Wake up, tradmoms

Hi, everybody. I’d like you to meet my son, Sean, as a baby in 1996.

Hi Sean!

I strive to always illustrate my posts so they show up better in social-media feeds, but I have him here for another reason: lately, a Canadian politician has said some things about “biological clocks” that have got the tradmoms coming out of the woodwork, and I’ve had this argument before. I guess it’s been too long. Time to visit it again.

Okay, I’ve had two children. Here are the bare-bones particular logistics involved.

SEAN
Normal birth (I don’t feel like naming body parts today; cope)
Formula-fed
Family babysitter or daycare from six weeks of age onward
Mother (me) employed outside home his first year and a half, then periodically afterward, but never earned a living wage
Mother (me) depended on father (Mike) for primary income

ALTHEA
Caesarian section (see? cope. I’m coping)
Exclusively breastfed to eight or nine months
Friend babysat maybe half a dozen times in her first year for date nights, no daycare ever
Mother (me) stayed home until she was nearly seventeen
Mother (me) depended on father (Matt) for nearly all income

Wait, where’s Althea? I need a baby pic of Thea. Here ya go.

I just want to impress upon you that I’ve been there. Not only have I been there, I’ve been there in LITERALLY two different versions of “there.” Okay? I am not some mealymouthed twentysomething church-mouse virgin who would really like to get married someday but the mean and nasty feminazis have scared all the available men away from traditional marriage, sob, but who nevertheless feels qualified to tell the rest of us how to mother.

P.S. They’re not scared off from marriage by feminism, darlings. Just the opposite. They’re at home, in their mothers’ basements, bingeing PornHub. They’ll lie and act outraged if you ask them about it, too. Don’t shoot the messenger.

I have mentioned here, in previous incarnations of this Substack if not the current one, that I was once in a Neopagan church (the Church of All Worlds) for a number of years. The specific event which caused me to quit the church was an argument I got into on the email chat list about whether mothers should work outside the home. I was solidly on the “pro” side and these so-called “feminists” hammered me for it. I was fucking done. At this point I was four years out from losing my son to my in-laws after leaving his father, and I understood that this had happened because I had been financially insolvent. (I’d have never sent him to stay with them, which was supposed to be temporary, in the first place if I’d had a decent income.) I also understood that being expected to work outside the home during my marriage while at the same time being the mother of a below-school-age child and having to navigate the ins and outs of childcare mostly by myself (especially once we moved to North Carolina, where Mike couldn’t ask for time off as easily as he previously could) meant that my employability was lower than it should have been by my late twenties. I lived in the South, the home of “traditional values” and the encouragement of tradwifery and tradmotherhood. If these assholes really walked their talk, there was no reason I should have had to struggle that hard.

Well, guess what.

I am going to say a very unfeminist-sounding thing. Too bad. I don’t know what these stupid women are thinking. I am guessing, based on context, that they think society will forgive women for taking so much time off of work to raise kids if we just tell prospective employers that we were home raising kids. Well, ladies, wake the fuck up because that is not what is happening. It didn’t happen in the late nineties and early aughts and it’s damn sure not happening now.

Social Security doesn’t care either. Did you know you don’t earn Social Security credits for staying home with your kids? Back when they used to know what a woman is, the National Organization for Women was gearing up to fight to obtain that for homemakers, and then the Right distracted them with the abortion war. And now they are being distracted by perverts in panties. Either way, mothers lose: if we are employed outside the home, we bring home less money than a man would with the same job because even if the pay’s the same, which it’s usually not, a man usually doesn’t have to pay for daycare. If we stay home with the kids, we don’t earn Social Security credits and we had better stay with the asshole husband our entire lives or it’ll be living in a refrigerator box in an alley in retirement, eating cat food out of cans. Even if he’s a good husband, which is better: being a widow with your husband’s Social Security, or being a widow with his Social Security and also yours? One payment or two? Can you math at all? Huh?

