For several years I have been watching my friends oscillate between the desire to have a child and the need to stay in the labor market. Contrary to appearances, the problem is not new.
What is this happening now, look: children have children! - the comment of the old lady sitting on a park bench with her kumah clearly concerned me. I was just taking the obligatory walk for the sake of my newborn son. The fact that in military trousers, lace-up shoes and a stretched sweater, I might not look like an adult, but I had graduated from school a long time ago.
You have to break out
A few months later, when I was giving birth to my son, the "ground crew" told me that I was 26 springs, and - to my surprise - placed me in the "old element" category. There was a slight rebuke in that term for giving birth so late. At one of the follow-up visits, my gynecologist asked me if I was planning a second child. When I raised my reservations that I had only just returned to work after my parental leave, and that we live with my in-laws, he said: - No need to wait, ma'am, you have to leave before the age of 30! I quietly admitted he was right: how long can we wait with this reproduction, we will probably find our apartments in a few years! However, I knew my own - so far one child is enough. Such were the dilemmas of a young mother several years ago. Today it is even worse: more and more children have children (which is still frowned upon), and at the same time more and more women reply to the thought of motherhood: not yet (which is also not to the liking of gynecologists and demographers). It is like in the popular song by Jan Kaczmarek: "What are you afraid of, stupid? - I have to finish my studies first. "
A cat instead of a child?
It is hard to disagree with the opinion of the older ladies on the park bench that teenagers should not give birth to children. First, of course, you have to graduate from some schools. However, many girls cannot slow down their drive for education and self-improvement. They go to university, do internships, and when they get a good job, they do not want to give up the field they have gained with such difficulty and instead of a child, they fund themselves … postgraduate studies and a cat. They begin to think about stability and motherhood only when they are positioned in life and have a sense of economic security. But then they're all right afterthirty. My doctor would say that these are no longer old, but rather ancient elements. From his point of view, it is safest to have the first child between the ages of 20 and 25. From the point of view of an ambitious young woman - this is the least convenient moment, because then she studies and starts working. "Growing up" before the age of 30 is a purely virtual vision in her situation.
What to do then?
Give up maternity? or should you give up your professional career and devote yourself to your family? Many women find such a decision unacceptable because it condemns them to be financially dependent on their husband (let's ignore the fact that hardly any man is able to support a family with a group of children). And the prospect of old age without earned retirement does not look rosy either. Most of them, therefore, try to compromise with the (not from today) "family-friendly" Polish reality and struggle between work, shopping, meetings and home, performing miracles of logistics, organizing babysitters, fighting to stay at work. It's a miracle that babies are born at all because they are born against logic and against the interests of their parents.
Every moment is good
The only explanation that comes to mind is the suspicion that women don't follow logic. Or at least not a male logic that does not allow for the coexistence of mutually exclusive theses. The logic of women who have decided to become mothers is that if there is no good time to give birth to a child, then every moment is good. If women waited for more kindergartens to be created, for employers to favor pregnant women, for the apartments to become … then we would die out like dinosaurs.
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