The Definition of Human Growth in Chinese Confucian Culture, "Thirty and Standing" or "Forty Not Confused" is aimed at men. For women, there seems to be only one critical period of growth, that is, marriage.
Getting married, conceiving, and becoming a mother is both familiar and unfamiliar to women. But as early as the New Culture Movement, discussions about the awakening of women's consciousness began. From then to now, in the past hundred years, the awakening of women's consciousness has intensified, and women have more pursuits for self-identity other than "wife" and "mother".
In addition, in recent years, "fear of childbirth" has often been hotly discussed, and the discussion in the public domain has made the pain of women's childbearing more visible, and more and more people are aware of the risks of pregnancy and childbirth, and begin to face the dilemma of women returning to the workplace after giving birth.
After becoming a mother, whether to work or not to work may be a difficult question for our time. When it comes to balancing work with motherhood, it seems that many women are going through an "unfinished revolution."
The working mom's level
In sociology, there is a term called "maternal punishment." In the mid-to-late 20th century, labor economics and feminology were constantly coupled, and the wage gap between mothers and non-mothers or men and women was often explained by human capital theory and gender segregation theory.
By the 1980s and 1990s, many researchers directly regarded the birth event as an important factor affecting the wage gap, and applied it in the early 21st century to explain the changes in women's professional status, forming a school of maternal punishment theory. The theory can be summarized as "the damage and systemic disadvantage suffered by women who have given birth to children at the physical, family, workplace, and social levels."
The punishment of motherhood may have been formed because of the long-term social default that all labor related to childbirth that will continue to occur is usually unpaid, incalculable, and cannot be symmetrical in the minds of the family, but it is related to the mother.
This includes, but is not limited to, the mother's physical trauma and long postpartum repair, postpartum depression, redundant housework, decreased quality of sexual life, childcare and even continuous parenting, the huge communication costs and emotional consumption of generations of common parenting, the energy and time cost invested in educating children, the overall rejection of women of childbearing age from salary to position promotion opportunities in the workplace, and the delusional demands of society and public opinion on women of childbearing age.
According to the "Survey and Study on the Social Status of Chinese Women in the New Era", the proportion of urban women who have had a career interruption before the age of 30 is 39.7%. More than half of them had to interrupt their work because they had children. Once women are interrupted from work due to family care responsibilities, nearly 40% will be difficult to re-employ.
When a mother returns to the workplace, problems such as "occupational gender" imbalance, sexism in interviews and workplaces, and narrow promotion channels for women are still widespread. At the same time, the cost of raising children has also increased significantly, and there are countless prenatal education and early education, school district rooms, interest classes and so on.
In the "2020 China Women's Workplace Status Survey Report" released by Zhaopin, the main causes of gender inequality in the workplace were investigated, and 63.98% of working women believed that "childbirth is a burden that women cannot get rid of", and 38.97% of men agreed with this reason.
The act of "opening a mother's job" may not be as simple as "wanting" or "not wanting". The British writer Rachel Kasker even wrote in her book Becoming a Mother: Confessions of an Intellectual Woman that on the issue of childbearing, women's "bodies have changed from private to public places that are constantly monitored and disciplined."
Six months after the birth of her eldest daughter, Rachel found herself pregnant again. Rachel said: "At this time I return to the siege, like a fugitive arrested, can only sullenly accept the reality" "When I was a mother, women gave up their public values in exchange for a series of private meanings. ”
Motherhood and Rachel's other social roles, writers, are completely incompatible. She found that to be a good mother, she had to stop answering the phone and ignore the previous arrangements. And if you want to be yourself, you must let the child cry: "In order to think about other things, I must forget her, and successfully playing one role means playing another." 」 If you choose to be a stay-at-home mother, the value of self is tied to the child and the family, that is, the "private sphere", which seems to be not easy to adapt to and endure.
How hard is it for middle-aged women at home?
The "2017 China Family Parent-Child Companionship White Paper" shows that some families recognize the importance of parents accompanying their children equally, but "invisible fathers" are still a common phenomenon. In 55.8% of families, the mother is accompanied by children on a daily basis. Only 12.6 per cent and 16.5 per cent of households with more or as many parents accompanied by their parents. Fathers spend 2.9 hours on weekdays and 7.7 hours on weekends, much lower than mothers' 4.6 hours and 10.9 hours.
The extreme absence of the father's office also makes many mothers experience "widowed parenting", and the balance between the workplace and the mother's job is basically an intractable task for women.
