I’m an author. My most recent book Thirty-Something and the Clock is Ticking is about motherhood and my books have been published in 11 countries, including Australia.
One of the things that interests me about motherhood is how on one hand we say it’s the best job in the world, but yet, on the other hand there is a mountain of evidence that shows how damaging motherhood can be to mental health. Eight out of 10 women with young children report that they suffer severe emotional distress on a regular basis. Women with young children are more likely to be depressed or suffer from a mental illness than at any other time in their lives.
One of the reasons for these horrifying statistics is because the job of mothering doesn’t end. Women of our generation have transitioned from a world where we were able to clock off at the end of the day and have the freedom to do something else, to a world where we are on duty every minute of every hour of every day of every month. There are no lunch breaks or home times; no weekends, no holidays and no sick days. And it’s interesting that as a society we still believe that daddy needs his sleep more than mummy because he has to get up the next day and do something hard; something important.
If you haven’t experienced the sheer relentlessness of mothering it might be hard to imagine why we are making so much fuss about saving Occasional Care. It’s just a few of hours a week, right? Wrong. It’s our oxygen. It’s the only time all week where we can sit down in peace, have an uninterrupted adult conversation, go to the doctor, have a haircut, work, spend time caring for our other children or sick relatives, or reclaim a piece of ourselves. This doesn’t mean that we don’t love our children. It just means that most of the time we are running on empty and we do indeed need to Take-A-Break. For many of us Occasional Care is the difference between getting through the week or falling apart. Governments claim that they care about mental health; well Occasional Care is a very cost effective way of doing just that. It’s bang for buck.
Operation Big Fridge is about our children doing their very best art work and giving their best work to our politicians in the hope that our politicians will do their very best work in return. In the hope that the finger-pointing and the blame game will stop. In the hope that our politicians will act like grownups.
This is an opportunity for one level of government, or all levels of government, to sparkle with leadership. It’s an opportunity to do the right thing for our children, our mothers and our community. And as we launch Operation Big Fridge and offer our artwork for the big fridges of our elected representatives we appeal to all our politicians –Federal, State and Local—to please work together and do whatever needs to be done to save Occasional Care.
Kasey Edwards has her own website here
A big thanks Kasey for such a thoughtful speech on why occasional childcare centres need to be funded!
No comments:
Post a Comment