zoekrupka.com

When I was a kid and wondering aloud about what I was going to be when I grew up, my mother, if she was part of these musings, had two favourite responses. “Don’t be a nurse, be a doctor” and “Always have your own money”. She was a nurse who worked part time through most of my childhood, and I know she felt both patronised by doctors and undervalued for her work. Her message was about independence, dignity and personal welfare. Even as a very young child I knew she was saying that I should never depend on anyone else to take care of me. I took this to heart, and for most of my life I never did.

Then I had a child. For the first year of her life both my partner and I were at home living on a small inheritance. He spent most of that year trying to launch his creative work, and together we did our best to care for our first and only baby. I have to admit that during those first three years I stopped thinking about what my mother and many others of her generation of women had said about money and independence. I did not feel a loss of dignity in leaving paid work, because I had a supportive partner and I was parenting in a time when stay-at-home mothering was in vogue.

Almost two years later I went back to work part time, and in the incredibly demanding balancing act of our tiny unsupported nuclear family, I lost sight of my financial independence. In that little boat that we were floating in during those years, there was a terrible choice between money and time. I chose time.