Gall, Wormwood and the Jewish mother

There may be Jewish Feminists but they do not represent Jewry. Feminism will never cross the Jewish threshold. It is gall and wormwood to the Jewish mother. Percy Cohen  (1904) Jews and feminism, The Westminster Review (October, p462)

The old motherhood statements are probably worth examining. They popped up again after Brexit, when the quantity of a woman’s progeny was touted as a quality for the new PM. I am a bit of an expert on this subject, in fact, by some standards I am a top candidate for British Prime Minister as I am currently bringing up my ninth (and absolutely final child…although I have said that on two previous occasions), That is a lot of kids by any standard.

 Please bear in mind that the majority were accidental, non-biological, and some were shorter term than others, but for most of my adult I have been cooking and cleaning up after 2-5 kids – the current ones are aged 17 and 25 so not children – living in my house.

I am not a remote-control mother although I don’t think I hover, either: I’ve sat on the hill among the schoolie mothers for many long summer afternoons, barracked for football, basketball, hockey, athletics; attended Christmas pageants ad nauseam, graduations and prize givings;  I’ve cooked for the canteen, successfully supervised several HSC’s, undergraduate degrees, funded many educational trajectories and assisted learner drivers with their 150 hours on road. I have not pumped out fifteen IVF infants or adopted a foreign tribe to collect either the welfare or media income on them, although I did entertain the thought when I noticed that strangers gravitated towards my cappuccino coloured kids and ignored the poor little pasty white ones. We have mostly struggled on in obscurity, financed by thrift (a virtue) and hard work (another virtue). Although I have only the minimal number of Jewish grandmothers to make this claim, I am in every way a Jewish mother. And a feminist.

Confessions of a Jewish mother

Before going into pre-history, I would like to mention that motherhood today is more exhausting, more costly, more complex and more demanding than ever before in human history. Women have gone from getting permission to work, to the expectation that they will maintain a flourishing career, be a gourmet entertainer in the home,  achieve drop-dead good looks as well as sexual energy and innovation, oh, and health, and be a yummy-mummy (whatever that means!). They must produce children worthy of the annual Christmas report to relatives and friends. By way of contrast, a 1980’s childhood included a neighbourhood cricket match in the middle of the dirt road that lasted six years, when a flash new basketball hoop and trampoline provided other options. A 1960’s childhood included collecting softdrink bottles worth sixpence each, and scouring the tip for goodness-knows what. Those long summers of unsupervised indolence still produced citizens…and sometimes a social conscience and a career plan.

 The needs of children and the demands on their parents in Western society today are incompatible and disproportionate. Expectations of children are unrealistic. Out of every dozen or so children, only one can be an all-round high achiever, but we have lost the old biblical concepts of specialisation, finding the child's one gift, accepting and nurturing it,even if it's a trade rather than a professions: the old “this one thing I do…”  or “whatsoever thy hand findeth to do – do with all your might.” 

NOTE - (I quote King James version of the bible here because it was on the walls of my Methodist Sunday School in Walthamstow, where we were exhorted to find our gift and excel in it. I should also mention that I have never forgotten the look of horror on the faces of the Sunday school teachers when, in response to their rhetorical question, I informed them I had learned to say shit-bugger-bum from my mum)

As I am officially old, I can use the expression “In my day…” to signal that anyone young enough to regard me as irrelevant should stop reading immediately.

“In my day..”

 I was a stay-home mother, whether I liked it or not.  I had to resign my job when I was obviously pregnant – they never knew quite how pregnant.  I left the Parramatta Advertiser offices on a Friday night, stood up jostled and bumped along on the crowded train all the way home to Penrith, and gave birth the next day. Getting back into fulltime journalism was almost impossible in the pre-child care era. There were also suspicions about married women with children.

It was not such a kind world for mothers – despite all the blathering about motherhood we were often treated with contempt. Breast feeding was regarded as a hippie sport, and there was nowhere to do it, apart from the occasional dirty public toilet. Smelly babies were also hard to deal with in the absence of niceties such as change facilities at Macca’s which came years later. Going shopping with toddlers was not easy before aluminium racing style pushers. I had the great iron Double Trouble (pram) which I pushed to and from the train station, and the ugly little official there made me drag the kids, the shopping and the pram up and down 38 steps to protect me against using the ramp across the lines. On the homeward journey at least one exhausted child had to walk in order to make space for the groceries. That was before families had two cars.

The recession of the nineties seemed to start in 1989. I think it was called the dot-com boom-bust, but we didn’t know what that meant, except that interest rates, which we had negotiated at 5% only five years earlier,  and had been assured would never go beyond 10% -  went to 16%  - many  people lost their homes and we only dodged the bullet because my husband got a redundancy package.  Redundancies were the flavour of the eighties and many men were casualised for life - just like women remain casualised today: minimal superannuation in that.  The playgroup crowd shared strategies: powdered milk, apples bought from the orchard by the box, ditto honey, grow your own spinach, potatoes and onions, eat a lot of soup, and cook everything from scratch. Like my ancestors who survived The Thirties Depression, my moral compass is set to thrifty. We went to MacDonalds, half an hour away, for birthdays. There were no holidays until the late 90’s.

 

Domestique

Without the benefit of dishwasher, clothes dryer or child care, I raised my children and went on to the next thing – as did they. So there was a little snafoo with a late baby (another final child), but once you’ve had a tribe, well, one little life to carry on into the next century is not a big ask.  

The post baby years were the time of greatest creativity, leading into the decades in which my career changed course and did indeed flourish, if that means it provide somethings like human service, satisfaction, interest as well as some money.

The non-baby, freer years have stretched much further than that brief busy, joyful moment of having a houseful of infants. I took my mother’s advice and did not retire at 55 (well, she could – superannuation back then was a company pension) - but I don't aspire to a 40 year retirement.

Children grow up very quickly. They are not a life’s work, and they leave great decadal gaps to define yourself, explore potential and make a contribution. What kind of household requires the fulltime services of a stay-at-home wife for life? 

Motherhood, although I have had it in abundance, is not an adequate definition of who I am or what I do, and if my kids get up at my funeral and talk about what a great mother I was, I will rise up from my coffin and announce 20 other nouns and adjectives that define my life. Like any quasi-Jewish mother, like most of my friends, I love the domestique. It is a wonderful zone of creativity. It needs to be the place where we come to play when we have a little time to spare from the real work of life.