Working mothers of Birmingham

[Alberta]

My husband works for the local council,he is a very practical hardworking man.Almost every day he has at least one job where the tenants are young couples.He has lost track of the times of when they are watching Tv or playing video games and their children are playing in the squalor around them.They have usually sent for a maintanance man to
do a trivial job that they could have easily done themselves.He finds it hard to believe that a man would sit and wait for a job to be done but even harder to see a woman not caring for her house and children.
This makes me think of my Mom and perhaps yours.Did you ever see her sitting for very long and was she ever empty handed.Broom,Duster,dishcloth,iron,boiler stick(blimey that hurt)and on top of this some of them even went out to work as well.
They managed to keep their house and children clean and husband and children fed without any of the modern gadgets and quite often without any help from their other half whose job was to get the coal in.
As I watch my young neighbour and her husband strap the babies into the car seats at 7am to go to nursery and bring them back at 6.30pm I wonder which mothers had the most fulfilling life,I suppose each generation has its own ideas.

 

[Di.Poppitt]

There were two sayings in our family Alberta. Bury me in me apron, and I'll die with a duster in me hand.
Oh that boiler stick, ragged and white at one end. I have gto a posher or 'maid' as my mom called them outside my back door among the pots of summer flowering plants. It just reminds me, should I ever be tempted to forget, of the dreaded wash day of my childhood. :roll:

 

[jennyann]

Working Moms

I just came across this thread today and I can relate to Alberta's words. Mom's back a few decades especially during and after WW2 had it very rough. They worked and worked most of the daylight hours and without any gadgets except for perhaps a heavy Hoover vacuum cleaner or a carpet sweeper.
The laundry was a three day event for the most part except in the dead of winter when the clothes froze like cardboard and had to be stood somewhere warm to melt!!!!! No wonder our houses were damp at times.
There were very few "miracle" fabrics back then. Cotton and wool mostly. All the sheets went in the boiler with shirts and underwear and neighbours judged each other's white washing items when they appeared on the line!!!!!!!! They had very harsh washing powders and heavy wringers also. Our neighbour had a large wooden roller wringer. She used to let my brother and I watch her wring the sheets out. That boiler stick was not a nice thing either.

When Moms did sit down it was to mend the clothes or make new ones by either knitting or sewing. My mother was a great Fair Isle pattern knitter
and she had her own chair with a cushion that covered all the different coloured balls of wool, all lined up symetrically to feed into the knitting needles. God forbid if anyone moved them when a pullover was in progress!!!! Once we knocked the whole chair over and had no clue which ball went where. There were often as many as eight or nine different colours in use. Oh yes there was trouble after that. I can also remember Mom unravelling inches of knitting after she said she had made a mistake
with the pattern and yes she did unravel all kinds of garments and knit them up into something else. I didn't inherit her skills I'm afraid.

I was an only girl with two brothers. I had to help my Mother a lot and my oldest brother had his chores as well but never as many as mine. On Sunday mornings after church we used to visit this neighbour and she would show me how to make beds and cook certain things. She also taught me how to arrange flowers. My brother went into the garden with her husband to help with his garden.

I used Cardinal polish on the front steps and lavender polish on the furniture until Pledge came along. Glitto in the bathroom and Harpic in the toilet. Then there was the fire grate to deal with. Very dusty indeed if you didn't remove the ashes carefully. I also had to lay the fire to be lit in the evening and in the winter we kids would light it. How we didn't burn the house down I'll never know. There was never enough newspaper to "draw" the fire with. We had seen our parents do it but the newspaper never ended up catching fire when they did it!!!!

All those blankets to put on the beds and the feather mattresses to plump up. All highly labour intensive jobs it seems.

When my Mother went to work part time in the early l950's she would arrive after having shopped on the way home and have a fully cooked meal on the table in just over half an hour. No microwaves for warming up meals either. My father who worked shifts often came home to dinner that sat on the top of a saucepan containing hot water. Mom often used to take a large basin in her shopping bag when she worked in Aston Brook and bring home faggots from Potters Hill . Lovely stuff Just stiff wax paper and string tied around the top of the basin. No takeaway gear in those days. Fish and chips in newspaper was about the closest there was to takeaway containers then.

 

[Di.Poppitt]

My father who could make anything crafted a 'Draw Tin' which you put in the firegrate opening to draw the fire. I was left one day while mom went shopping, she had put the draw tin up and told me to give it five minutes. I was sitting on the seat of the wooden curb reading, forgot about it and came to when I heard a roaring noise. By this time the chimney was well on fire, and mom came home to the firemen pouring water down the chimney. Boy was I in trouble.

 

[Pomgolian]

Parents - Not just Moms!

As one of the people who see the end result of too much childcare in terms of behavioural attitudes on both the part of the parent’s and their children (Guilt most of the time from parents) and the children’s to their parents (What right have you to tell me off), I am not quite sure why any of them persist in the practice :roll: .
Apart from the money side of it and even that doesn’t seem to telly as you need more money to have your kids looked after than if you stayed at home with them; Fees, designer clothes and health bills (A fact, children in childcare get more infections than they would at home ).
However as stated, the parents who do stay at home these days, in the most part are too lazy to actually care for the kids and the state of the home anyway.
I would love to be told that I no longer have a job in childcare because one or other of the parents are now staying at home too look after their own children.
However until that unlikely scenario happens I am glad to be able to give some of my love, understanding and unconditional caring to these children.