[Peter] German multitasking mother

My mother worked as a hairdresser in a small familiar business in the same road where my parents lived and she was very low paid. My father worked as  pattern maker, making forms upon a wooden pattern for a casting house. 

Mom Liselotte with son Peter in 1953

Normally, he worked from Monday to Saturday for 10 hours per day. We rented a small house of an old widow but later on my parents planned to build a house for a bigger family in the same village. It took two years and nearly each free minute of my mother's and father's free time.

My mother then quit her job in order to stay at home. She took care of my father and sisters Karin and Jutta who were born shortly after each other: this was the role model for the woman of that time. She had to care for the children to wash, to cook the meals for them and her husband and also cared for the garden. When Jutta and Karin went to Kindergarden, I started primary school at the Evangelische Volksschule in our village.

On Sunday my mother used to go to the sunday service at the protestant church with the children, while my father cooked the Sunday meal. This was really unusual at that time and belonged not to the traditional role model, but that was a social family tradition for long, long years. This was not the only unusual thing she did: when the new house was being built, she also worked like a man climbing on the roof  with the craftsman and also digged out the earth for the building pit, which was prepared by hand. As we grew vegetables from our own garden, my mother also had a lot of work to preserve them. We kept the fruits in the cellar, while we stored the jam for the wintertime in the sleeping room. When the whole family gathered, for my mother the most important thing was to bring a lot of cakes and biscuits on the table, served with coffee in the afternoon. My mother has never been submissive in the family because the role was clear: she took care of the children and my father cared for the income. That was the real task sharing!

As I grew up I left my family for practicing social work in a children home when I was 19 years old. That was the time when I became apart from my mother. She started to work part time sewing shoes, in the neighbour town where my aunt worked too. She then left this firm and at the age of 50 she started to be a nanny in a family where both the wife and husband worked, he as a advocate and she as a teacher. That was a good time for my mother, because she did what she liked as a job. She was  not under pressure to survive with a big family, she had enough money, a car and no more small children of her own. The thing she missed the most is not to have had a chance for a higher level of education, as she sacrificed this for her family.

As far as today's situation is concerned, I would say that women have to choose between family or career since mothers have the biggest part of work, also because it is not accepted that fathers take care for children.Women should be multitasking  to be partner, to be mother and to be successful in their job. Some are overloaded from this and go ill.This often results in divorce because the pairs are overloaded and have a lot of conflicts. Furthermore, it is more common that women rather than men care for children alone, which is mostly connected with poverty. The distribution of tasks should be put into question!

Peter Wagner from Germany