I REMEMBER my mother once telling me about the `day orphanages’ in the former Soviet bloc; grim places, by all accounts, where down-trodden mothers were forced to leave their tiny offspring while they trudged off to work because their financial situation was so dire they couldn’t afford not to.
Picturing those families where, in my mind at least, time at home was just a brief break from those institutions, I remember, despite being a little child myself, feeling a mixture of pity and horror.
Whether any of it was true or merely that era’s version of `fake news’ - propaganda spread by the `good side’ at the tail end of the Cold War, which lingered in public consciousness long afterwards, handed down to a new generation – I don’t suppose I will ever know.
I know around the time my mother was speaking sadly about this I was playing under the desk at her office, not romping carefree through fields in the style of the `Famous Five’ books of which I was so fond.
Were little girls and boys in the former Soviet bloc being told tales of how in the `west’ mothers were forced to take their children to work because capitalism had destroyed their family structures to such an extent they had no choice? It wouldn’t surprise me.
If there were really `day orphanages’ there is every reason to think that they were as bright and welcoming as the daycare so many of us leave our children in; with smiley, caring staff , a dizzying array of toys, sensory play areas, and tasty nourishing meals.
Still, I can’t help thinking about those `day orphanages’ - real or exaggerated – and the life so many of us are living in 2017.
Whether you rush back to work after maternity and paternity leave with the unadulterated joy of a gazelle skipping free from the jaws of a lion, or trudge miserably like those apocryphal mothers of eastern Europe, the likelihood is the only choice is when, not if.
When the bottom fell out of the housing market that only stopped it from spiralling to a point when mortgages would need to become intergenerational, it did not make them affordable.
In most cases, both parents still need to work to keep a roof over their offspring’s heads. All those sages urging others to buy because “renting is money wasted”, fail to take into account the fact that, for the majority of people, buying means paying back a bank or building society every day of your working life and then in all probability handing over that `asset’ to pay for basic care in your final years (I wonder what capital the other side’s propagandists would have made with that).
You need to work to pay for childcare and you need childcare to work. It doesn’t feel like a million miles from the days when you were paid just enough to feed your family, which you did by buying goods from the company’s store. The monetary merry-go-round where at the end of the day you don’t actually have any money.
Those of us lucky enough to love our jobs are able to rationalise the economic realities but there are still moments when you are brought up short by the Kafkaesque nightmare of it all.
As I begin settling my baby into the daycare where her older brother has been so happy for three years, I am also grappling with the Gordian knot that has presented itself on his transition to nursery.
His nursery is “too far away” for a pick-up by the daycare, so we have to find some way of getting him from nursery to the daycare, paying the full half-day fee for two-and-a-half hours.
Meanwhile, the nursery’s breakfast club, not unreasonably, won’t take him until he’s `settled in’. Which means we have to be in two places (work and nursery) simultaneously at 9am in the morning.
With two sets of grandparents, respectively, across town and busy and at the other end of the M1, the untying of the knot does not look promising.
Decent, reliable, affordable and flexible childcare continues to be one of the biggest headaches facing parents.
In 2016, a third reported that their childcare bill was higher than their mortgage/rent.
One parent I know was distraught at having to shelve plans to apply for a promotion after her child’s after-school closed with only a week’s notice.
So… does anyone know an Uber driver with an Access NI check? Or a `day orphanage’ on this side of the Iron Curtain?
