So so true! I went completely on strike twice when the kids were growing up, just to show them and my husband how much fell apart without me. I also withdrew parts of my labour - washing their clothes and cleaning their rooms when they reached 12. It prompted lots of learning for them about the power of the proletariat, workers' rights, unions and why the right to strike is so important. When they went to uni, both were the ONLY people in their dorms that knew how to use a washing machine.
I remember you telling me about your strikes before. Bloody well done because not many people actually follow through on that threat. For me it took total burnout and resulting chronic illness to finally let go of the ‘shoulds’. And I’m so glad that I was forced to relinquish my idea of perfection because it was making me ill. And we’re all still alive! 😄
I love this. I did the same thing but never thought of it in that way. I just expected my children to contribute to the household when they were able to. And mine were also the only ones who ever knew how to do anything like load a washing machine. I find it extraordinary that women allow themselves to be servants to their families.
I think it was maybe easier for women before us because there wasn’t the need for them to work as well. So while they may have been bored or frustrated at home they weren’t having to do all the unpaid work and have a job as well. Plus the lack of family and community support these days. This impossible to do it all.
The best advice I ever had as a new mum was to ‘put my oxygen mask on first’ because if I went down the kids go down as well.
"to have their identities sucked from their souls and be replaced with an exhausted, resentful shell of a woman."
"but that they didn’t know they wouldn’t be given the space or words to talk about the identity-destroying sacrificial elements of it. They weren’t betrayed by the women who came before them, they were betrayed by their predecessors’ wholesale silencing."
"The lists we make are a way of externalising our pain, a way of making visible the unseen. It is, at its root, a desire to be understood."
Thank you for this price of writing.
It's really really hard to say "this is good enough" "it's enough" - especially when demands and criticism are from much older children who now adults. I should have made it ok in conversation throughout growing up, to ensure I expressef both my own limitations and how by strengths needed nurturing.
The hardest thing about motherhood has at times feeling my heart has been brutally ripped from my body and had been laid bare on the floor, being walked over. Stamped on. I don't think I had built the resilience before the teenage years and acknowledged that I had an equal right to really live my life
Workers rights. I love that. Wish I had gone in strike way way back. And absolutely, intergenerational conversation about parenting realities and things we wish we had known the consequences of - those conversations maybet once happened in the much wider social networks that existed.
So so true! I went completely on strike twice when the kids were growing up, just to show them and my husband how much fell apart without me. I also withdrew parts of my labour - washing their clothes and cleaning their rooms when they reached 12. It prompted lots of learning for them about the power of the proletariat, workers' rights, unions and why the right to strike is so important. When they went to uni, both were the ONLY people in their dorms that knew how to use a washing machine.
I remember you telling me about your strikes before. Bloody well done because not many people actually follow through on that threat. For me it took total burnout and resulting chronic illness to finally let go of the ‘shoulds’. And I’m so glad that I was forced to relinquish my idea of perfection because it was making me ill. And we’re all still alive! 😄
More than alive, you will have taught the kids so much!
I love this. I did the same thing but never thought of it in that way. I just expected my children to contribute to the household when they were able to. And mine were also the only ones who ever knew how to do anything like load a washing machine. I find it extraordinary that women allow themselves to be servants to their families.
I think it was maybe easier for women before us because there wasn’t the need for them to work as well. So while they may have been bored or frustrated at home they weren’t having to do all the unpaid work and have a job as well. Plus the lack of family and community support these days. This impossible to do it all.
The best advice I ever had as a new mum was to ‘put my oxygen mask on first’ because if I went down the kids go down as well.
"to have their identities sucked from their souls and be replaced with an exhausted, resentful shell of a woman."
"but that they didn’t know they wouldn’t be given the space or words to talk about the identity-destroying sacrificial elements of it. They weren’t betrayed by the women who came before them, they were betrayed by their predecessors’ wholesale silencing."
"The lists we make are a way of externalising our pain, a way of making visible the unseen. It is, at its root, a desire to be understood."
Thank you for this price of writing.
It's really really hard to say "this is good enough" "it's enough" - especially when demands and criticism are from much older children who now adults. I should have made it ok in conversation throughout growing up, to ensure I expressef both my own limitations and how by strengths needed nurturing.
The hardest thing about motherhood has at times feeling my heart has been brutally ripped from my body and had been laid bare on the floor, being walked over. Stamped on. I don't think I had built the resilience before the teenage years and acknowledged that I had an equal right to really live my life
Workers rights. I love that. Wish I had gone in strike way way back. And absolutely, intergenerational conversation about parenting realities and things we wish we had known the consequences of - those conversations maybet once happened in the much wider social networks that existed.