The past few months of children of school and parents working from home has witnessed a flurry of articles highlighting the imbalance of the maternal and paternal roles and how women have borne the brunt of it. However, the imbalance was there long before COVID, and why should anyone have expected it to be any different?
Women have always come off worse and been the parent expected to pick up the slack when raising children. My own experience is typical… the husband went out to work and expected to come home at 4 pm, have his dinner on the table and spend the evening relaxing… While the wife (in this case, me) looked after the children all day, completed the domestic chores, completed at least five school runs a day (the curse of having multiple children of different ages), worked from home as a PA, cooked dinner, and completed the rest of the household chores before she could relax for the evening. Help was forthcoming only after an argument over roles.
The leading cause of the end of our marriage was not the gambling of a large amount of money six weeks before Christmas. No, that just put the final nail in the coffin. It was years of inequality. It was the years of misogyny within the marriage. On the outside, we were a good couple, but on the inside, he resented the expectation I had that he would participate in domestic life and I resented the fact that I had to force him to participate. The result was bitterness, anger, and lots and lots of frustration.
While I’m not jaded enough to think that ALL men are the same (I know some great Dads who take on more than their fair share), I am confident that my story is the same as millions of other women and this is just one of the issues highlighted by the national lockdown.
Lockdown, for my family, began a week earlier than it did officially. With a vulnerable child, she required more protection than others. I didn’t know how everything would unfold, but I did what I had always done. (Actually, I found a text message I sent the day I decided saying that my children would be off school until after Easter… Oh, if only!) I started lockdown as Mum; I continued working and completed the academic year (with a distinction no less). But now, almost the middle of August, I’m unravelling. I feel the effects of 5 months of pressure on a daily, if not hourly schedule. It’s not just the physical toll; it’s the mental load I had placed on me. Women carry most of the mental pressure in the family anyway, but lockdown mental pressure is something else entirely. The mental risk assessment before leaving the house, the food delivery debacle, the guilt for not completing enough school work with each child, and the disappointment in myself for failing to complete all my work the instant it came in.
While some have discussed making a choice between which parent is afforded the time to work, for those like me, there is no choice. I don’t have anyone to pick up the slack in my house, and when I’ve needed to conduct video calls for work, I have had to rely on my older children entertaining the younger ones (and they have risen admirably to the challenge). For me, and other single parents, there is no decision to make. If they work, they are the breadwinner and work must continue. No working often means no money and no money leaves you in the predicament of choosing between whether to feed your kids or buy gas and electric. For me, I’ve managed to keep the money coming in, but after five months, all I see are blurred lines, and I don’t seem to be able to differentiate between work, study, domesticity, and leisure.
Work time gets eaten by domestic chores; chore time gets stomped on by parenting, leisure doesn’t exist… or at best is a rare occurrence. And even when I get leisure time, I feel wracked with guilt that I’m not doing something more ‘productive’.
Oh, how I would like to revisit the simplicity of January. Where I was excitedly anticipating the beginning of the next chapter of my life… A chapter in which all my children are in school, and I would have 6 hours a day without a single child… for the first time in 15 years. Now, I’m faced with the possibility things are going to remain unsettled for quite some time.
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