Parenting Taboos: The creche was the same as our mortgage. When I look at it now I think, ‘Jesus, how did we buy into it?’
Regretting working outside the home: ‘We’re told to parent like we don’t work. And work like we don’t parent’
Carla finds herself envying her friend, who is a stay-at-home parent. “I’d love to have, not a stress-free life, but a less stressful life,” she says.Gerry Thornley: There is a theory France losing to England is good for Ireland, but is it? Although her children are now both in school, Carla says she’s still paying approximately €800 per month “for really crap childcare”.
Older family members have passed comments about being a working parent, such as: “You go to college to get this education, and then you have your kids and you just put them in creche all day… you just can’t win.” Podcast: Becoming a mother at 49: ‘If I didn’t try… I would have lived with regret until the end of my days’
Her ideal would be to become a stay-at-home mam who is at home growing her own vegetables. “I’d love to have that pace of life and just to know what my kids are eating. That they’re eating healthy foods, and to have that little bit of freedom … I think my kids will never have the freedom that we had when we were younger.”
Deirdre has two children and has recently finished up work. “I used to go to work in the dark and come home in the dark.” She and her husband were like “ships that passed in the night”, due to their different working hours. In the absence of a second wage, the couple used their savings, help from family and she became an expert bargain hunter when shopping for food. “You had the time for all this,” she says. “It was the best time of my life. It was the happiest I ever was. I had the gift of time with the kids, for my husband, for the house.” Knowing a return to work was unavoidable, Deirdre and her husband set about planning to allow Deirdre to retire early so she could return to being a stay-at-home parent.
Guilt is “a very normal motivational system that we have to do no harm to somebody else” she says, referring to the infamous mum guilt. The difficulty is that “guilt doesn’t know when to dial down”.
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