First Teacher, First Lesson

The Work of Caring

When mom had cancer she spent some of her time living at my house so that my siblings and I could take care of her. There were many things she struggled to do and needed our help with. After the first couple of days she asked me: “Where did you learn how to do this?”

Me: “Where do you think? I learned it from you, from how you took care of us when we were little.”

Mom: “But I’m not little.”

Me: “Well you’re not exactly big.”

Mom was our first teacher and our first lesson was how it felt to be loved and cared for.

Mom was forever taking care of others, she wasn’t used to anyone actually taking care of her. Mom did the enormous workload of caring for her 7 children — and she helped to raise her grandchildren too. Mom helped care for her sister through repeated bouts of cancer, she regularly helped a great-aunt who is in a home, and she normally helped her mother up until mama died in 2008. When mom’s oldest sister died and her young adult nephew was heartbroken, mom wrapped her arms around him and said, “I’m your mother now.”

We grew up with mom setting the example for how to do the work of caring for others, so we had it pretty well figured out from a relatively young age.

7 kids is a lot of kids. Eventually, mom decided to get her tubes tied, no one wondered why. By that time I had already moved out and, at age 14, Liam was the oldest kid in the house. Out of the 6 kids, 2 of them were still just babies.

A tubal ligation may be routine surgery, but it is no small thing — and I don’t think they even had laparoscopic surgery in rural Newfoundland back then, just your invasive open surgery. It takes a lot of rest to recover, rest that is virtually impossible to get when you have 6 kids at home. For the first 6 weeks the patient isn’t allowed to lift a laundry basket of clothes, let alone multiple babies; it’s difficult just to walk around your own home, let alone run after little ones about to get into trouble.

It was summer break and Liam stepped up to help mom take care of the younger kids. It was all about the lifting. Anyone who’s taken care of little ones knows there’s a lot of lifting involved, whether it’s endless amounts of laundry, moving babies into and out of the bathtub or their crib or their stroller and so on. Then there’s telling the middle kids what to do and what not to do, so some things may have been a little entertaining for Liam.

Mom was both highly impressed with — and grateful for — Liam’s efforts.

Care Work is Work

Sometimes it’s backbreaking, sometimes it’s emotionally draining, sometimes it’s dirty and smelly, but care work is work.

People don’t get paid according to how hard they work, they get paid according to how much power they have in their society. Mom worked harder than anyone I’ve ever known, but stay-at-home-mom is not a paid job.

The traditional women’s work, maybe we’ll call it “feminine work”, is not even considered to be part of the economy. Three guesses who was in the room when that decision was made. Housewives and Stay-At-Home-Moms are referred to as “economically inactive” by the same leaders (economists, CEOs and politicians) who are howling at people — by which they mean women — to make more future consumers and taxpayers (ahem...) babies. All while they ignore the vastly disproportionate work, costs and sacrifices born by the mothers who are supposed to do all this unpaid work…in their spare time…because those same leaders expect modern women to do paid jobs to help grow the economy they’re not really considered to be a part of.