De-skilling wives

Today is a day of celebration for me. It has been since 1998 when I got married.

Sadly as I pondered the blessing that my husband has been to me, I know of friends whose marriages have fallen apart.

What appears to be common in these is that these friends are/were married to high-earning lawyers. As my son is just about to start on his law conversion course (after an undergraduate degree in Classics), I had spent many hours mulling over why some marriages hold and some don't.

These friends and I also share another characteristic: we are all highly-educated women, previously with enviable careers working for some of the top multi-nationals, had kids, and we became stay-at-home mothers.

Why did their lawyer husbands then decide to explore and then prefer relationships with other women, themselves also lawyers?

I can only think that their ability to earn high incomes meant it was easy for their wives to remain at home. This, in itself, is not a bad thing.

However, as I learned, staying at home, talking baby talk to infants often turn our grey cells to mush. I needed to get away from just "being mum".

Slowly, but imperceptibly, we lose our identity. I was no more "Miss", "Mrs" or "Dr" so-and-so. I was somebody's mum. Outside of the schoolgate context, people do not recognise me as the whole person that I was.

I was "somebody's mum", and that was the be-all and end-all of my identity.

With the loss of identity came the loss of confidence.

I could never understand why people said "women lose their confidence". "How could that be?" I asked. When women have been a leader in their high-powered job, travelling the world, meeting people, etc. how could a stint as a stay-at-home mother rob these women of their confidence?

Then I became one of these women.

When I -- still unemployed -- had to go to Paris to present an academic paper, I was so lacking in confidence that I dragged my family along, and pretended that it was a good idea to turn this novel experience into a family holiday. 

I was too scared to travel abroad on my own. Fact!

Meanwhile my friends got very good at organising their children, ensuring that uniforms are laundered and pressed, everything needed for school trips was ordered and delivered, they were well-fed, well-behaved and performed well above average at school.

Their friendship circles shrink.

There weren't any women friends they could lunch with regularly who could/would have alerted them that their husbands' behaviour was suspect; nip the problem in the bud.

And when the nasty stuff hits the fan, these high-earning lawyer husbands say, "All that you are doing for me, I can pay someone else to do."

That must have hurt. SO VERY MUCH.

So I tell my son (in anticipation), if you could afford for your wife to stay at home to look after the kids, you can afford to hire someone to do the cooking and cleaning, etc. If you choose to marry an intelligent woman, please do not de-skill her to the point where you cannot have an interesting conversation with her, to the point where you need to seek the company of a lawyer colleague, to the point where you think it's preferable to leave the wife who had supported you in your early legal career, and your children, and in the course of that, strip her of every shred of financial entitlement that she had helped you to accumulate.

It hit home again last week when we looked into the Bible and were reminded in the book of Malachi: "So be on your guard, and do not be unfaithful to the wife [read husband as well] of your youth." 

Your comments are appreciated.