the playground. She had the look of a woman who had lost the conviction that her heart’s desire, having children, had in fact turned out to be desirable. Mother’s pass that muffled grimace of sympathy around in supermarkets, libraries, playgrounds.

So,

[Faith’s rolling out the door onto the stair landing]

the plan is to write the story of my going back to work, in the most—I’m not going to use ‘privileged’ anymore, perhaps ‘exemplary’— of circumstances. Let’s see how far I get.

(Faith has the phone cord in two hands and is about to pull it from the desk directly onto her head).

I thought knowing the job was coming up in 6 months meant that by the time I started I would have everything sorted.

(Faith is potentially dialling Alaska, by pounding her heels on the keys with the receiver in her hand).

I started with expressing, and trying to get Faith used to a bottle. The electric pump on loan from a neighbour could not extract a drop, so I bought a $90 hand pump. You can lead a baby to a bottle of expressed milk it seems, but you cannot make her drink. Being a baby, she’s not stupid. She knew a soft, perfectly temperatured, perfectly fitting nipple was lurking on the other side of my jumper and she would have none of it. Nor would she drink from the endless rounds of boiled bottles with her Father or my mother. I read Hattie Green Eggs and Ham (‘will you have it in a train, will you have it in the rain’) through increasingly gritted teeth.

Meanwhile, I had placed her on a waiting list for Wednesdays at Hattie’s co-op 6 months in advance.

(Isn’t Faith being good?)

As the weeks before my starting day approached I grew increasingly anxious. No Wednesday materialised. I went on hoping and failed to book her anywhere else. But since she was born I had been popping her in the cots, handing her over to carers and generally familiarising her with the centre and kids, and Hattie was there—I didn’t want to leave her anywhere else. With a dreadful feeling of guilt I arranged for my mother, now a full-time grandmother to 7 grandchildren—6 of them under 5— to get up a 5.30 am every Thursday and drive into Fitzroy in peak hour from Cottlesbridge, so I could then drive to St Kilda by 9am.

(Faith is grizzling, I’m typing one handed with her on my lap. I still can’t figure out if she’s had her sleep. My partner hasn’t come back from work, even though he’s on 2 weeks leave).

(It’s a few hours since I last worked, I walked around to the shops with the pram. The check-out operator told me I looked like I was about to explode when our card wouldn’t swipe. When I got home I changed Faith, fed her and put her in her cot. She screamed so I went back and let her drop off on the breast, which is a big no-no according to my infant welfare nurse and is ‘making a rod for my back’. Not as great a rod as pacing with her for 3 hours, and certainly a lot less cruel and stressful than leaving her to scream in high distress.)

Still, no Wednesday materialised. My partner arranged to go in to work late one morning a week, co-op agreed to have Faith until 11am when a regular child arrives late, my partner would then bring her over to St Kilda where I would feed her and stay at work if and for as long as she slept. This involved rejigging endless meetings for my partner with numerous colleagues who had to reschedule not only their weeks, but the time tables of hundreds of students. The ripples spread. The stresses fanned out, through countless lives. When I started, and still now, 10 weeks later, I have 20 hours work and 10 hours childcare. The childcare in my area is insufficient to meet demand, a number of centres have closed, and aside from 3 perpetually threatened community-run centres there is no diversity in the care⎯most of them resemble egg cartons.

2 weeks before starting I decided to do a couple of practice runs. On Wednesday my partner took both girls to co-op, armed with Hattie’s bag and blanket, Faith’s lambie and sling, 2 sachets of expressed milk (even though Faith still wouldn’t drink), one of 20 mls to try her, and another of 100mls in case she accepted the bottle, and a sterilised bottle. We settled her in and Hattie was so excited about having her sister there she forgot to kick up her customary stink (‘no one is allowed to ride Faith’, she solemnly advised the co-ordinator). I drove off to work having not allowed myself to feel any of the misgivings that tormented me when I first left Hattie.

(Faith is wailing. I’ve been and given her the breast again, purely for comfort, scandalous as that may be. She dropped off to sleep and I struggled not to).

The feeling I had scooting down Punt Rd, dodging the slick boys with their close haircuts in their fast cars, was one of pure liberation. I had been a stay-at-home mother for 3 and a half-years and according to Doctor Phil I was exhibiting all the ‘symptoms’ of post-natal psychosis. After months of planning and meticulous organisation, I was winging my way to the first proper job I’d held in 8 years. I felt I had every last detail covered … And then just past Commercial Rd I ran out of petrol. Because I could only buy a kitchen funnel, by the time I got to work to meet my colleagues I stunk to high heaven of petrol. I had to put my drenched shoes outside and reassure them I wasn’t into sniffing.

