IT COULDN’T last. Stay-at-home parents, principally women, were in vogue for all of the famous 15 minutes. Now as the recession gathers pace we are back out of fashion as fast as your local multinational can jettison staff.
For look at us now, buffing our own toenails and ruefully skulking past the once ubiquitous chichi organic stores. Aren’t we sorry we didn’t stay in a job that could have paid us a salary, any salary, to support our families, while our accountant/banker/ carpenter husbands or partners are living it large on the dole? As if one could possibly live large or small on payments of a few hundred euro a week.
The blame game is continuing apace and stay-at-homers of either gender are somehow part of our great national crisis.
Nobody likes the finger being pointed at them and in the spectacular crumbling of our economy, finger-pointing has become a national pastime. We all played our part in the credit craze of the recent times; of course we didn’t all splurge on apartments overseas and on designer developments advertised by models dangling champagne flutes, but most of us hopped on the conspicuous consumption wagon to some degree. The stay-at-homers were just as able at splurging on extensions and holidays and just as keen on remortgaging their lives for fancy cars. They are as guilty of grandiosity as the next mamma and are now the very same matrons terrified of putting their mitts into their málas to spend on a packet of jaffa cakes, never mind an Audi TT.
Old habits die hard, however, and while some stay-at-home mums or dads are busy e-mailing and clobbering their local councillors with ideas for the regeneration of our economy, others are still active participants in activities such as “pram envy”.
Young mothers and fathers, used to an era of overconsumption, feed their addiction by splashing out on designer buggies that can cost upwards of €1,000. And it must be in this season’s colours. Not that your mewling infant will give a hoot, what he or she requires is warmth and love, feeding and a clean bottom and parents that aren’t stressed off their heads trying to maintain the “lifestyle”, the demands of which are partly responsible for pushing the country to the edge.
It has been suggested we could follow Iceland’s lead in the appointment of a woman premier. Radical times need radical action. Johanna Sigurdardottir was appointed as prime minister of that small nation in February, an appointment that followed the mass resignation of the parliament. Since October and the collapse of the country’s banks, currency and stock markets, there has been sustained social unrest. Presumably nobody in Iceland wanted to relinquish their “lifestyle” either.
What could be more radical than the appointment of a female prime minister and an openly gay one at that? Not that anyones private activities in the bedroom should matter one whit, except that perhaps they may have a greater personal understanding of injustice and social exclusion and a greater willingness to embrace imagination plus an agenda for the massive change that will be necessary, not just in Iceland, but here in Ireland too. It has been suggested for years that we in Ireland need more female representation in government, in business, in our institutions, and now we need it more than ever, to curb the rapacious tendencies of the testosterone-driven men who were at the helm during the boom/bust cycle.
One problem with the theory of a wish list of women leaders is that our most prominent female representatives in Cabinet, the Marys Coughlan and Harney, haven’t exactly covered themselves in glory, so far, in the continuing story of a country that’s gone to the dogs. They, too, were at the helm and did precious little to curb the testosterone.
At the end off the day, it is about ability, ingenuity and leadership, whatever the gender. Pointing the finger has become simply pointless.
Stay-at-home parents are no more or less to blame for our financial crises than are public servants. Our self-buffed nails are chewed to the quick worrying about what’s coming down the line at us this month.