I do realize that many women who stay home with the kids and don’t have fucking fifteen of them (why???) tend to go back to work when the kid hits school age. That doesn’t matter; school age is five years old, usually. If you miss six months of work, future prospective employers will look at you kinda funny. If you miss five years, it is the kiss of death and you might as well go back to school, with money you do not have for I hope obvious reasons, because no one will touch you with a ten-foot pole. Not for anything with decent working conditions and a living wage. And if you have more than one kid, of course it’s going to be longer than five years — even worse. Remember, too, that Social Security (remember Social Security? see previous paragraph) is based on how much you earned in your working life. They first use that to calculate your credits, which determine whether you even qualify, and then they use it to calculate the amount of your monthly payment after retirement. If you didn’t earn shit, you ain’t getting shit. Again, it is simple math. It’s not even pre-algebra. Take off your shoes and socks if you can’t keep up.

This all sounds, to dishonest people, like I am against mothers raising our own kids. You can assume that, sure, but you’d be wrong. I am not against it; I actually would prefer it — in a society that was made for human families, which this one is not. I am simply noting the reality. We are REQUIRED to participate in a money economy for EVERYTHING, including life necessities. Even if we are on government assistance, the assistance is in the form of money so that we can then turn around and pay for the things we need. We are not allowed to opt out. Especially if children are in the picture.

We could have set this up one of two ways. We could have set up this money economy so that we could have our kids with us at work. This was the norm for most of human existence: we worked for life’s necessities with our children in the room or very nearby, certainly in our home territory. It was even the norm after we invented money. I am not talking about child labor, though sometimes that happened too. I am talking about not having children be totally separate from the productive lives of adults.

The other way we could have set it up was exactly how we did set it up: forcing children to be kept separate from money-generating activity. This worked as long as there was one adult in the household to mind the children and another adult in the household to earn the money. In that case you have one of two options: be flexible about who earns the money, or be rigid and force one type of person to stay home while the other type of person gets to earn the money. Guess which option we went with. And when you can’t be flexible and you enforce dependency on one class of people, guess what happens to that class of people. Exactly what women have been trying to escape for the past fucking century.

And now we’ve got our own saying we should go back into the cage. Go to hell.

Women do not need our future and our fate decided by fucking lazy cowards. We need a new way of doing things that works for both us and for our kids. Thanks to advances like the internet, we were close to achieving that, too, and then men started outsourcing to Asia and developing AI to replace the things we could have done at home. Even when the pandemic showed us just how many jobs didn’t have to be done in an office, meaning women could have had more options at last where we didn’t have to juggle hours so hard, men just couldn’t let that go. Their little power trips were too important to them; women’s and children’s lives, not one fucking bit.

So it’s getting to the point that women are doing the math (and didn’t even have to take off our shoes and socks) and realizing that it doesn’t pay to be mothers. Literally. Not even getting into the health damage that pregnancy and childbirth cause, being a mother does nothing to secure a woman’s future. Nothing. Zip. Zilch. Fuck-all.

You want us to be Good Mothers(tm) and do the mothering thing as its own reward. That’s not gonna keep us from living in a van in our fifties with everything we own in the back and our poor cat having to live on the dash. Which I personally saw — that literal thing, and immediately knew what I was seeing — during my homeless days. There is no protection against this happening. None. Literally we could do every single thing right and the man might still walk away and our children might still reject us. And then what? We’re left with no resources. We didn’t use those thirtysomething years of potential working life to earn them and save up.

Oh and don’t forget, the same assholes trying to push us back into the cage also want to cut the few programs we have in this country that might sometimes catch us when we fall. And only sometimes. I got bumped up for help only because I wore an Army soldier’s uniform for a few years; otherwise I’d have been lucky to find housing at all before they asked me to leave the shelter. Too many women don’t have that edge and have to get by with survival sex and God knows what else.

If this is what you call “traditional values,” you can shove your traditions up your asses sideways. But even that’s a lie. Tradition? What tradition? Nothing I consented to, certainly. I have a better idea. Let’s start a tradition where women can actually participate fully in society without ending up in the gutter for it. You can even leave your shoes on. Deal?