The Emotional Labour of Performing Motherhood

Being a young university student with lofty aspirations of academia and published writing from a Berlin apartment, I naturally became a nanny for my third unglamorous job. Despite the inflation of qualifications and the impossibility of getting a job with just a lowly bachelor’s degree, no such restrictions exist in the world of casual childcare. Instead, being a cis female grants you immediate acceptance into someone’s home to look after their Precious Little Ones for ten hours every Thursday.

Despite my total lack of experience with children under age nine, I rocked up on my first day feigning confidence to nanny a four year old boy and two year old girl. And I was shocked at the amount of… things one must do.

Morning tea time, simple right? Just set up the high chair, put on bibs, make sure each child gets their preferred colour of plastic crockery, mediate arguments about who gets which cookie, regularly wipe hands and face with baby wipe, the two year old needs a nappy change, but by the time of return the four year old has thrown the food everywhere and yoghurt was definitely a bad idea. Change clothes for both children, set up with toys so you can have an undisturbed fifteen minutes to clean up food, wipe down chairs, table and floor, sweep, wash dishes. Remember to make children drink water!

Going to the park, easy. Pack spare clothes, nappies, towel, baby wipes, bandaids, tissues, water, jackets and raincoats into pram. Somehow convince children to wear helmets. Help two year old ride scooter with one hand, push pram with other hand, and endure glares from strangers because the four year old isn’t stopping properly before crossing the road so I’m clearly a bad child carer. Play “Lion King” on the slide for an hour at the park. I need to pee, cannot leave the children alone so convince children to come to gross park toilet block with me. Convince children to come into cubicle with me because they will otherwise literally run away. Children are too tired to bike and scooter home. Put children into pram, push pram with one hand, bike with the other and carry scooter on back. Four year old wants to bring the pram inside to play with it, pram does not fit through the front door. Endure ensuing tantrum. Remember to make children drink water!

In all my various jobs and volunteer gigs, never have I gone home so utterly exhausted, covered in various kiddie excrements, dishwashing water and mud. Never have I performed so much physical and emotional labour for other humans; waitressing, seminar presenting and camp-leading do not compare. I earned twenty dollars an hour.

My nannying experiences demonstrated two distressing facts of the gendered reality of childcare in our world. Firstly, the complete and utter refusal of society to recognise non-educational child care as labour. As work. As fucking difficult. Mothers are expected to do this crap every single day for several years for free. Paid maternity leave for a handful of weeks cannot possibly be counted as legitimate pay for the burden of child care, especially when the labour reaches into the night with breastfeeding, colic babies and scared toddlers who accidentally watched Doctor Who. The fact that cis women have historically been primary caregivers, that they will do it without pay regardless, and that they get enjoyment from raising children does not stop childcare from being incredibly difficult, and a barrier to earning enough money to live.

The disregard of childcare as a legitimate form of labour has everything to do with the devaluation of women and non binary people as social contributors. Paying women for their work requires actually admitting that women are important, and that their labour deserves appropriate value. Shunning childcare into the murky depths of “women’s business” removes their literal sweat and tears from the public eye and ensures men maintain social precedence as the ones who perform the “real work” and actually contribute to society. Childcare is pitted as beneath men; too simple and intellectually unchallenging to warrant effort from the big brains and brawny muscles of hard working dudes.

The reciprocal is in effect too; jobs that require working with children are deemed less valuable than other professions, evidenced in the negligible pay of teachers in the public system. I easily imagine that this occurs in part because why would we pay child carers and children’s educators a decent wage when mothers already do this stuff for free? Shockingly, I would argue the answer is to… pay women, and primary caregivers of any gender.

The other horrifying truth that passed before my metaphorical eyes during my nannying stint was to observe how good I was at being a “mother”. With emphasis on my nonexistent experience with toddlers, I figured out within the first few hours what needed to be done and how to do it right. Changing nappies felt like second nature, I became a pro at cleaning a kid-wrecked kitchen halfway through the first five minutes, I quickly developed a mental checklist of all the stuff to pack should we leave the house. And to be perhaps problematically essentialist for a moment, I could not imagine any of my male friends performing motherhood as well as I did without guidance. From playing with dolls, from having homesick kids on camp literally handed over to me to deal with, from being told women are natural mothers, I am incredibly good at childcare. There need be no further qualification for nannying than being cis female because we are so shaped as career mothers from birth with no other virtue than having a vagina and identifying with the ensuing feminine gender.

Being assigned female at birth is a one way ticket to being conditioned to effectively performing motherhood. When faced with a childcare problem, something inside me told me I should know how to deal with it. So I just… did. Men aren't so relentlessly told they can care for children, in fact they’re often explicitly told they are incapable; that nappies are a dealbreaker, that dads are goofy pals to their kids who can provide such minimal domestic labour that they exclusively order pizza for dinner. This does a disservice to men, who should be able to be primary caregiver, who should connect to children with meaningful emotional integrity and who should actually aid their partners in the division of domestic labour.

Child care deserves the social value of any other highly demanding job. Just because the labour is emotional in nature does not mean it comes free, and just because it is primarily performed by those brought up as feminine does not mean it is worthless.