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.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Upcycling clothing labels -- don't throw anything away!

Image
Over the last two years I went through a period of buying new clothes to replace some "holey" ones. Each time I find a hard board label that comes with a punched hole and string, I say to myself: these are too good to go in the bin , even the recycling bin. (I am not sure if mixed materials like cardboard and metal can be recycled.) As I started to write this, I googled and learned that these are called "string" or "swing tags". They are basically custom "travel tags" which you can buy at stationers. In fact, there are crafters who personalise travel tags and sell them on market platforms (five for £3.50!). This is what I did for Christmas 2023. I started with these tags, all of sturdy cardboard, with punched holes. I removed the strings, but kept them, and you can replace them later. I then found my stash of Christmas cards from last year (ie those sent to us and saved from the bin). On the spot, decided to cut them into 1/2 inch strips. They co...
Read more

Going organic -- slowly

I was 'in conversation' with another happy customer. He tells me that "when things need replacing we try and replace them with an organic/fairtrade option". I think that is just such a sensible way to go. Like him, we are slowly switching over to organic bedding. Although the definition for 'need replacing' is slightly modified in my case. My son and I both have sensitive skin and some things have been making us itch. I wonder if it is the cheap cotton sheets we've been using. Up till now we've been buying bedding on the basis of whether they look good. For example, son was into anything to do with space/exploration, so we went and got him bedding with a 'space' theme on it. At that time I had no idea what harm conventional cotton was doing and the effect of conventional cotton on the skin. Some places offer such 'cheap' options that we -- I, really -- had succumbed to the temptation and had bought what I thought would suit us and our s...
Read more

Linguistic Hegemony: Cockles and Muscles

(A shorter, less controversial version of this was published in the Straits Times online section on 11th October. I had assumed that the Editor was not going to run it. Apologies for the overlaps.) The English-Singlish debate has thrown up a vociferous group defending the use of Singlish, largely because they see Singlish as being tied up with a Singapore identity. (I tried to explain how being a good Singaporean should not preclude us from learning to speak good English in a letter to the press .) This group seems to be made up of people who are able to speak (or at least write) excellent English when they choose to. There is a deafening silence, at least in the English cyber-media (and understandably so), from the Singlish-speaking group who could most benefit from learning to speak good English. If I were a Marxian sociologist (not the same as being a Marxist, nota bene ) I would say that this ‘good English’ group own the “means of production” and the ‘Singlish’ group do not. In or...
Read more