More and more women are coming to terms with the fact that their children are growing up and that their role as mother is about to atrophy. It is causing something of a crisis. This crisis is invisible to those who choose to attribute the current high rate of marital breakdown to “moral decay” or “selfishness”. They don’t realise that the problem runs deeper than that, that it is somewhat more complicated and therefore much harder to resolve.

Girls and boys are, to a large extent, still being raised differently to each other here in Malta in 2005. It is taken as a given that the boy will need the means to support himself and a family. It is not taken as a given that the girl will need to do the same. Consciously or subconsciously, many Maltese parents raise their daughters to kill time, earning money in a short-term career or dull job until they find a man, marry and raise a family. It is the recipe for disaster where these daughters are concerned, but the parents seem oblivious to the fact. They still cling to the thought that, whatever problems they may have in their own marriage, it is the result of their having made the wrong choice of partner. It never occurs to them that, ideally, a marriage should take place between two fully-matured individuals, each of whom has interests and an income of his and her own, and neither of whom has curtailed personal development at the moment of marriage or childbirth.

The wish for dependence on men, among women, is not natural, but cultural. If you raise a girl in the way that boys are commonly raised, that is precisely how she will turn out. She will want her own life, her own income, and her own identity. She will regard with extreme distaste any sort of future that involves staying at home all day and asking permission from the breadwinner to spend Lm30 on a dress. Oddly enough, many people seem to believe that girls are born with a congenital need for cloying dependency and an unwillingness to fend for themselves. It never occurs to them that, if you programme any child – girl or boy – from birth to cling and to see dependency on others as the best means of survival, then that is how they will grow up. Look at how our men our raised in the main – they are so different from the men of northern Europe, so dependent on their wives to get things done for them, so keen to be served, so reluctant to contribute to the physical running of the home and the care of children, so conscious of the chauvinistic Mediterranean role division. When they hang out the laundry to dry, they take the attitude that they are doing their wives a favour; you can almost see them craving their mothers’ applause as they do it (“Clever boy, he’s hanging out the laundry. What a lucky woman his wife is.”).

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One middle-aged man declared his belief to me that it is because women are intrinsically lazy that they do their best to snare men into marriage so that they can live off them. He said that he would be quite happy to stop working and live off his wife if she so dearly wants a paying occupation beyond their home. What does his wife imagine, he told me – that it is fun leaving home at 7am every day and struggling with irritating people for the next nine hours? I told him that, however bad the job, it’s probably a whole lot more interesting than moping around the house and doing chores, when most days the only company you have is that of people 25 years younger than you are. Men like him think they would like to stay at home, that staying home is the easier option. They think this because they only stay at home for holidays and on Sundays, when it’s a relaxing break. They have no idea what it is like to stay at home for years and years, fiddling around trying to kill time when there’s nothing to do and nobody in the house except perhaps the cleaning-woman. They have no idea what women feel like when the door slams behind their husband in the morning, and they are left alone with babies and a house, and nothing else. So many women I know identify that moment when the door closes every morning as a watershed of despair and of envy for the man who escapes. But this is the sort of thing that no one ever writes about, and women only talk about it when somebody finally brings it up in conversation. And then it all spills out, like a guilty secret.

There are women who don’t even have to do their own housework, even though they don’t work. They have absolutely no role at all, and it is no surprise that they eventually become thoroughly demoralised. No, I can’t see any of these high-powered men, men who work even though they don’t need the money, staying at home for more than a few weeks. They work because they need the zing of it, because they need to feel connected to the rest of the world. Women need this, too, only most of them don’t know it. They attribute their low spirits as they mooch around to other causes, usually sexual or amorous, and that’s where the problems really begin and the marriage starts to go to pieces. They begin to imagine that the problem begins and ends in bed, that if the man to whom they are married paid them more attention, then all would be roses. They don’t realise that human beings are not built for an emotionally parasitic life; that we are made to forge ahead and build our own future and our own happiness. Bed is not the right place to look for a solution; in bed you will only find temporary distraction from fundamental problems.

Many Maltese men, particularly those of the older generation, refuse to “allow” (as though they were children!) their wives to work because they think that, by going out in the world (as though Malta is the world!) their wives will meet men and maybe be tempted to have affairs. How psychologically ignorant they are. How they bury their heads in the sand. Women have affairs when they are unhappy and discontented, and women are far more likely to be that way when they have no role in life, when they are hanging around all day. More non-working married women have regular affairs than do working women, but try telling that to conservative men who think that it’s the working women who are jumping into bed with everyone. The reason is simple: the devil finds work for idle hands. Women left hanging around for too long with nothing in particular to do soon enough find the wrong sort of way to amuse themselves.

