…but I can’t have it. I can only ever have a guilt- and resentment-tinged shadow of my version of ‘it all’. Just like, it seems, SJP in her latest film “I don’t know how she does it”. Having read an irritating review in the British newspaper The Times it seems that the ever full-of-herself SITC star is trying to prove that women can have the perfect life with a great career and great job but fails. Well, quite frankly, no shit Sherlock.
In my opinion, today’s women have fewer choices and more obligations than we are led to believe. The media, the government and society at large make us feel as though going to work while having a family is obligatory. Where it was once a desirable and optional thing, today’s government seems to believe that families are better off with both parents at work while strangers care for their children, even from 6 months or a year old. How can that be good? Who truly believes that strangers, albeit professional strangers, will care for their child as well as themselves? What impact will that have on their development? So stay at home and do it yourself… but this is no longer a real choice.
Because of the nature of a capitalist culture, money has been squeezed from the budget of the average family up to the pockets of business owners. Where once the breadwinner’s income was enough to support a lower middle class family, today the same family needs both partners to work to barely cover the basic costs of living. From what I gather, a generation ago people bought homes in their twenties and had pensions growing nicely, but these days young couples rent rooms in shared houses or live at home with parents well into their thirties and often have no pension, unless they work in exceptionally well-paid jobs. To buy a home often requires the equivalent of the couple’s annual income as deposit so any kind of pension is out of the window. Then, once they make it on the ladder, the cost of bills have soared over the last 7 years such that they can easily be close to £400 per month (gas, electricity, water, TV licence, cable/satellite, Internet, phones, local council tax etc). A mortgage on a two-bed flat in a rundown neighbourhood of London can easily be more than £800 a month and that’s with today’s low interest rates and whacking great deposits. So one entire income goes on the basic costs of living while the other covers food, transport and social life – with possibly a tiny bit of savings for a holiday if you’re lucky.
Let’s assume, rightly or wrongly, that the happy couple with the keys to their lovenest safely in their mitts start getting clucky and have a child (or two). They suddenly realise that all their pre-birth plans of being cool parents who cart the kid to gallery openings and meals out at fancy restaurants or slotting back into their jobs after a few months of babydom are no longer as important or easy as they had seemed only a few months ago. Something has happened to their rationality – love.
Suddenly providing the best life possible for your child becomes the priority and that’s being cared for by Mum and Dad who tend to have their child’s best interests at heart unless there’s something wrong with them. Suddenly, returning to that creative, high-pressure unpaid overtime job doesn’t seem so appealing. You actually want to see your child take their first step or say their first word – not hear about it from Sue who’s in charge of the baby room. Unfortunately, desperate searches of the Internet, papers and job agencies reveals that part-time work often pays minimum wage (or close to it) and you know that if you ask your boss to consider flexi-hours or a job share you’ll be out on your ear in a jiffy. So the couple realise that they actually can’t afford to look after their own children unless they’re willing to eat dust and get a lodger while sharing the only other bedroom with their child. So they try to find the best childcare they can to assuage their parental guilt before realising that again they are screwed. In my neighbourhood the average nursery costs between £70 and £80 per day. Yes, you read that correctly – per day. This means that unless they earn more than £27,500 they effectively lose an entire salary on childcare. Ah, but what about the childcare portion of working tax credit. Well, excuse me for not getting over-excited about a means-tested maximum of £55 per week. I’m not on anywhere near £27,500 and I get £40 working tax credit a month. I’m not likely to get more than a fiver for childcare.
And that’s the catch-22 my generation find ourselves in. We slogged our guts out to pay off our student debt in our twenties, then do it again to pay the deposit on a shoebox-sized flat in our early thirties only to find we can’t afford to live in it any more now that we have children.
And let’s face it, if a hedge-fund manager can’t do it what chance do the rest of us mere mortals have SJP?