There was a hot post on the Internet: how bitter is the life of a middle-aged mother? A high praise answered: "Wake up at three o'clock in the morning, after giving birth to a child, it is easy to get up at night, lying in the quiet night, unconsciously already in tears." I wish someone had wiped away my tears for me, but no, my parents are old, my children are older, and my lover is cold. I'd rather have someone hug me, but no, not a long time ago. ”
Freud once said that all anxiety comes from conflict. You have to be a "good" mom, a "good" wife.
It seems that all mothers can't escape the word "good". The word "good" seems like a medal, "I am the obedient daughter of my parents", "I am a good wife of my husband", "I am a good mother in the heart of my children"... Even in order to achieve the "good" of other people, mothers often forget how they look.
Kate in "How Hard It Is", at the peak of her career, in order to better take care of the family and accompany the growth of her children, chose to quit her job and go home to become a full-time mother, thinking that a good life had begun.
"How Hard It Is"
Are you sure?
Children in the midst of a difficult adolescence replace childishness with "nothing to do", daughters post their buttocks on the Internet, provoking a group of hooligan perverts to send harassing messages; sons are addicted to video games and hardly communicate with their families; suddenly unemployed husbands decide to pursue their true selves — in other words, no longer looking for a job to earn money to support their families and no longer be responsible for anyone; the once sharp mother-in-law suffers from Alzheimer's disease and buys a chainsaw with a stolen credit card His own mother had just recovered from a sudden heart attack and had broken her hip joint...
Kate secretly inhaled the cold air while methodically processing, as if pulling her own hair, trying not to fall down, and clenching her teeth step by step to keep up.
This year, she was 50 years old. Life forced her to try not to drive herself crazy.
In fact, author Alison Pearson has cleverly created a life cycle, and in her last book, How She Did It, the same Kate is on the rise of her career, she is a senior fund manager in the City, two children are born, she can wash herself and her children in an hour and a half, be ready to go out, and manage nine currencies in five different time zones at the same time. One can't help but ask, how did she do it to balance family and career?
Pearson wrote in How Hard It Is: "When I work, I feel guilty about my children; when I am at home, I feel guilty about my work. The time I spend on myself is like stealing, so I rarely spend time on myself. Like other mothers on the planet, I'm in my head trying to squeeze in fragments of time for family life, and my husband, who lives with me, thinks that retrieving dry-clean clothes and taking his own children to the park on weekends is worth a Purple Heart or Victoria Cross. Deborah once joked that the only good thing about such a life was that we were exhausted and had no energy to cheat. I repeat, the last thing I need in this world is love. ”
First herself, then her mother
"How can I not do anything, how can I clean up this mess?" Many mothers often ask themselves in chagrin, but the question is not whether Kate or thousands of working mothers have balanced family and career. The question is, why do people always expect working moms to do this? Why do people assume that the person who fights hard to take care of the family and children should be a woman?
Should a mother always experience the storm, recognize the storm, but can't escape the storm?
Mothers are often associated with greatness, devotion, and love, but they are not sexy. The famous Italian female writer Morande once wrote: "No one, including a tailor of the mother, would think that the mother would have a female body." ”
In a social culture where we expect to use the word "hot mom" to "normalize" motherhood, the word "middle-aged mother" is clearly not a pleasant allusion, as described in the opening chapter of "How Hard It Is": the handsome guy he meets on the Ring Line subway will still notice himself, but he gives me his seat instead of his phone number; and he is increasingly inclined to practical comfy underwear rather than the prickly lace edges of Victoria's Secret.
Although middle-aged women's concern about the depreciation of their sexy currency year by year looks shallow and confused, in the social atmosphere of most of them secretly believing that "men have forty-one flowers and women forty tofu slag", they will constantly confirm their girlishness and can't bear to drift away from it. Everyone wants to have a beauty comparable to their own age, that's all, and if they don't try to save it, it will soon plummet across the board.
Perhaps this is not simply the disappearance of youth and the growing of age, but a sense of identity. However, the type of middle-aged woman who is in the white fever stage of her wife and mother has the last thing she has is "identity"—the identity that belongs to the self.
For a long time, people's consciousness has tacitly accepted that women are born to be mothers, and a woman who does not become a mother is often considered "incomplete" and "selfish", and women seem to be required to take on the motherhood because of natural fertility. But it also seems like an emergency for women to hold their place in the world, to be who they want to be, to get younger, not older.
In the 19th century, the Norwegian dramatist Ibsen wrote in The Doll's House: the protagonist Nala's husband reminds her that "first of all you are a wife, a mother", and Nala responds with the sentence "Now I only believe that first of all I am a person, a person like you - at least learn to be a person".
Today, more and more women are putting self-actualization as a person before the identity of wives and mothers. Of course, what is getting better and better is that self-actualization and value realization as wives and mothers can overlap in some people. They tried to keep the ship from sinking and let the show go on.
*The pictures in this article are all from the Internet