Full-time mammy

By Contributing Writer on Friday, January 21, 2011 - 17:34

[Editor’s Note: This article was written by the team of ‘Gaelick’, an award-winning Irish website for LGBT news.]

From ‘Gaelick’ contributor Zemama

I recently caught up with a relative I haven’t talked to in several months. My big news was that I’d been made redundant. “Oh,” she replied, “so you’re a full-time mammy now.”

I breathed deeply and didn’t get into it. But I’ve been a full-time mammy since I first held my son. At no point has this been a part-time gig, a sideline or a hobby. No one is a little pregnant, and no one is a part-time mother. Whether one has paid employment across town or in a home office, whether one is out of the paid workforce by choice or circumstance, whether one spends all the child’s waking hours engaged in stimulating educational activities, sits parked on the sofa watching television or volunteers twelve hours a day for worthy causes, if you have children, you are a parent all day every day. (Not necessarily a good one, mind you.)

When I was working in an office for pay, I was every bit my son’s mother every minute. Did anyone think that if the crèche rang to say he’d fallen off a chair and broken his arm, I’d say: ‘Okay, I’ll be there after work when my shift as mammy starts, but I’m not his mammy until 5:00 pm.’?

So why do we use these terms? Full-time mammy, career woman, working mother, stay-at-home mother? Heck yes, every mother is a working mother. And every woman with a child is also more than a mother. Mother is one component of an identity, like daughter, sister or (ahem!) father. But despite the decades of feminist effort, we still seem to like to classify women according to their reproductive status.

To really make it fun, we rank them. But this is where I get really confused, because a ‘stay-at-home, full-time mammy’ is good, right? She’s put her children ahead of her career and made them a priority. Go good selfless mammy! And a ‘welfare mother’ is bad, isn’t she? She’s too lazy to work, a parasite living off handouts. Bad selfish mammy! But um, aren’t they both home with the children with their expenses covered by someone else? (Please note, these rules pre-date the recession by decades.) Is there some distinction I’m missing other than class? If an educated, middle-class woman becomes pregnant, we congratulate her and ask if she’ll keep working. We don’t say: ‘Shock, horror, you’re not going to live off your partner now are you? You’re not going to be a kept woman, you lazy sponge? Ha, so you decided to scam some money from the child benefit!’ If a woman with less money and education becomes pregnant, and doesn’t take paid employment because what she would earn doesn’t cover the cost of safe and reliable child care, what exactly is society’s reaction? (Insert your own rant about the minimum wage and/or cost of child care here.)

So there, in the space of a couple of weeks I went from being an educated, professional woman to a ‘full-time mammy’. But really, I’m now a welfare mother. While I’ve been grappling with own issues there (identity, phobia of social welfare office, occasional bouts of feeling humiliated, exhaustion from chasing a toddler all day every day), my son is remarkably clear. I’m just mama, plain and simple, as I was before and always will be, all day, every day.