One morning, at childcare drop-off, I hung my daughter’s backpack on her bag hook, lifted her over the child-proof gate, and gave a loud good-morning greeting to the childcare worker in the room. But this particular morning, before I left the childcare centre, I looked back again, and surveyed the scene. In one corner, three children were arguing over a puzzle. Another was standing on a chair in the middle of the room, loudly declaring his hunger. Several more little ones were over in the reading corner, deliberating over a brightly coloured picture book. Two were crying near where I stood: loud devastated tears wetting their chubby cheeks as they yelled respectively for their Dadda and Mum to come back.
The childcare worker made her way to where I stood, near the wailing children. She lowered herself down to her knees and put an arm around each of them.
Maxine Beneba-Clarke. Source: Supplied by Danyal Syed
“I don’t know how you do this,” I said. “I see you with all these kids, and you’re so calm. They love you so much. You’re a miracle worker. What you do is incredible.” A strange look came over her face. I wondered if I’d said something wrong. Then she said “Thank you.” She paused, as if considering whether to say something else. “The mothers who come here….mostly they say ‘Why did you not make my child eat all his lunch?’ or ‘Are you teaching her the alphabet? My child is three, he should be starting to learn the alphabet now.’ Or the child had lost a toy from home or a sock and they’re very angry about it. Nobody has ever said anything like what you said to me before.” Her voice was shaking. I was stunned.
How many of those beating the affordable childcare drum would also take a morning off to raise their placards and march the street for better pay for the women who leave their own kids with friends and family members because they cannot afford childcare themselves, and come to work every day to look after ours?
We focus mostly, in the childcare debate, on middle and upper middle class women; on the costs versus benefits of returning to work; on the fact that we want childcare to be more affordable, and more readily available in the workplace. But how many of those beating the affordable childcare drum would also take a morning off to raise their placards and march the street for better pay for the women who leave their own kids with friends and family members because they cannot afford childcare themselves, and come to work every day to look after ours?
A month or so ago, I posted a short poem on Twitter. It read:
there are other women
who want to say
#metoo
but can’t
they sit at home
minding the children
of women who march
& hoping to god
the husbands
of those women
do not arrive home
first
The poem went viral. Amongst other things, it was retweeted by activist Deray to his 1 million followers, and Instagrammed by Essence magazine to their 1.1 million followers.
Debate around the meaning of the poem was rife. Some of the replies, from women in particular, were bafflingly illuminating. They included comments such as: Why would you let such a beautiful woman in your house working around your husband? And this makes me feel uncomfortable, I feel like she is blaming the women who are out marching. Nonsense proliferated. I turned off my notifications.
We are failing if we don’t put carers first. We are failing as feminists, and we are failing as parents.
How can it be so, in these #metoo times, that many women still have such little empathy for other women working looking after their children? Childcare for me, as a single parent, was robbing Petra to pay Pauline. For the first few years with my daughter, I lost money by working and putting her in care, but I understood it as an investment in my long term work future (and those early days were the sound basis for a career change which now supports my family). But I still wondered, at the time, and worried, about the circumstances of my child’s carers.
We are failing if we don’t put carers first. We are failing as feminists, and we are failing as parents.
Anti work-place harassment campaigns have been recently spearheaded by privileged women with famous faces, without consideration of women for whom a complaint might lead to immediate dismissal, and the inability to pay rent; might mean their children go hungry; might mean residing in the homeless shelter. The Twittersphere collectively loses its mind over the injustice some uber-rich Hollywood actor being paid several million dollars less than her male co-star. But I want to know how much that actor’s female Nanny gets paid. I want to know how she speaks to her female personal assistant. I want to know if she gives the woman who cleans her house the time of day.
Anti work-place harassment campaigns have been recently spearheaded by privileged women with famous faces, without consideration of women for whom a complaint might lead to immediate dismissal, and the inability to pay rent.
There are other intersections, as well, that play into this socioeconomic dynamic. The women at my child’s childcare were almost exclusively women of colour, like me. They were all of them excellent carers, in their own special ways. Some were better qualified in their home countries, but had found their qualifications invalid in Australia and retrained because they loved kids, and childcare was something comparatively inexpensive to study. For some it was their dream job, and they’d never wanted to do anything else.
Some had been in childcare for many years, and now found themselves trapped and with no other transferable skills – at least, transferable skills written on the paper they were required to be on to enter another industry. They were universally underpaid for the work that they did. And they were more than just the people who wiped my child’s bottom, and dried her tears, and spoon fed her lunch, in the same was I hope people consider me more than just a Mum.
Maxine Beneba-Clarke will speak at panel, with Dr Rebecca Huntley and Clementine Ford, at the Sydney Opera House on Sunday May 20.
