When the wife of a former colleague walked away from her marriage and her two pre-school kids the gossip mills went into overdrive.
“How could a mother leave her children?” people asked in horror and bewilderment.
‘It’s one thing to leave your husband, but to abandon your kids? It’s unthinkable.’
Without knowing anything about the family’s situation, the consensus was that the mother was selfish, evil and/or a complete bitch.
Meanwhile, her husband’s status oscillated between victim and hero. People fretted about how he was going to manage to care for the children. He has a job, you know! Sympathy and offers of support came flooding in. A roster for hot dinners was drawn up.
While the situation was no doubt incredibly painful for my former colleague and his kids, not to mention logistically difficult, I was struck by just how differently people reacted to the news of a mother leaving a family compared with when they hear about a father upping stumps.
When it comes to social sins, is there anything worse than a woman who leaves her kids? It’s such a taboo that there are no extenuating circumstance to excuse it.
When a US mother abandoned her two young sons at a fire station last year in Houston, Yahoo Parenting asked: “The disturbing story begs the question: How could even the most desperate mom abandon her kids?”
The question was answered by Beverly Hills-based family therapist Fran Walfish: “Child abandonment is so stunning because it goes against a mother’s nature, which is to protect her child.”
Apparently nature hasn’t ordered men the same way.
Men walk out on families all the time without it making international news headlines. In fact sometimes a father leaving is seen as a good thing; that a broken home is better than an unhappy one.
I know plenty of single mothers — many of whom also hold down difficult and demanding jobs — but they seem to get little in the way of offers of support. There’s not a lot of outrage and concern over their abandonment or fretting about the kids. If anything, people conclude that she probably deserved it.
I know nothing about my colleague’s marriage so I can’t speculate as to what went on and why his wife left. But as a mother I know what it’s like to feel like I’m not coping with the day-to-day drudgery of motherhood.
There are days when I feel like running away too — and that’s with a husband who is committed to shared parenting and has a job that allows him to come home almost every night for dinner and bath time.
I don’t think it is unnatural for a woman to become a mother and then discover she doesn’t like it. In fact, when I was researching one of my books, several mothers whispered to me, “I wish I’d never done it”.
While they thought they were the only ones, it was not an uncommon refrain. Most loved their children dearly, but had discovered that motherhood was not what they wanted.
That’s the thing about motherhood: you have no idea what it’s like until it’s too late. You can read all the books you like, listen to the stories, gather advice but you cannot conceive the way motherhood can drain your physical and emotional energy until you feel like a shell of your former self.
You also have no idea how children will change your relationship and how all of a sudden you become continuously responsible for your child’s life and well-being, and judged accordingly. Meanwhile, most fathers can seemingly get away with helping out when it suits them.
I also know how you can love your kids so much that it hurts. Almost all mothers would need a very good reason – or a very bad one – to leave their kids.
Mothers continually have to strike a balance between loving their children and the sacrifices they have to make daily and over decades to raise them.
And this is why my heart breaks for my colleague’s wife as much as it does for the rest of the family. Perhaps if this woman had received the sympathy and support her husband has since received she may not have felt the need to leave.
That’s speculation, of course, but I’d be willing to bet that there weren’t too many offers of hot dinners coming her way from concerned friends and family before she left.
When a father leaves his kids it’s unfortunate. When a mother leaves it’s a scandal. This is because despite the advances we’ve made, parenting is still mandatory for mothers and, for many fathers, an optional extra.
Source: dailylife.com.au
