Last week, there were several maternity based articles floating around. There are always maternity based articles floating around. And like most of the others, last week’s focused on the sheer crappiness of it all.
In the Guardian they chose to highlight some of the devastating hardships of mothers ending a relationship if they were the one raising the children full time. Hardships so impactful that one expert quoted in the article warned that “any woman embarking on a relationship should at least hear the facts and be aware of the risk she is adopting.” Wha?!
And a study out of the University of Salford talks of women needing up to a year to recover from childbirth, a view echoed by midwives for centuries. Well, good fucking luck with that.
The Washington Post talks about the dismal and ever-worsening state of maternity leave in the US. And let’s face it, even if there is some compensation for time off to recover from childbirth and take care of your child, women rarely take the time off, as to not be seen as less-than in the workforce.
It’s no wonder that there is a lot of interest in new podcasts like Pregnant Pause, where a couple debates whether or not to have kids. Or why we have people disregarding the healing of their own bodies – and let’s not forget putting their children’s development at risk – to rush back to work like nothing happened.
But even if you could stay home with your children, you’re damned there too. Like this blogger, who pores her heart out about the crazy amount of work and the intense boredom involved in parenting while simultaneously being judged as “worthless” to society. And it’s thoughts like those that lead some parents to do stupid shit like these two when they decided to go out for dinner and drinks leaving their 11 month old daughter in the hotel room alone, because the mother felt the risk was “much too small” to make her “waste an evening sitting in with her in silence, in the dark.” Yeah, we wouldn’t want you to waste your time being a parent… at night… sitting… in the dark.
Ok, ok, that may be harsh and it definitely minimizes the complexity of parenting in these societies, but it is also true and it needs to be addressed. People would rather not be a parent at all or take risks with the children they have, mainly because we’ve made it such a shitty job. That is something society can and should do better at. We need to reproduce… well, most of us. To do that well we need to value parenting. And until we do, more and more people could start thinking it just might not be worth it.