Most of the jobs college graduates look for when they come out of the schools nowadays didn’t even exist a quarter century ago. At least, they didn’t have names and nobody got paid for doing them.
A while back, I started a list of modern job titles I run across in my daily reading and suddenly realized that all these fancy functions used to be filled free of charge by Mom and Dad.
For example, they both shared the role of performance consultant – Mom reviewing in what shape kids left their bedrooms and Dad urging great effort on the barn chores. Both parents were also family therapists, now and then stepping in between feuding brothers and sisters and helping the seven of us get along without murdering each other.
Mom was a director of long-range planning, starting her Christmas baking way back in October and counting the days until we went back to school in September. Dad was a crop scientist and a weed ecologist, locked in a never-ending struggle to keep the latter from overtaking the former. Mom was a pork adviser, advising us to finish up our bacon and she was also our soil-conservation adviser, instructing us not to wear our muddy boots into her clean kitchen.
Dad was our media-relations coordinator, deciding which kid would be sent out to the road to bring in the newspaper from the mailbox. And Mom was our cereals agronomist, deciding whether we’d be eating corn flakes or puffed wheat for the next week. Dad was our plant pathologist, bringing back crop-condition reports from the fields every day.
Long before there was such a thing, Mom was our family-studies professor, talking us into doing our homework before we turned on the TV and studying her family to make sure we were doing it. And Dad was the poultry-behaviour scientist who kept the eggs coming.
Mom was our environmental manager, directing efforts to keep the house clean and tidy while Dad was the environmental engineer, fixing the furnace when it broke and keeping a roof on the place.
Mom was our food engineer and shared the duties of information engineer with Dad: “For your information, young man, you are NOT staying up till 10 o’clock.” Mom was the design-services engineer, deciding whether the wallpaper would be flowers or stripes. She was also our certified biofeeback therapist and counsellor, giving us awful-tasting pink medicine when we complained of stomach aches and telling us we were good as new.
Mom was our family’s health-care activator, applying mustard plasters and cough syrup as needed. Dad was our water-management supervisor, fixing pipes and drilling wells. He was also the program manager, switching TV channels when the shows got too racy and the artistic director, asking the kids to sing that song we learned at school for the neighbours when they dropped around. And he was also the wildlife rehabilitator, administering needles to the rumps of cattle when they came down with yet another sickness.
Mom and Dad also wore a whole host of other hats as career counsellors, spiritual advisers, transportation engineers, recreation directors, financial consultants and life-skills instructors to name but a few.
But what they were best at being was a mom and dad.
Or is that childcare worker or primary caregiver or youth-activities coordinator or biological parent or …?
©1989 Jim Hagarty
