Super lives ofthe super-wives

Give Me a Break/Kate Holmquist:A guy up the road got a new BMW people carrier at the weekend and all day Sunday it attracted a respectful crowd of men and boys cooing over it.

It was like that scene from 2001: A Space Odyssey where the apes find the black obelisk and hunker around it in awe. Before long, they were trying out the lights and inspecting the "extras". Watching headlights going on and off must be pretty interesting for some people.

It's not the man's car that I envy. It's his wife (who is going to drive this boy-toy on school-runs) and all those like her who don't have to work outside the home and yet still have the amazing houses, the second homes and the flash cars - not to mention the security of knowing they can spend their days shopping and still eat.

These women have taken wifehood to a whole new level. Like the rich, they really are different. And they are certainly rich, these super-wives. Because to be a financially secure full-time wife and mother these days, you either have to be on a low income or an extremely high one.

I guess you could say I'm suffering from a serious case of housewife-envy. It used to be that it was we working women who were the envy of the stay-at-homes, with their pathetic unfulfilled lives (or so the feminist movement led us to believe). Now it's we who look like fools because these super-wives are rarely home and, wow, are they fulfilled. They've turned fulfilment into an art form.

I see them tumbling happily out of Pilates class mid-morning and picking the kids up from school looking refreshed in designer sports gear after a session playing tennis or at the gym. I spot them wandering aimlessly around boutiques looking for the right outfit to wear to a posh "do" at the weekend and I eavesdrop on their discussions about what shade of Farrow & Ball beige the decorators should use in the house they're having done up for the umpteenth time.

So I ask myself, where did I go wrong? I was reared with the ethos that a woman who didn't work for a living was only half a woman. In the 1970s, we were told that a woman without a man was like a fish without a bicycle - a fridge magnet philosophy that was part of a new way of rearing girls. Education, career, self-sufficiency: they were the goals.

So why is it that now I'm doing so many jobs that I feel I'm doing them only half-well? Who's half a woman now? Certainly not the wealthy super-wife who doesn't have to worry about spending quality time with her children.

I'm nearly at the point of telling my daughters to devote themselves to education and career, certainly, as long as they marry rich at the end of it by the age of 30. Because we all know that women who work hard and wait till 35, may never find a husband, or if they do may never have babies due to infertility problems.

Before my many friends who are full time in the home decide to stop speaking to me, let me qualify this. Yes, I know that all of you aren't rich. I know that many of you are cutting corners financially, don't have second homes and BMWs and have had the bitter experience of struggling to work outside the home only to discover that combining a relatively low-paid job with motherhood is a recipe for a stay in John of God's. I know you get bored sometimes and that you wonder if you're accomplishing anything meaningful at this point in life. I'm not talking about you.

I'm talking about this entirely new elite class of super-wives that's been created by the Celtic Tiger. Women who can afford to have five or six children. Women who had the sense, or maybe just the luck, to marry rich and escape the daily stress of "doing it all" adequately, at best.

I know you struggling stay-at-homes resent them, too because you've told me so.

We're talking about the Nigella Lawson types, who brag to the rest of us about how perfectly they're doing everything. They can hold court for hours on the subjects of their children, their children's activities, the time involved in ferrying these children to the various activities in the BMW and the sheer frustration involved in finding decent help.

Women like Nigella may have been admirable once, but she's a typical super-wife-we-love-to-hate now, working even though she doesn't have to in a fun career that probably takes about eight weeks a year of her time and gives her the leisure to give her children and husband the essence of womanhood, as she defines it: 90 per cent good food and 10 per cent cuddles.

Being a mother is so much about feeding and cuddling, yet when you're working, cooking is a chore and when you come home at night to do laundry and clean and pop a ready-meal in the microwave, it's hard to sit down long enough to cuddle anything but the school jumper you should have sewed the name-tag into weeks ago.

"I don't cook or clean or do laundry," has become the ultimate status-claim of the super-wives. They don't have to. They have staff to sew the name-tags on. Their lives really are different.

[  kholmquist@irish-times.ie ]