My daughter is at that stage of life, with a husband, a toddler and a new baby, where life seems an endless round of dealing with laundry \u2013 gather it up, get it washed, get it on the line, get it off the line, iron it if the spirit is willing, re-distribute it to its respective owners.\u00a0 Tedious, repetitive, essential. But not jolly.\u00a0 And probably neither taxing nor stimulating for the brain cells.
\nOn a rare evening out with girlfriends, she discovered she is not alone \u2013 they are all at that stage, and the trials of the laundry basket struck a chord with them all.
\n\u2018I told them about your blow-up,\u2019 said my daughter, cheerfully matching up a pile of ill-assorted socks.
\n\u2018My what?\u2019 Ok, I admit it, I was nervous.
\n\u2018You remember, that time \u2013 it must have been a Monday morning \u2013 when the three of us lined up in front of you and said, \u2018We don\u2019t have any clean shirts, or pants or socks!\u2019 You must remember?\u2019
\nEr, no.\u00a0 But it transpired that her recollection \u2013 and possibly that of her younger sister and brother \u2013 was crystal clear.
\n\u2018You must remember \u2013 you burst into tears!\u2019
\nReally?\u00a0 Well, perhaps that wasn\u2019t so bad \u2013 a moment of pressure and stress and undoubtedly guilt \u2013 how could I let my three little angels face a Monday morning in school without the bare essentials of their uniform crisply arrayed in their rooms, ready to be worn with pride?\u00a0 No wonder I cried.
\nApparently, that\u2019s not all I did.
\n\u2018Then you exploded \u2013 and you said, \u2018I have two degrees in English Literature and I won a prize in the year I qualified as a teacher \u2013 what has my life come to that I am reduced to just being the minion who does the washing, irons the shirts and can never find a pair of socks that match!\u2019\u00a0 You must remember!\u2019
\nSadly, no.\u00a0 Or perhaps, wisely, no. \u00a0I do not remember the incident at all \u2013 though my daughter remembers it so well she is now repeating it for a gaggle of girlfriends who will\u00a0 only remember me dimly, if at all, and now have a new vision of me as a screeching harridan.\u00a0 And \u2013 I then heard \u2013 her husband is well familiar with the incident, having heard\u00a0 the story several times and even coined a person-specific version of it for said daughter when she is equally stressed and suspects that her two degrees in law, sociology and criminology are not providing her with the rich\u00a0 and intellectual rewards she might reasonably have expected when she graduated.
\nThe trouble is, from this distance, while I can hear my own voice in the story \u2013 and I swear, I thought it far more than I actually said it \u2013 I think I may well have been wrong.\u00a0 Without wishing to borrow clich\u00e9s from football, at the end of the day, which mattered more \u2013 all that toiling with pants and socks and a red hot iron, or all that toiling in the corridors of schools, if not of power, made possible by the two degrees and the qualification to teach?
\nThere is no doubt I enjoyed the job (mostly) and I would have grave doubts about the enjoyment of laundry in all its phases.\u00a0 But the job, in the end, is just a job.\u00a0 The laundry, you do for love.
\nI have attended two funerals recently.\u00a0 In both, there were long accounts of how the deceased had spent his professional life \u2013 qualifications, jobs, promotions, positions of power and influence, achievements.\u00a0 And in both there were constant references to the fact that regardless of all of that, the man we mourned had been most proud of the wife he had loved and the family he had raised.
\nYou do not raise a family by writing a thesis, or by striding around with exaggerated ideas about leadership in general and your own self-importance in particular, or composing strap-lines that distinguish your family from those of all your friends.\u00a0 You raise a family being up all night with a crying baby, pushing toddlers on swings till your arms ache and singing nursery rhymes till your throat is sore, worrying yourself into grey hair about their nursery group, their pre-school, their primary school, their senior school, their choices for university \u2013 place and course \u2013 their future, God help us even their pension. You raise a family stressing about the food they eat, the friends they make, the dangers of bungee jumping and driving lessons.
\nYou raise a family dealing with the pants, the socks and the shirts, so that none of them has to form a pressure group of three and demand where these simple things are, while you were sneaking around reading the papers or having dinner with friends, or embarking on research for your third degree.
\nSo I am ashamed \u2013 about twenty five years late \u2013 of my hysterical outburst in the face of justifiable enquiry.\u00a0 And I am also interested in the place of \u2013 let\u2019s face it \u2013 the drudgery in the great scheme of our lives. And I am very concerned about where schools stand on such matters.
\nI was there when Home Economics turned \u2013 overnight \u2013 into Food Technology, and when Woodwork turned into Design Technology.\u00a0\u00a0 From my slight distance from such things as an English teacher, it seemed that several things happened at once: palaces of technology, money no object, suddenly appeared in otherwise impoverished schools to cater for this brave new world of subjects with the sparkling \u2018Technology\u2019 label; and students stopped making cakes and pipe racks (the very idea!\u00a0 I wonder what the modern equivalent might be?) and spent their time designing the brief for any object they might think of making, or ensuring the packaging would be appealing to the market.\u00a0 It seemed to get a long way from hands-on anything.
\nIn fact the subjects seemed to move a long way towards art \u2013 fantastic sculptural creations appeared from A level students, and many a fashion designer must have caught the bug in early classes which were a long way from my own experience of taking a year to make a gingham apron with my name on it in cross-stitch.
\nBut while what you might call domestic arts \u2013 the whole business of home-making, when you boiled it down \u2013 were shrinking on the timetable, girls were powering ahead in the examination stakes and the league tables.\u00a0 They quickly earned better results than their brothers in most public examinations you could name.\u00a0 Hurrah for the girls, and good luck on your way to a career dancing on the glass ceiling of British industry and institutions like banking and law.
\nIn fact, hello cruel world, and goodbye pants, and socks and crisply ironed shirts.\u00a0 Hello increased maternity leave but a fairly rapid return to the working world , and goodbye to the ten year spell I had at home with three small children.
\nMy daughter\u2019s story of my own explosion, so vividly remembered, is evidence that the old days were not necessarily a bed of roses. And of course I hope I have raised my own daughters \u2013 and sons \u2013 to make the best of all their talents, needle-sharp intellectual as well as cuddly nurturing ones.
\nBut I hope that collectively we do not forget what people may well realise just in time as they approach their graves: that in the end, whatever the glittering prizes,\u00a0 it\u2019s the people in your life who matter, and what they remember of us will be what we did for love.
\nAnd to underestimate that \u2013 tedious or repetitive as it may be \u2013 would be just pants, really, wouldn\u2019t it?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
My daughter is at that stage of life, with a husband, a toddler and a new baby, where life seems an endless round of dealing with laundry \u2013 gather it up, get it washed, get it on the line, get it off the line, iron it if the spirit is willing, re-distribute it to its\u2026 Read More »<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[12,13],"tags":[59,90,153],"class_list":["post-154","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-ie-today","category-independent-education-today","tag-chores","tag-family","tag-parenting"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/j-moriarty.co.uk\/hilarymoriarty\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/154","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/j-moriarty.co.uk\/hilarymoriarty\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/j-moriarty.co.uk\/hilarymoriarty\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/j-moriarty.co.uk\/hilarymoriarty\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/j-moriarty.co.uk\/hilarymoriarty\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=154"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/j-moriarty.co.uk\/hilarymoriarty\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/154\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/j-moriarty.co.uk\/hilarymoriarty\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=154"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/j-moriarty.co.uk\/hilarymoriarty\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=154"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/j-moriarty.co.uk\/hilarymoriarty\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=154"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}