To be a mother, to remain in equal partnership and to maintain self-sufficiency – is it possible? Reader’s letter.
Even before becoming a mother, I knew that often with the advent of a child, an equal partnership established before that ends. With diapers and sliders, the traditional distribution of roles comes into its own. Emancipated women fall into a real trap.
This shouldn’t have happened to me. In theory, everything sounded very simple: my husband and I were going to equally distribute the 14 months during which the parental allowance is paid: the first 7 months I stay at home, then he. Then the child goes to the nursery. And then? Then everything would return to normal (to be honest, I didn’t even think about “later” – suspecting that everything would not be as simple as it seems).
Already during pregnancy, I said goodbye to the idea of taking only 7 months of maternity leave: it suddenly seemed to me that a year was what I needed. In fact, subsequently, an application for maternity leave for 2 years fell on the employer’s table, with the opportunity to work part-time until the expiration of this period.
The husband supported this idea and planned to take 2 months of parental leave immediately after the birth and another additional month when the daughter turned one year old (for these 4 weeks we planned a joint vacation). So, in just a few months, the idea of a fairly divided period of maternity leave, which had been nurtured for a whole year, changed.
Every day I lived in the closest symbiosis with my daughter and was reluctant to be separated from her.
And that was just the beginning. In the first 2 months after the birth of my daughter, household chores did not cause any problems: we were both at home and shared work among ourselves. However, when my husband returned to the office and I stayed at home, I quickly got the feeling that I was being subservient. At the same time, my husband, as before, did housework on a par with me: he washed dishes, went shopping, cooked, changed diapers.
Maybe it’s because the rhythm of my day was completely determined by the needs of our daughter, and my own needs faded into the background. I envied my husband because his day was full of events, because of the possibility of self-realization. At the same time, every day I lived in the closest symbiosis with my daughter and was reluctant to part with her.
The older our daughter got, the more clearly we understood that we did not want to send her to a nursery a year, as we had previously planned. It seemed unthinkable to us to give into the wrong hands a baby who still cannot walk or talk. We decided that attachment to loved ones would be more important for our daughter than intensive contact with other children or even early development programs.
When I got the opportunity to work 12 hours a week, our daughter was one and a half years old. Her husband’s parents offered to take care of her. This step became less of a problem for the girl than for me. I would have loved to have stayed at home, but I wanted to take advantage of the opportunity. In addition, I was still thinking about my ideals of equal partnership, excluding financial dependence.
The desire to earn money again was so strong that it overshadowed the desire to stay longer with her daughter. At the same time, something inside me resisted such a decision. Then things took a new turn. I went to the office 2-3 days a week. She collected her daughter in the morning and got ready herself, took her to her grandparents, went to work. In the evening, my husband and I wearily juggled ladles, rags and toys, swore over dirty dishes, discussed the inevitable organizational issues and fell asleep.
Equality was still a long way off, but a 50 x 50 distribution would have incurred significant losses
My days off from work were respite. Housework no longer seemed so burdensome. At the same time, I began to better understand my husband why, after a long day at the office, he barely had the energy for household chores.
We took a small step in the direction of our original idea by making this decision: Husband reduced his working hours by 90%, and I increased mine by 40%. Equality was still a long way off, but a 50 x 50 distribution would have incurred significant losses. And unlike me, my husband couldn’t work part-time.
As a family, it became stressful for us that we both went to work: it inevitably turned out that in the mornings we urged our daughter on, and as a result, we had little time for a large number of tasks. Perhaps in many families this is the case: this stress is part of everyday life, but you definitely shouldn’t strive for it. Therefore, we decided to allow ourselves a small time-out and return to the traditional distribution for three months: I will take another parental leave so that our daughter can get used to the nursery without problems with adaptation.
And also – so that we can do housework and that in the evenings and weekends we have more time for each other. And after those three months of parental leave? The dilemma between the concept of “motherly love” and my feminist requests has yet to be resolved – but I will definitely deal with it!