A lifetimes experience of coping

 

Subject: A lifetimes experience of coping.

I lived in a golden era. An era when newly released from war, people elected a new form of government. Not one fixated of balance sheets and the financial bottom line but on the population as a whole. There was a sense that for the first time a government cared for the ordinary people, the masses and didn't just pay lip service to them at election time. This was a  massive change of political heart which saw people for the first time offered protection  covering ill health and unemployment, a situation almost unheard of in the pre-war Britain. The post-war government was built on men and women made from a different cloth with different ideas of what was right and wrong, who sided with humanity as a whole and not just the privileged class.

There were many obstacles. The City for one, entrenched in its own self preservation and a county who's finances had been plundered by war and debts, which would continue stretch through the generation growing up, but the underlying difference between what had gone before was the ideology 'that we all counted' and must 'all be valued the same'.

The aristocracy and its wealth, a wealth built on stock holdings and not productive capital, as in Germany, was ill placed to reignite the economy and instead it depended on the nationalisation of critical industries including the Bank of England to focus on specific investment projects to rebuild the countries infrastructure in time of need. With a work force depleted by the slaughter of men at the front women came to the fore and entered the factories doing the work normally expected of men. This was not only a necessity but it placed women on the front line of any recovery. For many working women, released from keeping house and becoming financially independent meant that there was the start of an assertion of their equality in society and at work and the respect became due, not only as the fundamental home makers but as a providers also.

This tussle is still with us today. One opinion seeking to impress their role as mother over their ability to earn since there is the danger of a clash of priorities.

The single mother was born of this assumption that a woman was equally capable in the home and in the work space. With the dreadful attitude of some men towards their responsibility as breadwinners, the absent father forced more and more women out to work with a diminution of their important role in bringing up children. In some homes the children seem like a commodity, a badge of womanhood in which poorly educated young women feel that having a baby is part of a 'passage of right' irrespective of the unending role of being a parent. There is no relief for the single mom no one in the home to turn to, no adult conversation, only a never ending series of demands from naturally hedonistic children who having played no part in the decision to be born had views to their importance growing up. For the single mother trying to find ways to fulfil these competing claims on her time, the job on the one hand the kids on the other there are few moments they can call their own. Fitting the hours of the day and the night, into the chaotic demands of work and child raising would be well beyond the competence of most men who's egotistical sense of themselves and of what can and should be done limits them to single tasking, clearly way short of what's required in the single parent family.  

Why I ask myself do women do it. Is the urge to be a mother is greater than their sense of what's involved. Did they believe the father of their child and his promises to stand by them or was the cohort of motherhood just too great to let common sense prevail. And what of the children who grow up in a home unbalance by not having the genetically linked dad who was expected to grow into the role of father. His imprint on their lives is missing and he sometimes becomes what can be the corrosive element in the mother's life, the occasional dad who when around, spoils the children but isn't there when they need discipline.

Still the young girls fall pregnant and decide to go it alone. It's not like it was in the 50s when society was indignant that girls should have children out of wedlock. It's not through lack of education or the methods to prevent an unwanted birth, it's almost a perverse reaction which is maybe part of societies attitude towards sex as a recreational pastime and not an evolutionary, or god given act of procreation with all the implicit importance attached.

Of course there are thousands of unhappy marriages where living under the same roof becomes a problem. In theses cases the advantages of not rowing and constant fighting outweigh the privation and the economic hardship. For them the task is clarified and their decisions become a sort of life force within the home. Conflict which used to sap out the energy is gone and this energy can be redirected towards the children's needs for as long as they need it, but what then. There's no putting up ones feet over a bottle of wine to reminisce and grow old gracefully. The reason which made it all worthwhile is gone to make their own lives leaving the single mom in a bit of a bind.

We have travelled far from that Golden era (which of course it never really was) into our neoliberal world of individual needs outflanking those of the collective need. Soon with untold unemployment due to those twin evils of the pandemic and Brexit, we are about to to have enforced pressures that the modern society is ill equipped to handle. Maybe the single mom is best placed to cope having had a lifetimes experience of coping.