Dear LPG,

I recently found an appeal on your pages for job related stories to help us oldies remember National Careers Week from our end of the experience and I have a story to tell.   It is not actually about my first job but I suppose you could say that it had a lot to do with an employment that all too many people, mainly the men, still do not actually recognise.  I am talking about motherhood.

I started work in an office the week that I left school and, after getting married kept putting off the next thing expected by the rest of the family for as long as I could.  Having children was not at the top of our priority list and there was always just one more holiday my husband and I wanted to take, or one more expensive item we wanted to buy while we could still afford it. 

But we got it wrong after year number seven and within two years there were two offspring.  He worked while I worked just as hard as far as I was concerned, and even though I did not have to commute anymore, my working day often started in the small hours when one of the little ones woke up crying or wanting another bedtime story. 

I think that we moms, who stayed home and looked after our kids, are still thought of as having lived life as one long holiday, but back then my contemporaries will remember that family clothes washing was not just a case of loading the machine, and everything needed to be ironed.  Shopping did not arrive online and dinners were not delivered either cooked or as a set of ingredients with instructions. 

Even though Covid-19 has affected everything, until we were introduced to it, I have no doubt that there are many retired grandmas and grandads who did the delivering and collecting of their younger grandchildren to and from school so that mothers and fathers could continue to do their real jobs, and I will agree that childminding was a very expensive business back then, and the costs of the service are eye-watering now.  So the time is coming when we grandparents will be called upon again to take up those duties as part of the so called ‘new normal’.

Nowadays full-time parenthood is more readily classed as real work, but in the late 1960s when I got married at the end of the era where most husbands accepted that wives needed to be ‘kept’ and did not a lot at home all day.

I suspect that the experience of lockdown, and sharing the balancing of online home-schooling and working from home has taught many of our sons a thing or two…

NR, Kent