Being a Woman, a single mother and a Professional in European Romania

I don’t know how it was for my mother to be a career woman, raise two children and be a good wife.

She had been the director of an orphanage, then the director of a school, which meant for me and my brother having less of a loving, care giving mother around us and more of a professionally successful presence in our family. Of course, I was proud of my mum. But I was also eating lunch alone, I was doing my homework by myself, socializing after my own will and generally lacking a consistent interaction with my mum.  That’s how life was for our family in the 70’s and 80’s.

Under communism, it would seem that men and women were equal in public, but in private, it has never been so. Women always had the double burden of working  outside and inside the home and the irony is this European Romania hasn't changed that for women.   Society had decided that women needed to be superwomen even from then and did not ask children about how they felt when parents were too occupied to win the daily bread and did not have time for bonding.

Now we are 30 to 40 years away from that moment and if I ask any woman around me I hear the same answers: that life is a crazy carousel, that they are overwhelmed with this responsibility of winning the bread, being good mothers, cool housekeepers and great lovers and partners for their husbands.

And that is why I ask in all honesty: how long can this go on until we start failing on one or more aspects of our lives?

“I think I would need another clone to be able to do all the things I need to do in one day and make them functional, not impeccable”, says one of my colleagues. She is a married woman, mother of three children and a social worker. She has in her mind not only the cooking, cleaning, doing the laundry, taking care of her children but also that part where she needs to be an empathic, cool headed professional, which takes care of disadvantaged children and makes good decisions for them.

“I have this feeling that somebody else is raising my child, not me”, says another colleague. She is only voicing what other thousands of employed women would say.  “If you don’t have a grandmother at hand, then your child stays at school as long as you stay at work. It’s too much for the poor child. And it also hurts me to see that I am no longer the one who educates my child; I have to leave it in somebody else’s hands…”

I am trying to run in my mind the list of possible situations a woman can find herself into. So I forget  the divorcees.  They are all over around me, and I am one of them. Divorced women are a special category. They become tougher women, fighters. They have to be or they can’t survive the prejudices and the economic hardships and the isolation. The society also takes care to separate themselves from  the elements that are judged as somehow being less than the rest of them.

“Marriage is still a financial contract, a way of surviving for women in our society” says another colleague. She has been struggling for the past 18 years to raise her children on her own, since the husband went away and forgot to pay alimony. It is true that in Romania alimonies are not taken seriously. Men can get away with it. Justice will not make men take care of their children if they don’t want to. So legislation is lax, everything is left to the mercy of one’s good will.

“I lost some of my married friends when divorce happened. My social circle started to reject me because I was seen as a possible threat. It has been a constant challenge to make new friends for me and my children”, says another one.

In today’s Romania often men are left without jobs and women become the main bread winners in the family. Or women become better professionals and therefore are better paid then their husbands. There is a total overthrow of the roles in the family from this point of view, yet the patriarchal ‘flavour’ still lingers in many of the modern families.  Many Romanian women would say that their husbands are lazy, and they are not giving enough support in raising the children or doing the house chores. Many of the jokes circulating on the internet have in the background the proverbial lack of interest men have in raising children and in becoming involved in the domestic chores.

I cannot avoid going in this article to those parts of the society where my job often sends me. There where I see ruthless poverty and even less chances for women to have better lives. So I need to mention the women who go to work abroad because of the economic challenges and leave their children to the extended family’s care.  And how their hearts must break because of that. Or the women that are so poor and uneducated that they don’t know how to create strategies to get out of the vicious circle they live in.

But I feel that I need to find a thread of light and link all these lives I have mentioned here, because all the situations described or briefly mentioned are parts of somebody else’s life or personal history. I would like to believe that all these roads are designed with a higher purpose. That God in his wisdom knew what he had in his plan when he let all these things become manifested in His Creation.

Life is easier to live and external circumstances become changeable when women carry love in their hearts, when they manifest their wisdom, their deep knowing, and their maternal essence.

Thank God He made me a woman and gave me the possibility of awakening in myself all of that!