I Don’t Have a Job, But I do Work

7 minute read

I don’t work. That’s according to my children and most likely a whole host of other people, such as the Government, who won’t give me credits towards my pension; or people with little experience of raising babies, who might imagine I watch a lot of television.

I don’t work like Daddy ‘works’. He needs to be alone in a room dedicated to his work. I’ve misled my children by using the wrong terminology. I say things like – ‘No, I’m dropping you to school; Daddy has to work’ and ‘Shh, we’ll make your jigsaw in this room; Daddy’s working’. So now they think that working is something he does and I don’t, while, really, he is ‘engineering’ on any given day. I am working too. I am ‘mothering’. These are our jobs, our roles – and both are, in fact, valid types of work.

Before having my first baby I used to work in marketing and public relations and it was really very nice. It was challenging and interesting and utilised at least 35% of my talents on any given day. It provided me with a paycheque and a feeling of getting somewhere in life.

A job, a professional job, meant I was somewhere on the ladder, didn’t it? A job showed I had the ‘right’ kind of ambition, that I had get-up-and-go, that I was contributing to society by not being someone who, well, didn’t have a job?

If someone asked me what I did, I had an answer that, at the very least, elicited a vaguely interested nod, not an ‘Oh God I could never do THAT’, like it sometimes does now.

But you know how in school – in religion class – we learned about how you’d just know if you were called to a vocation? How it would call to you, this amazing glimmering light of sudden recognition, which you would feel in your heart and soul – that thing you had to do, that you were destined to do. I got my calling way, way back and have always been aware that my biggest ambition, always, was to be a mother who would be at home with her children.

That’s not to say my ambition was primarily to have a child, because I do think that I might have been okay had I never had children. I think – I hope – I might have gotten over such heartache in the long term. It was more this thing that if I did have children I would need to be with them, at home, always. It wasn’t a choice – it was this vocation. Like a nun, my vocation doesn’t have a pay cheque and it requires a degree of privilege to pursue (did you know that most convents charged a handsome dowry for those entering as novices?). But you make a calling happen if you can at all. It’s an imperative.

The idea of ‘work’ has become quite singular, with very little room to facilitate or properly reward the artistic, the emotional, or the caring that is needed – and is being done, mainly by women – in the world. The American dream that ascribed status to what you worked at, the now-debunked dream of ‘having it all’, the way in which we sneer at the idea that teachers have the summer off (How dare they! Time off when they could be, well, working more?) shows that there’s a problem with how we define ‘work’ and with how this definition edges out any scope for most people to bring their life’s talents and passions to their day job. I remember seeing a quote from Meghan Markle in the months following the souring of her relationship with the Royal Family about how she had been “working since I was 16”. I’m not sure what she worked at – perhaps a babysitting job or a shop assistant – but I still wonder about what she was getting at.

Obviously, she felt this fact gave her a sense of moral superiority, while also perhaps undermining the path taken by members of the royal family who don’t ‘work’ in the traditional sense (although I do not begrudge Kate Middleton her day job one bit; it looks tortuous, if glamorous and luxurious).

I also believe Markle was feeding into the age-old idea that you are only a good person if life has at some point in time been tough. You need to be a grafter, to work your way up, to learn the hard way in order to have the right to a half decent life or to be viewed as a decent person.

But we need to ask why, in this day and age, our lives must be so bloody hard? I don’t think many of us will forget Kim Kardashian’s recent assertion that people just don’t seem to want to work hard. What a sucker punch to those for whom working hard still results in barely staying afloat.

Since becoming a person who does not officially ‘work’ this subject has become exceptionally interesting to me, because it seems to me that the human race is obsessed with applying a kind of harshness and rigidity and routine to careers which do not serve our souls or our humanity. We pretend that work is about a sense of purpose and satisfaction, when really it’s about money and status. Maybe the extra things we can afford to buy will distract from the fact that many of us are forced to work in jobs that are at best okay and, at worst, softly killing our souls. Shouldn’t we all be able to choose to spend our lives sitting on a beach if we would so wish? Or to write poetry, if we so like? What would it matter, as long as we’re not hurting anybody? Life is so short. Why, in order to live, must we ‘work’?

Artists, musicians, writers… they get it. They pursue their dreams in a world that makes it pay for perhaps 10%. The rest subsist. So do monks and people who do great things for charity and full-time carers. But the longer you stay out of the job market, the more you come to see that world for what it is. We become chained to a job for fear of losing financial stability, and this is understandable. But it’s also out of fear of having a gap on our CV, or not having an answer to impress that person we bump into from school who asks us, ‘And what do you do now?’.

Because, let’s be realistic here, I do work. I work hard. And on so many days I want to throw in the towel, even though it’s my dream job.

The moaning and the messiness and the repetition and boredom and isolation that comes with parenting can be stifling. It is so, so hard.

And yet, to me, the only way I know how to mother is to do it entirely. I don’t want a minder to share the burden, I don’t want more ECCE hours, or a part-time job, or to go out to work while my partner stays at home. I am doing motherhood like an all-consuming addiction, which is constantly on the cusp of killing me. I can’t wait for it to be over and yet I never want it to end.

When my children told me I didn’t, in fact, ‘work’, I had to think long and hard. I mean, the feminist in me was in some way trained to feel I should be going out to work in order to show my girls – and my boy – that a woman’s place is not in the home, it is on the corporate ladder. I have a Masters Degree, for God’s sake! But I want to model living a life that I love, where I’m doing the job that I actually want more than anything else. I want them to learn, as I did from my own parents, that it doesn’t really matter whose work brings in the money because when you’re a family you do what you can to live a life according to the values you hold highest. I want them to see that raising children – raising them – is my most important role, and this is the way I need to do it. For myself, as well as for them.

When it’s election time and the odd politician calls to our door and they see my disheveled mum bun and toys strewn across the hall and the dark circles under my eyes, they will inevitably mention their commitment to providing increased and cheaper access to childcare. And that is vital for the people who want and need the service. ‘But I like being at home’, I say, challenging them. ‘What about my pension?’ I ask, ‘Or a training scheme for when I do return to the workforce, or something to pay me now for the work I’m doing to support the wheels of capitalism?’. It kind of bewilders them. Why would I want to be at home, every day, when my small children could be cared for by someone else while I made a tiny profit which I could… spend at Woodies at the weekend?

And that’s when I, as a human being first and foremost, take a long look at life and our humanity. Thankfully, my circumstances support me living my own personal dream (or, more realistically, we cut our cloth to fit the dream). But what if we could all live our dream, whatever that might look like? What if work didn’t need to be so hard and removed from what truly stirs our heart? What if we valued art and creativity and caring and dreaming and meandering gently through life? What if ‘work’ could be arranged around what makes our heart sing, if our day job came from a place of deep knowing about what was right for us, a tailor-made, individualised vocation? What if our day job was all about our life’s work? And we made an actual, good living out of it?

I Don’t Have a Job, But I do Work

7 minute read

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