Days Gone By

I have just spent the best part of this afternoon making a pie.  First getting all the ingredients together cooking, seasoning and then making the sauce for the pie.  Then I set about making the pastry, rolling it out fitting and pressing, rolling then cutting and trimming it to fit the pie dish.  Then putting it all together and cooking it.

This got me thinking about days gone by.  In the past, like my mother, mums would stay at home bring up the children and cook for the family.  This, in those days, consisted of making everything from scratch.  When I was young there were no ready make meals and everything has a recipe or a passed down technique from mother to daughter.

I know now how long this takes and being a stay at home mum was a very full time job.  Not saying it isn't now but no wonderfully organised mum would have time to go to work and make pies, wash out toweling nappies by hand, sew dresses and keep the house clean with brooms and solid polish.

The modern woman is expected to go out to work, putting their children into care with strangers, keep their house clean and cook.  I for one, would have loved to have had the privilege of being a stay at home mum.  This was something I always wanted to be but my 'wonderful' husband said when I gave birth to my first child that there was no way he was going to be going out to work all day just to keep me sitting at home with the baby.  This meant my dear mum and dad took over the care of my children and I went back to work.

I remember rushing home in my lunch hour to make a flan ready for evening. Trying to live up to the standard my dear mum had and to try to do the things stay at home mums did.  This didn't last long as it was just to hard trying to juggle everything at once.

By going back to work I missed my children's first step, first word and all the fun experiences you get when you have children, something you can never get back if you miss.

The world seems to have gone a bit crazy, with all the publicity encouraging woman to work and fine child care.  In my opinion there is plenty of time to work after the children are at school and the roll of a mum is to be there for their babies.

I know if I had my time back I would not have gone back to work and ignored the rantings of my husband being jealous of me having a bit of time off work.

There are a lot of people who would disagree with me but I feel the balance of life has been tilted in the wrong direction and the warm safe family unit has been eroded.

In an ideal world we would be getting back to making things, instead of eating all this processed packaged foods which you are not quite sure what is in it.  The treasured arts of sewing, cooking and housework would still be being passed down from generation to generation.

So back to my home made pie which is about ready to eat and being the stay at home mum I finally am!!

Love from the Funny Farm x