I’m ashamed to admit that I am still using my few free minutes a week, the moments spent neither working nor doing a pick-up or drop-off nor studying for the Canadian citizenship exam (but not in vain!) nor using the new kitchen to make disastrous bread having apparently forgotten how to bake during this time, what was I saying? Oh right, that I am using those minutes to plod through Doc Martin.
I’m now in Season 5, which has just killed off Stephanie Cole’s delightful character, though not because anything bad happened to the elderly actress. (She’s still alive, but went on to bigger and better things, like getting to be on Inside No. 9 with Steve Pemberton and Reece Shearsmith, who are—this is relevant I promise—far more appealing than Martin Ellingham).
It’s bad timing, what with how I’m now officially writing the straight-women book, but the character of Doc Martin is conspiring to turn me into a ban-men feminist. He has, as of the last episode I’ve seen, decided that while it is extremely important that his on-again off-again girlfriend stay home with her baby (their baby), and not return to her teaching job (which she needs, for money, because who else is supporting her?) after her six-week maternity leave, it’s reasonable to expect her to spend that leave being his unpaid receptionist while also looking after this newborn without any help.
I find myself hoping the next episode of Season 5 has Louisa coming for Martin with an axe, or at least a cutting remark of some kind, but even this seems out of step with the show. He’s just going to bandage someone’s hangnail or whatever and she’s going to look into his eyes and tell him he’s a wonderful doctor and they’ll be on-again, again.
On that note, kind of: Wesley Yang’s newsletter just ran a piece that cleverly weaves the mommy wars into the culture wars. Mommy Wars x Culture Wars, if you will.
It is about the Louisas of the world, the moms, and it takes very much the Martin position: a baby needs to be home with its mother. Like Martin, Laura Wiley Haynes is more interested in chastising those who rah-rah mothers working outside the home, than she is with the material reasons why even some who might be stay-at-home moms do not go that route. There’s a little aside about funding UBI rather than daycares, but that is not the heart of the matter.
No, that would be its central, and as far as I know original, argument: Rather than blaming the fact (presented as a fact by every generation) that youth of today are in unprecedented crisis on smartphones, or Covid lockdowns, what if the problem goes back further and is… daycare?
Which, look, there’s an excellent case for not setting up society such that newborns go to daycare. Daycare-for-newborns isn’t exactly something most mothers want, I suspect, but rather something American women wind up doing so as not to be unemployed for having inconvenienced their employer by having a baby. I’m not persuaded that newborns being in daycare broke society, but I’m with Haynes on it not being great, and on the importance of society funding alternatives.
What’s less clear is whether there’s some compelling reason to keep toddlers and preschoolers at home—and their mothers home looking after them. Haynes is first discussing infants under a year, but then starts up about the preciousness of the years up to age 3 and this is a road you can go down and the next thing you know you’re home-schooling graduate students.
I will now take you on my own daycare journey. I did not go to daycare myself, so my own many failings must be attributed to other causes. I grew up with an understanding of daycare as this thing a mother understandably turns to if left with no other options, but that everyone would go with staying home or hiring a nanny if they could. This is because that’s roughly how it went where and when I grew up, coupled with whichever subjective understandings and all-out misunderstandings of the world around me.
I now have two young children, in a different environment, in a different country, at a different time, and am a daycare enthusiast. Assuming, obviously, good daycares, but the same could be said about children’s home lives.
What can I say? I like to model, for my daughters, earning an income, and having interests outside the domestic sphere. I also uh have interests outside that sphere, which I was glad to put on hold with both new babies, but was not prepared to abandon entirely. But also, and arguably more to the point, I think it’s great that my children get to be around others their own age. They also both started at over a year old (one was close to 2), so at an age where they were interacting with peers. I’m grateful for Canada, and for flukes of life, that made this possible.
The problem with daycare discourse—not just that newsletter post—is the lack of precision about when, exactly, a baby needs its mother. Everything gets into this strange muddle, where being able to nurse or otherwise care for an 8-week-old is somehow the same thing as staying home with a 3-year-old and actually should you really be sending your 10-year-old to school, when you consider Schools These Days?
It’s almost as if there’s a way to avoid sending newborns to daycare but also to allow the mothers of toddlers and older children to live their lives and earn money. What if, hear me out, because I definitely just invented this idea: what if the state paid women to stay home for a year, and then after that year, they returned to the workforce? Has anyone considered the possibility?
It’s well and good to discuss how universal funded daycare went in Quebec for whichever newborns went to it, but the real place daycare-for-newborns an issue is the US, land of pumping-in-offices (largely avoidable if the baby’s home with you while an age where that’s relevant), land of, your baby is five minutes old, and either you will be a Working Mom and go back immediately, or you have chosen/been forced to choose Being A Mom and that is instead your route, your path, and good luck finding your way back into the paid workforce should you wish to do so/have to do so later on.
I cannot emphasize enough, to American readers, that one-year-off, give or take a few months, is how it (often) goes in Canada. The year off per kid somehow do not mean women are then all stay-at-home moms, far from it. Precisely because the staying-at-home is expected and expected to be finite, there’s this structure for it, and it need not go on forever. It’s what even the most go-getter hyper-professional moms do. There is a lot of staying home with an actual baby and not a whole lot of doing so with an older child.
Because there’s a moment at which being apart from one’s baby can seem unfathomable, and also one where it’s more like, no, actually, it is good for the entire family that the 4-year-old is back at school.
People are really overreacting to the feelings of loneliness and isolation we’ve collectively felt due to COVID/smartphones. We spent from the 80’s-2010 letting women work outside the home and civilization didn’t collapse and people’s mental health didn’t collapse. Maybe consider there’s something special about the last 10 years before forcing women back into the kitchen in the hopes that it will fill some vague hole in our collective soul.
Awkward question:
"I think it’s great that my children get to be around others their own age."
Why? You never really spend time "around others your own age" except in weirdly recent social innovations like compulsory public school or summer camp. Why is it preferable for two year olds to be with two year olds, and not with a variety of different ages?