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Yes, of course it is women themselves who dream of dependency on men, the sort of dependency that allows them to live the life of a child with many of the privileges that adults have. But that is because their development is cut short and they fail to reach full emotional and psychological maturity. Women who marry in their very early 20s and who never work after that are really just like “big children”. They are not in the least bit self-reliant. This is not a good thing, and the comfort it offers is entirely false.

There is no difference between the essential nature of men and women; it is the essential nature of a human being. Those of us who have sons of a certain age, or whose profession it is to teach or give guidance to boys, know that they too go through a period of turbulence and uncertainty as to what they want to do with their lives, between the ages of 16 and 21. It can cause the most terrible trouble at home. If they don’t find ‘the goal’, they become unmotivated and drift. The difference is that parents worry about drifting, unmotivated sons – but they rarely worry about drifting, unmotivated daughters. Many of them actually encourage their daughters to be that way, reasoning that a woman’s “natural” state is that of a brood mare: to mate and foal, and thereafter graze in the field. So many women of my generation were actively discouraged or persuaded away from their ambitions, in a way that their brothers were not. Even when they were more clever than their brothers, it was their brothers who got the attention and the money for further education.

For boys, marriage, fatherhood and dependency on a working wife are not a socially acceptable alternative to earning a living, so boys are forced out of “drift mode” and their longing for escape into prolonged childhood – which is all that the dream of dependency really is – by their peers, by their parents, and by social disapproval. A man without a job or motivation, who lives off his wife, is regarded with pursed lips and made to feel less of a man. He is described as a bum. People say to each other: “Hekk sewwa, hi tahdem u tistinka, u hu d-dar jara t-television.” They say this even if the couple has children, and the man is looking after them. And that is why men fight themselves out of the wish to stay at home and to drop out of the struggle of life. It’s not because there are no men who wish to escape into the haven of the home and hours to themselves, particularly if they have monotonous jobs. It’s because they wish to be respected, and stay-at-home husbands are not respected. Where respect for men is tied to their ability to hold down a job and to provide financially for their families, they will not stay at home cooking, cleaning and looking after the children while their wives go out to work. Where respect for men in this category has deteriorated, or where it never existed, large numbers of men drop out of working life and retreat to the home, drawing social benefits or living off working women. Yet it is only uneducated men who do this, or those without talent or skills. Those who are educated, and who have talent and ability, make an effort to fulfill their potential. They do not wish to stay at home and do nothing. They feel themselves wasting away. And that is precisely how women with ability feel, when they are expected to play the role of brood mare-cum-housekeeper. No amount of glorification of the role of motherhood and housewifery can appease them. They know it is a sham. How much housework can you do to fill a 10-hour day? My house is fairly large and it takes just eight hours a week to keep it spotless (and someone else is paid to do it), plus another four hours to do the week’s ironing. And how can you play mother to teenagers who are out of the house for eight hours a day? The women who say that they couldn’t possibly find the time to do anything but look after the house are the victims of Parkinson’s Law. Parkinson was a consultant engaged to draw up a review of the British civil service in the 1950s, who reached the conclusion that “work expands to fill the time available.” And that is precisely it. Many of you will have noticed that the homes of women who work are often in better order, and much better run, than the homes of women who don’t work.

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Choosing to stay at home and look after children long past the age when they can look after themselves is – and there is no easy way to say this – the coward’s way out. And like all cowards’ ways out, there’s a high price to be paid for it. Women usually realise what a mistake they have made only when it is too late: when their marriage breaks down when they are 40 or 50 years old, and they are left high and dry.

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It is a frequent complaint of men in the higher socio-economic groups – the ones most likely to have dependent wives – that they cannot fathom why their dependent wives whine about their so-called plight, why they are always moaning and sinking into depression, when they have such a nice, comfortable life. Why are they on Valium? Why do they take Prozac? Why do they weep in the bathroom when they think nobody is listening? What do they have to complain about? A woman working on a factory production line for the minimum wage, who has to go home and clean the house and feed the children afterwards, would probably agree with the men who say this. It’s relative, though. The dependent wife generally comes from a social background that has ensured her education, perhaps even up to university level. She has skills that make it easy for her to integrate in several environments, and to adapt. Her mind, at least before it was forced to atrophy through misuse, was once ignited. For her, it was never a choice between a factory production line and endless pointless hours spent floating around her home or having coffee with friends, once the children have detached themselves from her emotionally. Her original choice was between an interesting occupation that earns her money of her own, and a child-rearing break that turned into 20 years of time out. When those 20 years are up, she finds she no longer has a choice. Life has passed her by. The job market has moved on. She lacks the skills. She is already past it. By the time she acknowledges her plight, it is usually too late. There are not many work opportunities for women of 45 who have been out of the job market since they were 24, and that is why so many of them have resorted to teaching English as a foreign language, which is badly paid, seasonal work, or taking in paying students, which isn’t really work at all, but just a source of income. Not even that despised factory production line will take on a 45-year-old woman who hasn’t worked for two decades. Too many years of doing what they want at their own pace makes such women impervious to the need for discipline and deadlines in the workplace – it would have the same effect on men. This, of course, is a personal tragedy and it is no surprise that these women feel cheated. Yes, they chose their own life, but it was falsely advertised to them. At 10, 12, 18, 20, 25, they were told that this would be the only option for them, the best option – and then, 20 or 30 years down the line, they wake up one morning to find that the strange feeling in the pit of their stomach has the dreaded name of despair.

