“Are you going back to work?” and other nuggets.

I said something the other day that I instantly regretted. It was an auto-pilot, small-talk statement, which promptly obliterated the tiny snippets of progress that working mothers have been clawing for since we were ‘allowed’ to have our babies and our boardroom too.

It happened outside the Kindy classroom at school. A mother I half-know was dropping her youngest child off and we were having a quick chat by a pile of woodchips. Sorry, I mean the nature play area. I watched her son fiddle with the zipper on his new Spiderman backpack and I said to her, “So, are you going back to work?”

Now, this wasn’t the kind of statement that would turn heads. I’m sure I wasn’t the first person to even pose that question that day. After all, when your youngest child enters the school system, that’s it, right? Your world OPENS UP and you better as hell be doing something good with it.

But as someone who’s tried to do the working / mothering juggle for seven years now, it’s these probing questions that really piss me off. Which is why I’m annoyed that I was the person who spewed it out this time.

Let’s break it down. Kindy is three days a week. And those days go for six hours max. Once you factor in travel time to and from school, grabbing groceries on the way home and maybe that trip to Big W to get more socks, then coming home and cleaning up from the mornings events and getting the laundry on, you’re looking at maybe three hours left in the day before pick-up. That’s before your mother-in-law calls and asks if you can please take her to her eye appointment because she isn’t allowed to drive afterward. Then the dog pukes on the carpet and while you’re down there picking tiny chunks out of wool fibres, you spot the library book under the TV cabinet that was due back last week…

I’m guessing you can see where this is going. If you’re the person responsible for keeping the house and family going, the school day feels very short…because it is. You’re lucky if there’s an hour left in the day for you to have some lunch and walk the dog.

So, it doesn’t help that, when the minute your youngest steps into that kindy room, people then ask you “Are you going back to work now?” It’s almost as bad as that other nugget “WOW! You’ve got THREE WHOLE DAYS to yourself.” As if you’re about to go home and watch Gavin & Stacey reruns for 12 hours.

So yeah, I regret asking the question. But that’s not even the end of the story. When I threw out the question, the woman’s embarrassed response was “Oh, I’ve decided to take the year off.” Can you imagine, a year off?! Obviously, in this case, a ‘year’ is referring to those five non-busy hours a week, if you’re lucky to find that many. So ‘taking a year off’ means not trying to jam a career into those five hours a week.

The big problem underlying all this is that the invisible and visible things women do to support their loved ones is not called ‘work’. Presumably, this is because we aren’t paid for it. There’s no wage, and definitely no sick days or annual leave or superannuation. It probably deserves a word far bigger and weightier than ‘work’.

So next time you’re chatting to a mother of school-age children, remember that her ability to undertake paid work depends greatly on how much help she is getting when it comes to all of her unpaid work. Chances are, it’s probably not a lot.