Thread by @AyoCaesar

Thread incoming, read til the end before you get mad at me.

What's been going on these last few days on the cleaners/working mums/child-rearing thing isn't a good faith conversation. It's journos with long-standing beefs enjoying a chance to get angry with each other.

But one thing that seems really weird to me is that women having and raising children is being positioned as something which is an onerous and oppressive interruption from real self-fulfillment, which comes from work. And that got me thinking about my mum during my childhood.

There was no agonising over whether it was better to get a cleaner, or get my father to do more housework. And that was cos we couldn't afford one, were often precariously housed, and dad hadn't been a part of out lives since I was a newborn. Some problems solve themselves!

My mum was a working single mum. A childminder for a bit, and then a social worker. And as a frontline social worker, she had to work late an awful lot (because child abusers don't respect the 8 hour working day, who knew).

And while I could see the stress that money worries caused her, sitting up late by herself at the kitchen table running her hands through her hair, I didn't understand them (obviously, because I was like 5 years old lol).

All I knew was that I saw other kids mums - and even dads! - picking them up from primary school, cutting the crusts of sandwiches while we watched CBBC, all that kind of thing. I didn't understand why it would be dark before my mum got home, and all I knew was that I missed her.

I absolutely LIVED for those rare times when she could take a day off to be one of the mums on a school outing, or pick me up from school. And when I was like 6, I went through a phase of being really clingy and crying when she had to work late.

But it wasn't just hard for me. It was hard for her.

We've talked about it now I'm old enough to understand, how she felt so awful for missing so much time with us, even though she had no choice. It wasn't just guilt, but missing out on something that made her really happy.

It doesn't mean she wasn't proud of her work, or that she didn't derive a sense of identity from it. She absolutely did, and still does! And having more time for cleaning wouldn't have made her more self-actualised as a woman or whatever.

The home wasn't something she wanted to escape from in order to better sell her labour.

The necessity of having to sell her labour to keep a roof over our heads took her away further away from the home where her kids were, from the joy and pride she took in motherhood.

Liberal white feminism has often ignored the fact that the post-war era didn't invent working women. Working class women have always sold their labour.

For working class women, and working class women of colour in particular, the restriction of time in the home doesn't represent emancipation from patriarchy or capitalism. It's another way in which those forces express themselves.

The conversation of the last few days has had little recognition of how domestic time can be hugely restricted along the lines of class. How some working mums spend more time cleaning up after your kids than raising theirs, and what they might prefer to spend time doing.

Anyway that's my thread over, you can all yell at me now.

TL;DR my mum didn’t want to be “liberated” from raising her children, she wanted economic stability so she could have the time to do it.

Amazing. Talking to my mum about her experience of motherhood doesn’t count, and if I really want to learn something, I should read some Helen Lewis.

These journos simply can’t bear the thought that they don’t have the final say on womanhood.