Today is Mother’s Day, so showing your mum how much you value her is the first order of business. But how do you establish a value for your mum? And if you are a mum, how do you put a price on your own head without seeming like a complete egomaniac?
One way is to get killed in a car crash, and your other half can then sue the other driver for loss of general factotum and consort. The law is excellent at ascertaining value, in its impartial, unemotional, cash-inflated way. And you might be pleasantly surprised at how much you are/she is worth.
Alternatively, Caledonian Life did a study last year that determined that an Irish home-maker was worth €59,000 a year. This was downgraded last week to €54,000 to reflect a drop in wages. The figure includes the cost of replacement labour for cleaning, taxi-driving, childcare, cooking and psychological counselling.
Of course, it’s Caledonian Life’s raison d’etre to terrify you into taking out spouse-insurance, but that doesn’t mean that its figures aren’t correct. Besides, as a nation, we are losing the capacity to experience financial terror, as we stand here shivering and cowering in the banking dystopia that is modern Ireland. As the economy continues to nose-dive, we’ll soon be taking out insurance on our insurers.
So we’ll run with €54,000. But then you must add on the home-maker’s earnings, as increasingly women are running the home while also earning some kind of living. Nobody now will ever ask a mother whether she “works”; they ask her whether she “works outside the home”.
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It is common for a mother to do several hours’ work before she gets to sit down and do some work.
My children are now 10 and 12. I used to have parenting ambitions that they would become junior concert pianists and champion show jumpers. Over the years, these ambitions dwindled down to: preventing them from getting run over by a car; and preventing them from drowning. For more than a decade, I have stood frozen in “novelty pools”, clad only in a bathing costume, making sure that they didn’t go under on a variety of terrifying water slides with names such as Green Death and Master Blaster. But now they are sufficiently old not to need the clucking-hen routine quite so much.
During the last mid-term break (they come every fortnight), I took them to the National Aquatic Centre in Blanchardstown, and they went off alone to do the water thing. I kept all my clothes on and headed for the cafe, which has a large window looking over the pool. They were to come and signal if they broke any limbs. In the cafe is a long bench with about six high tables arrayed in front of the viewing window. I took out my laptop and started to work. Dear reader, I was writing this very column. Not this exact one, but one a few weeks ago. Although the schools were on holiday, I was not. And I was not alone.
After a while a woman sat at the table next to mine, and she also took out a laptop. A couple of long-limbed teenage girls on the other side of the glass waved at her and made funny faces. She waved back.
Like many writers, I am basically a nosy parker, so I had a sideways peek at her screen and could see that she was running payroll software. Talking with her later, I learnt she was a self-employed accountant and did books for several small businesses, working from home while minding two teenage daughters. Her husband had a demanding job that involved a lot of travel.
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Soon another woman came along and sat at the next table along from the two of us and also took out a laptop. She seemed to be connected to a mob of boys waving through the window. I took the long way round to the cafe counter, and had a surreptitious gawk at what was going on with her. She appeared to be selling oil shares, hopping between a variety of news sites, and barking in at least two languages other than English into her mobile phone. It was the week that the Libyan crisis erupted. She may well have been co-ordinating the revolution.
“I’ll be okay here in the dark,” goes the old light-bulb joke about the Irish mammy, who has traditionally been cast in the image of the Virgin Mary. The modern Irish mother is no longer sitting in the dark, but that doesn’t mean that she’s not enduring a martyrdom of sorts. The flexibility of modern work practices means that many jobs can be done almost anywhere, and the laptop is ubiquitous. Work, both inside and outside the home, can be endless.
I have ruminated since about what an curious image of Irish motherhood was on display that day in the National Aquatic Centre: women with flexible and portable jobs, multi-tasking away. Often self-employed, there are no “privilege days” for this lot, apart of course from the eternal privilege of motherhood. (I feel compelled to put something pious in here, given the day.) I rang around a few of my self-employed mothering friends to get some comments on this, but they were all too busy to answer the phone.