 |
Visual and film artist Lidia Patriasz paints the silhouette of my mother, Lyn van Lidth de Jeude, during a performance of my work, SuperMAMA, 2010. All the women who participated in this production were mothers; most were also visual artists or musicians, and these two were also preschool teachers. Photo by Adrian van Lidth de Jeude.
|
As a teen, I never really thought about becoming a mother. Finding
the elusive “true love” — yes! But not kids. I was going to find a man
who was supportive of my political views (and would understand there is
nothing actually “political” about equal rights), and spend my life
busting up the patriarchy with gusto! Through the amazing art career I
had planned, I was going to save us from climate change AND our
degrading societal norms, by showing the world what absolute tools for
the patriarchy we’ve been, and getting us out from under the shoe of the
Man. Yeah.
So… that didn’t go quite as planned. My man was not unsupportive,
he was just mild-mannered and uninterested in the big angry mission I
was on. But he loved me. And also: hormones. Somehow my hormones
side-swiped my passionate goals, so that suddenly, and for a few years,
there was nothing more important to me than having babies. (My teenaged
self gets whiplash here: HUH?!) So I had my baby, and determined when he
was nearly two that it was time to go back to my career… or have
another baby. I chose that latter. The timing of this choice coincided
with our first child’s registration for preschool.
Preschool
is such a wonderful thing! These devoted people take our kids so we can
go back to the work of tearing down the patriarchy! My mother in law
tells of the glorious day she left both children at preschool, and
walked away with her body upright for the first time in years! It’s the
place you go to drop off your beloveds for a beautiful day of
mind-building play and learning, and you — the newly freed mother — go
back to your world-changing career!! YES!! (I was SO naive.)
In
my case, the first two years of preschool were spent back and forth
between nursing my youngest and tending to the eldest while he very
slowly acclimated to a system that never worked for him: school. I said
he acclimated. He never thrived. By the time my youngest entered
preschool (where she absolutely did thrive), my job became accompanying
my eldest to his Kindergarten, where he continued not to thrive.
It
wasn’t a heartfelt thinking-through that led me to leave my career
behind. It was just circumstance. I could never have left my son in that
world that wasn’t serving him, and homeschool (unschooling, in our
case), seemed like the best option. Nobody picks the second best option
for their kids if they can help it. My husband and I rarely even talked
about our life as a choice, and when we did, it was only that I
apologized for not making any money, and that he reassured me my work
with the children was equally important. I had found the equality I’d
been fighting for: not in equal pay, but in being equally valued — at
least by my partner.
Financially,
staying home with my kids was certainly a sacrifice. On one income for
the foreseeable future, we abandoned our dreams of owning our own home.
We are incredibly lucky in being able to rent from my parents, which has
meant we have a kind of home security unavailable to most renters,
today. But it was a mouldy and rotten home, and has necessitated over a
decade of my husband’s free weekends and vacation time spent rebuilding
(he’s still not finished, actually). So we sacrificed free family time,
as well. Of course all this meant that unlike many of our kids’ friends’
families, we rarely had money for vacations, new clothes, or sports and
arts programs.
What we do have
is an amazing attachment. That alone, and the benefits I knew it would
have for my children’s lives, was enough to keep me home. It was enough
to make every sacrifice of money, freedom, and career worthwhile. And I
was so passionate about my work as a mother that it really became my
life. I volunteered at various family-related organizations, served on
and chaired various boards in my community, and founded and ran a few
programs, all geared towards supporting healthy families in our
community. I somehow never even saw the irony of becoming a
stay-at-home-mom, after my passionately feminist youth, until people
began pointing it out to me, as my kids grew older, and I continued
staying home. It seems it’s reasonable for a feminist to have kids and
attachment parent them, but then apparently one should put them in
school and get back to work on smashing the patriarchy.
Well
hold on! What if my work as a mother IS smashing the patriarchy?! Is
feminism now relegated to single, childless women, or those who leave
their kids in the care of others? What does that say about our respect
for other women? Day-care workers and teachers are some of the forgotten
sacrifices in this equation, disrespected in wages, benefits AND the
mainstream feminist viewpoint. Like stay-at-home-mothers, they’re the
people feminism blindly relies on to raise the next generation of
feminists, while feminists are out doing “more important” things.
In the process of changing the world, there is NOTHING more powerful than raising children.
The
way we raise our children determines how successful each generation of
women will be at improving our lot. When caregivers aren’t valued as
much as our economy values shareholders and industry-builders, we all
lose. That goes for daycare staff, teachers, AND stay-at-home-mothers
and homeschooling parents. Many stay-at-home-mothers are the volunteers
in our communities who make the programs that support women and
children.
And all that is not to
ignore the unbelievable power of setting an example. As parents, we are
the greatest teachers our children will ever have. When they’re sixty
they’ll find themselves blindly doing what they saw us doing. There is
no such thing as “do what I say, not what I do”… our children will always
do what we do. So when they see us living powerful lives, when they see
our partners respect us; when they see us respect ourselves, they will
follow suit. And if we take in other children to care for, we’re
influencing those children, too, and their children’s children. In
everything from the choices we make in life, to the ways we speak to our
children to the ways we glance at ourselves in the mirror, in passing,
caregivers are POWERFUL. We’re the grease in the wheels of feminism. I
argue, actually, that women who put down other women for choosing to
stay home with children are just part of the blind patriarchy.
Without
regular vacations, without owning a home, without being socially
acceptable, I am privileged. I’m privileged to have watched my kids grow
up; to have shared my own life with them, and to have grown alongside
them. I’m privileged to have had opportunity to make a difference in my
community, and to model that for my children, so that, as young adults,
they’re now busy doing the same. I’m privileged to have developed a very
close relationship with my kids.
The
experience I’ve had in staying home with my kids and unschooling them
is not available to all women: especially not to single mothers, or
those with partners who are not supportive of the idea. Even as I now
struggle to develop a career as a middle-aged woman with disability and
not much documented work experience, I know how lucky I am to have lived
the life I chose. My career has shifted from
some-kind-of-subversive-artist to an artist that is deeply rooted in my
own experience as a stay-at-home-feminist-mom. The first big
installation I created was about giving voice to other mothers. Being a
parent has given me a perspective on humanity that was deeply needed for
my art-making, but not available to me until I’d had the experiences I
have.
I didn’t trade my values
and career for having children; I traded my early career for the
extremely powerful, feminist privilege of parenting my children,
full-on. Or, to shift the focus a little, I am using my chosen
experience as a stay-at-home-feminist-mom to build a stronger foundation
for my career, and thus hopefully to smash the patriarchy, even harder.
~ ~ ~
Did you enjoy reading this? You can subscribe by signing up in the sidebar!
