The art of being a mother

Annabel Crabb’s latest effort betrays her scornful attitude to the hard yakka of the domestic front.

Annabel Crabb ‘seems oblivious to the reality of being prime minister and treasurer.’

Last year I wrote a column inspired by the imminent birth of Jacinda Ardern’s baby. I mused that it might be difficult to be a breastfeeding mother and a prime minister, even of New Zealand.

Babies are naturally bonded to their mothers and Ardern had announced she would take only six weeks’ leave before passing “parenting” to the child’s father. Good luck with that one, I said.

The responses I received were pretty virulent. How dare I criticise the feminist pin-up of the southern hemisphere!

Since that article appeared Ardern’s stocks went up, then down, for purely practical political reasons irrelevant to her Madonna-like image.

Her popularity has plummeted along with the evaporation of her promise to build thousands of public housing projects.

Several things struck me about these complaints. First, no one reads past the first paragraph; I never said a woman couldn’t be a prime minister and have children. I quoted the serious example of Pakistan’s Benazir Bhutto, the prime minister of a turbulent nation of almost 200 million, who paid a too heavy price.

And in the sedate West there is European Commission president-elect Ursula von der Leyen, a German cabinet minister for 14 years who has seven children.

However, left-leaning commentators on family issues often can’t see past the flaws in ideological symbolism, to the simple everyday practical realities such as new mothers having to learn to breastfeed and wanting to bond with babies.

Annabel Crabb’s latest effort in Quarterly Essay, Men at Work: Australia’s Parenthood Trap, which quotes my view of Ardern, is basically about why fathers aren’t mothers. It’s full of complaints about fathers not having or taking parental leave.

It is curious that she uses the word trap. Why is it a trap to be a mother or father? Why is it so important, as she seems to think, to get out? Despite her culinary accomplishments, Crabb can’t stand the heat in the kitchen and she betrays her scornful attitude to the hard yakka of the domestic front.

Her thesis is the exit from the domestic front for women is not being matched by an exit from work for men to support the overburdened women. Why should men want to be out of work?

In most Australian families no amount of take-it-or-leave-it paternity leave or other inducements changes the arrangements they make. Most families still rely primarily on the father’s earnings and they have a whopping big mortgage. The family enterprise depends on dads and, obviously, nature equipped women to be mothers. It is imperative, especi­ally if mothers have time off, that fathers don’t. That doesn’t make it any emotionally easier for men.

Crabb interviewed Scott Morrison and Josh Frydenberg about their family life, which she says is all about “managing absence”. She asks: “Why do we expect so little of fathers?” Who says it is little?

Crabb seems oblivious to the reality of being prime minister and treasurer. Does she think the fact their wives basically hold the fort at home is wrong because it makes it practically easier for these two men, or any man, to do their jobs? Dads should share, but often they just can’t — ask any tradie trying to build his business.

What upsets a lot of left-leaning commentators and emotional snowflakes is the general population dismisses their impractical notion of pretending a father can be a mother, hence the handy gender neutral-term parenting, which smothers the difference.

Coincidentally, two days before receiving Crabb’s essay my mother died. Her death caused me to reflect on my own parents’ experience of the so-called work-life balance, driven as it was in our family by sheer economic necessity. My mother was an extraordinary woman, the anthesis of the insultingly superficial image of the 1950s mum beloved of the ideologues. She went to university to do arts law in 1947 and graduated with her arts degree in 1950. She went into the public service, got herself a social work qualification but regretted that she never finished law. Why? Because she had to work.

My father couldn’t work for a few years and my mother kept the family by working full time because in those days part-time work was almost non-existent.

Mum was not keen on full-time work, She regretted it, and as a social worker at St Vincent’s Hospital in Sydney she was always very stressed and tired, until my father could take some of that burden from her.

Mum was very critical of women who saw work as nirvana, solely as a means of self-fulfilment. She did it, as most men and women still do, to earn enough money for the family, her main priority. Nor was she impressed by the faddish self-promoting image-makers in the Ardern mould.

Going into parliament suckling a baby would have been my mum’s idea of appallingly unsuitable behaviour. Mum was my somewhat imperfect role model, as our mothers should be. She was privileged in her education but her working life was driven by the sheer necessity of helping to maintain the family and that is, of course, why men work too.

Unfortunately, too many of the women — and it is mostly women — who comment on this stuff are resentful of the grubby everyday necessities of the domestic front: the washing and cleaning, the cooking, the changing of the nappies, putting one foot in front of the other through the zombie-like days of three-hourly feeds. They often resent the sudden change from no children and don’t want to do it alone.

My upbringing with a somewhat reluctant working mother of a large family taught me that the ordinary suburban world is full of many different families with many different necessities.

But if you ask anyone, male or female, which is more important for a mother, getting back to work or cultivating a warm and lasting maternal bond with her infant child, I think I know which they would choose.