(It is another 2 days since I’ve been able to write. Faith is blissfully sleeping. Hattie is bouncing around downstairs while my partner does the crossword. I tried to go to work today, but my car broke down and a squadron of blokes leapt out of their cars to push me to the roadside. My partner got the two kids dressed and came down to rescue me. Our eyes barely met this morning and when I thanked him at the car for all the ways he helps me I erupted in tears and we clung together behind our raised bonnets, Faith crying in the car, Hattie getting fractious in her booster seat. )

The night before I actually started, co-op rang to say that there was still no Wednesday spot and in any event Faith, they felt, was too young. She couldn’t sit up by herself, she was in danger of being trampled, wouldn’t take the bottle and at one point had been quiet distressed. All those winging feelings twisted round themselves into a knot in the pit of my stomach. Soon after my mother rang to say she’d just realised she’d double booked herself babysitting for me and my sister. When we tried to find a way round it, she burst into tears (usually reserved for funerals) confessed she hadn’t had a day without grandchildren in 6 weeks, was too old to mind little children everyday, and wanted us to remember that she was only human. The knot tightened. I cried too.

(Hattie has climbed up the bookcase behind me, she is pulling the books off the bookcase and crooning ‘My body lies over the motion’, in my ear)

When I rang my sisters to tell them how upset Mum was, we ended up shouting at each other about who had used her the most. The statistics were reflecting back at me. I thought stress was merely this twisted welded knot in the pit of your gut, that you manage by yourself. In fact it erupts out of your gut like a Ridely Scott alien, gnashing its teeth at your most significant others.

(Hattie is telling me she wants her friend to come over for fish n’chips. When I distractedly ignored her she demanded, ‘Mummy, what did I tells you last night about the fip’nchips? Be nice to the people! I tell you fifteens! Listen to my words, straight now!’ I said no to fish n’chips and she thrashed on the floor next to me. We’ve just had a seesaw cuddle)

Since starting, I have worked 6 weeks, those hours where my grossly exploited mother has Faith I work uninterrupted for 7 hours.

(My partner has recovered some sleep after the marauding nerds went home and has taken Hattie downstairs to get dinner started)

I am the editor of a quarterly, refereed journal on Australian and Asian media. Everytime I draw upon my own distended file of rejection letters from editors, and reject someone new, I feel the misplaced revenge of a St Trinian with a hockey stick.

(Faith has woken, I’ve changed her and taken her down to my partner)

Everytime I think quietly, and allow an idea to take hold, develop and find expression I feel the transports of transcendental meditation—at least as I’ve heard them described. I come home and while Hattie still pays out on me she’s just starting to be OK about me going to work.

(I can hear Faith crying downstairs)

She’s figured out there’s more to life than the boredom and cabin fever of being one-on-one with an irascible mother day after day. Faith is somehow one of those babies that is perfectly fine without me, so far. At the end of each Thursday she latches on and I am glad to be home precisely because I haven’t been there all day, not to mention the fact that my breasts are like nuclear rockets. When two other families from co-op go away and 2 days came up for Faith, I got lost in the relief of looking forward to having as much childcare as the hours I work. But Faith became subdued. Whereas Hattie has always made her feelings known—with a megaphone—Faith you have to read, and she stopped beaming. She simply looked sad.

(We have eaten the meal my partner cooked, Hattie ran around making combinations of bits and pieces, sticking them in bags and giving them to us as presents, Faith watched me leave the room with wary apprehension).

I cut my hours back to 15. I thanked my editor-in-chief and told him it was rare for any workplace to be so accommodating—on the face of it, of my being a mother, in fact of my children’s’ needs as I read them. The decision wasn’t purely dictated by her needs, I have to confess, the cost of childcare is so prohibitive, we simply couldn’t afford it. I think of all those business lunches being written of as tax deductions—how has child care never been tax deductible?

Last night my mother called to tell me my sister has a hernia that requires surgery and she must stay with her in North-East Victoria for 3 weeks. The Monday spot at co-op won’t come up for 2 weeks, and the Wednesday spot for 8. This week I have no childcare at all. I have stopped feeding Faith at night and we started ‘controlled crying’ (really because it’s the only way to respond to her crying without the breast) last night. My supply has dropped dramatically since starting work, as has my weight. Without intending to, I have effectively begun weaning Faith. Yesterday she began having formula while I’m at work. Sitting with engorged breasts at my desk in St Kilda, I thought with some irony of the probably genetically modified ingredients (not that there is any labelling to tell me), such as ‘alpha tocopherhyl acetate and pyridoxine hydrochloride’.

The week over which this piece was written was ‘trying’.

(My partner has put Hattie in her bath, as she sings, ‘love and courage, love and courage, go together like a horse and curry’, Faith is on the floor crumpling a notice from Centrelink. After being stung, thrice, for over a grand, like 640,00 other families, Faith can crumple to her heart’s content).

