We’re gonna need a bigger boat…

From the Times Online.

 Bascially yummymummyhood is a great idea at 30 when you and the kids look oh so cute in your matching beribboned outfits from Boden, but a bloody disaster at 40 when you look less yummy and more wrinkly, are deathly dull because all you’ve done for 10 years is clean up baby sick, do the school run and visit the John Lewis flooring department and your husband goes, "oh, what happened to that smart, independent career girl I married? She’s a boring old bag with no conversation, maybe I’ll trade her in for a younger model."

Shame you don’t know how to use a spell check dear….

I work from home, I run a business from here. (Ethics Trading for anyone who didn’t know or might be interested.) I chose to take the financial hit for a variety of reasons. Part of that is a shifting of my own priorities from the mass consumption of plastic down to a more simple way of life. It’s even got a name - it’s called Downsizing or Downshifting and it suits us perfectly.

I know of people who send their kids off to club before school starts, dropping them off within moments of eating breakfast, then the kids do a full day at school while the parent(s) do a full day at work, kids then go to after school club, often not getting home until 6pm. Everyone is tired and grumpy. That’s not a choice I could make for me and my kids. So they’re home educated and we love it most days, but I know it’s not for everyone.

As an adult I have found my way out of the box that institutional schooling shut me in and I don’t want my kids to even get in the box. I don’t like so much that I see pushed at us as *normal* This is my way of rebelling and choosing another path.

It’s very much a choice thing for me. It’s a choice I am able to make and it suits us as a family. It’s not right for everyone and I’m very much an "each to their own path" kind of person on this one. Whatever works for you.

This is why I do still self-identify as feminist and why my views are getting more and more extreme (on eco issues too, although I’ve always been fairly deep on those) For me, my personal feminism is all about individual women having personal choice in their lives. If that means going out and being a career woman then that’s fine. But the flipside has to be valid too. The woman who chooses to devote her energy to her family, children and home has to have our respect too.
The real issue for me is when the *choice* is no choice at all because of societal pressure or whatever. There is no support really for a woman wanting to stay home for her kids, the benefit system here isn’t really set up for that as a valid choice unless you make part of that choice the decision to live on very little. It’s a hard one.

To truly accept that someone can choose to stay at home for whatever reason, then we, as a society, have to value a *homemaker* properly. As someone who places high personal value on downsizing our lives and on family as a more basic and fundamental structure, it comes easily for me. I feel that my kids having me here is way more important than a computer upgrade, a new mobile phone, new car etc.

If personal value is placed more on ephemera, stuff, nintendo, better house, location, neighbours, car etc, then it’s harder to understand and give value to the choice to do without those things - hence you need to go out, get a proper job in order to have those things - why would you want to stay at home all day with your kids?