Despatches from a mother who started late (and is running to catch up)

Disemvowelling

I'm not a girl who's easily scared of acronyms - but it would have been nice to have some warning before I became a mum that my life as a parent, especially a blogging parent, would be dominated by them. Take your pick - are you a Stay at Home Mum (SAHM), Work at Home Mum (WAHM), or just plain sahd?  We all have to be something, it seems.

No offence to my fellow blogger Stay at Home Dad, who's got a nice sense of humour and doesn't seem to take these things too seriously, but is this really how we're supposed to define ourselves as human beings?

It's almost enough to make me want to claim I'm a 'homemaker'. Another fellow blogger, Dooce, has a nice variation on what SAHM might stand for. I'm too inhibited to spell it out here.

Today I came across a new acronym - FTBCWM - for Full-Time By Choice Working Mother. Or EOE, for Embodiment of Evil, in certain circles. Fairly trips off the tongue, doesn't it?

I'm thinking of inventing my own title - PTBCAHWM. Part-Time by Choice at Home Working Mum. The hyphenation's a nightmare. But it fairly sums up my working day. And the world of the working mum is consonant-rich and vowel-poor, you see. My title could, alternatively, be a new transcription of a 5am seagull cry as the beast swoops on our rubbish bags.

Or it could stand for Poor in Time, Bewildered and Confused, At Home When Money permits. That could cover a lot of mothers, I reckon.

If you don't believe me about these titles then have a look over at Alpha Mummy, where a real old cat fight has broken out between stay at home mums and workers. The fights's got so nasty it's ended with one of the more vitriolic participants being disemvowelled - the first time I've ever come across this gruesome process outside medieval England. We were none of us overly endowed with vowels in this battle to start with.

It's not that I have a problem with acronyms in themselves. I mean, I fell in love with and married a paid-up geek. Don't laugh, but our courtship included word games based on car number plates we spotted as we strolled along. The Bean and I share our home with shelves of books with titles like XML Primer Plus, C# for Beginners, ASP.NET and XSLT.  They give me indigestion when I so much as look at them. Don't even get me started on the stash of computing books in the bathroom.

But I could never tell anyone who asked me what I do: "I am a WAHM. A Work at Home Mother." It'd be like being some tragic pop groupie from the 1980s, in denial that George Michael was gay, bouncing about in leg-warmers, ra-ra skirts and feathered earrings.

But when did all this nonsense about parenting types start? And why do we need these silly titles?

Maybe we invented the titles to give ourselves a sense of identity. Just like we coined the phrase 'parenting' for the stuff our own mothers used to do with no other job description besides 'mother'.

When The Bean arrived 15 months ago, people stopped asking me what I did for a living.

Instead, they started saying: "And what does your husband do?" As if The Bean's beaming presence at my side meant I was out of the job market for a while, and if they wanted to know about our financial status they'd need to check on her dad's earning power.

Maybe other women had the same experience, felt the same way, and so dreamt up these titles to give themselves more status.

I don't know what the people who inquired about husband's job were hoping for, but when I told them he was in IT, their faces generally went blank and they'd change the subject. It was sort of a relief. I don't have much IT small talk. Obviously they didn't either. Maybe I should have said: "He's a Mobster dad. Come on, you know, M-O-B. Mainly Office Bound." Or MOB for Man Overboard. Now that would have been a bit more accurate for the crazy early months after The Bean arrived.

Posted 04 July 2007 21:06

Angst Daughters Husband Parenting gurus Work Work vs mothering Work at Home Mum

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