A mother told me she feels she does a myriad of things, but all badly. At times I feel like I’m living a waking version of a nightmare I used to have as a kid when I would be in a life threatening situation, only to find my legs wouldn’t run. I seem to sprint everywhere, from the car to the clothesline, from the cot to the stove. Everything becomes trying, indeed I seem to never stop trying— trying to get the washing in before it rains, and the wet bed dry before their afternoon sleep; trying to figure out what heinous parenting on my part has made my child wet her bed (never combine lapsed Catholicism and a belief in the social construction of identity with mothering at home); trying to get back from shopping for their afternoon sleep,

(Faith was doing the phone cord trick again, she is on my lap and has dropped the phone into the desk drawer);

trying to remember to get the milk, and feed the immeasurably displaced and mournful cat; trying to not to shout at your kids when they are obstructing your every move, like not letting you do up their seat buckle (oh, the endless rounds of buckling) while you’re bent over with rain trickling down your bum crack; trying not to weep when you’ve just got to sleep and some senseless dickhead who’s never been sleep deprived blows his car horn outside in the street; trying not to arc up at your partner when he staggers in late from work wrung out like a dish rag; trying to forget the dream you had last night full of rampant sex because its been so long and you know that finding time in the near future again is lamentably unlikely and that to find ignition somehow you’ll have to overcome the alienation of never speaking; trying to stay on top of the rage, that volcanic erupting molten iron rage expanding in your chest like white noise that no one ever talks about; trying to find those mere 20 hours for your perfectly flexible job; trying half the time you are at work to phone around and organise child care for the next week; trying to fend off the latest cold from co-op; trying to get your kid to keep her shoes on wherever you go; trying to convince her, over and over again, sometimes over 3 hours, that shorts and a singlet and gumboots are not going to fend off winter; trying to do this without shouting, because while the first time you asked was model mothering, by the five-hundredth time, it’s pressing to be polite, even in Target; trying not to explode when it took 2 hours to get her warmly dressed in carefully negotiated ensembles, and just before you head out the door she emerges from her room in her knickers and fairy wings; trying to get the pram, laden with two kids and all the shopping, up the post office steps where the only local bank is; trying to push the pram with one hand while you carry the crying baby who isn’t even in it with the other and pull the string attached to the tricycle with some other hand that doesn’t exist while you catch your child’s artwork that just blew out of the pram to stop them screaming … and cross at the lights; trying to turn on the light at the bottom of the stairs with your nose, because you’ve got an emptied potty, a pair of slippers, a bucket of weenie pants in one hand, and a baby, saline drops, unproofed copy edits and a dictionary in the other; trying not to fall asleep at your desk, or the traffic lights, trying to remember the name of the person you just put on hold for your boss; trying to stop your kid from running out into the traffic while you unbuckle the other, trying to maintain a modicum of dignity when the bloke at a book launch spies you breastfeeding and says to his mate, ‘the other one’s free’ … and so on … always trying.

I’m a mother who’s got it good. And I know a mother whose baby cried without stopping for 10 months, and her husband didn’t come to see his new daughter for 14 days. There are mothers who will read this as proof of a very cushy situation, simply because I could find the time to write it.

(Faith is pulling my carefully categorized papers out of my pigeon holes)

And of course there are mothers who are so overwhelmed and unsupported that they will not find time of their own to read it. But to consider the even worse conditions under which other women are mothering offers none of the comfort of relative good fortune. It just makes me sad for them. And it begs the question … should mothering really be this trying?

Every day that passes as a blur of washing and feeding and changing and comforting is concluded with the evening news which seemingly unbeknownst to itself shows mothers struggling to keep their children alive, against the massively funded, disciplined disregard for human life of the world’s militaries and regimes. The needless death of each child is also the trashing of a mother’s minute by minute labour of life. And it occurs to you that the herculean effort of mothers is not just invisible and unpaid. It is constantly being undone, predominantly by men, who enforce the segregation of the world of mothers and children, who have never so much as changed a nappy, and who thereby have a limited understanding of what a human life is worth. Everytime a mother tends her child she reverses a dominant logic which disregards and destroys life, and places human relationships second to profit. Every workplace which denies a mother the choice of being with her baby is in small part confirming that logic, and the governments which fail to intervene and increasingly withdraw services and supports are perpetrating the criminal theft of developing human relationships. It might be hard for mothers to insist, having so recently claimed our rightful place in the workplace, and that place still being so precarious, that we are entitled to organise the care of our children, with our partners, as we see fit. Instead it is left to us mothers to deal with the fallout from the failure to organise that care, equitably within families and the community. Too often mothers feel the inadequacy and shame—of being a ‘grumpy Mum’, of hiding exhaustion in meetings, of fretting for their babies in care—that is not rightfully theirs.


20/11/02