{"id":11496,"date":"2026-03-02T09:40:43","date_gmt":"2026-03-02T14:40:43","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/cloggie.org\/wissewords2\/?p=11496"},"modified":"2026-03-02T09:40:43","modified_gmt":"2026-03-02T14:40:43","slug":"she-couldve-been-somebody-important","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/cloggie.org\/wissewords2\/2026\/03\/02\/she-couldve-been-somebody-important\/","title":{"rendered":"She could&#8217;ve been somebody important"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>\nThis week&#8217;s episode of <cite>Ikoku Nikki<\/cite?\/<cite>Journal with Witch<\/cite> hit where it hurts.\n<\/p>\n<p><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"\/pictures\/wissewords\/Ikoku Nikki - 07.jpg\" width=\"1280\" height=\"720\" alt=\"I stole my mother's life in a sense\" class=\"aligncenter\" \/><\/p>\n<p>\nI was born in 1974, which is long enough ago that my mother lost her job as a kindergarten teacher when she became pregnant. That&#8217;s how things worked back then in the Netherlands. If you became a mother you obviously could no longer work. You had to take care of your baby after all: that&#8217;s your job now. The father? He can&#8217;t help you, he has a real job. Believe it or not, this state of affairs was already an improvement on a decade earlier, when she would&#8217;ve lost her job on marriage. Progress!\n<\/p>\n<p><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"\/pictures\/wissewords\/Ikoku Nikki - 08.jpg\" width=\"1280\" height=\"720\" alt=\"That's not on you, that's a societal flaw\" class=\"aligncenter\" \/><\/p>\n<p>\nNot that my mother didn&#8217;t want children or that she didn&#8217;t look forward to being a mother. It&#8217;s just that the option of &#8220;have children AND a career&#8221; wasn&#8217;t available for women then. So when Juno-san started talking about their mother, how she was a sharp woman and how had she not had her child or had been born a generation later, she could&#8217;ve been somebody important, that struck me. Especially coming in the middle of an episode that revolves around becoming who you want to be and discovering who that is. Even though Makio is right and society is to blame, I share Juno&#8217;s sense of guilt. It&#8217;s not that my mother has been generally unhappy with her life, but that there were choices that were made for her, that limited her opportunities. What if she could&#8217;ve stayed a teacher and my parents had split the work of raising children they way my sister and her partner do now? What would her life be like now?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>This week&#8217;s episode of Ikoku Nikki<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1497],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-11496","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-anime"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/cloggie.org\/wissewords2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11496","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/cloggie.org\/wissewords2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/cloggie.org\/wissewords2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cloggie.org\/wissewords2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cloggie.org\/wissewords2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=11496"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/cloggie.org\/wissewords2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11496\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":11498,"href":"https:\/\/cloggie.org\/wissewords2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11496\/revisions\/11498"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/cloggie.org\/wissewords2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=11496"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cloggie.org\/wissewords2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=11496"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cloggie.org\/wissewords2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=11496"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}