“Why do they feel cheated?” my interlocutors often snap at me. Again, they are usually men, but they are often also women who have lived this sort of life, and who justify its validity to themselves because otherwise they would be unable to cope with the magnitude of their loss, of time and opportunities that will not be returned to them, and of the veritable wasteland that lies ahead. They glorify the role of mother and housewife. They are seemingly blind to the fact that several women, and I am one of them, raise children without making this their sole identity. They probably imagine that there must be something wrong with us, and they are secretly dismayed to find out that our children sail through their examinations, go to university, hold down jobs, cook, sort out their business, and are largely self-reliant, while many of their own children’s are mollycoddled to the point where they can’t do anything, and are semi-permanently infantilized. (It’s one of the reasons why so many marriages are breaking down; the grown-up sons of stay-at-home mothers can’t cope with real life as grown men in the role of husband and father.)

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Women defending their perceived role as housewife and mother are usually more aggressive, defensive and challenging than men seeking to perpetuate the unsavoury status quo, and I find it difficult to maintain my composure – though at the grand old age of 40, I have finally learned that you cannot convince religious or political zealots, or committed housewives. Many women in this position do feel cheated, because they were fed a dream and led to believe in it. The reality is that there is no opt-out clause from real life called marriage, motherhood and a lifetime of housewifery. There is no meal ticket for life; there is no free lunch. A high price is paid by these women; a far higher price than that paid by the women who started out with a life-plan, and who maintained that life-plan even through marriage and motherhood. The women who stick to a good job or a professional career through marriage and the birth of their children do pay a higher price in the short term, but they pay no price at all in the long-term, when they reap the rewards of their investment and their early hardship. The reality is that the child-raising years are but a brief interlude in a woman’s life and she should not centre her being on those few short years, but just take them in her stride and get on with the rest of life. A woman might live for 90 years; she raises children for 20 of those years at most.

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The big lie that girls are fed is that marriage can be a career and that housework and children can fill your days. They can’t. Fathers manage to be fathers without making it their defining role in life, and their children love them just as much as they love their mothers (and then the mothers get jealous, because they seem to think that they are entitled to proportionately more love because they are the ones at home with the kids). Men would never dream of making a vocation out of housework; even the men who are quite content not to work while their wives do so do not spend their days chasing cobwebs or dust-busting or telling the neighbours how many loads they have put in the washing-machine, in the tone others would use for a description of climbing Mount Everest. They leave the house in a mess, or pay someone else to do the work, and get on with the more interesting stuff. That is my attitude precisely. It costs about Lm20 a week to keep a house spanking clean. When both husband and wife are working, that’s Lm10 each. For that price, it really isn’t worth tearing each other to shreds over who does the housework. And it certainly isn’t worth an educated woman’s while to stay home and do it, when she could be out and earning so much more and never having to bother with all that.

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Whenever committed housewives insult me for my views – and believe me, there are few people as rude and hostile as certain stay-at-home mothers and housewives who feel that their choices are being challenged (they promptly revert to convent playground talk and tactics, proving only that their maturity has been halted at around that point) – one of their usual claims is that it is “impossible to work and have children and look after a home”. Then it is my turn to feel insulted. I have to decide, in that brief second before carrying on the conversation, whether they are so lacking in intelligence that they cannot see they are speaking to someone who not only works, has children and looks after a home, but also spent five years full-time at university during that period, or whether they have thought about this, but assume that my sons are neglected delinquents who failed all their exams and dropped out of life, and that we all live in squalor and eat instant mashed potato every night. I realise at that point that carrying on the conversation is pointless. The fact remains that women who work have more in common with men than they do with housewives. But they are caught between a rock and a hard place, because even men, usually older men, are hostile. But eventually you reach the conclusion that they can all go to hell, while you get on with your life.