Career and family are not mutually exclusive, even in the cabinet
By Anna-Stina Nykänen
The new Minister of Culture Stefan Wallin, 39, travels nearly every weekday morning from his home in Turku to work in Helsinki. In the capital, as a part of his work with the Culture Ministry portfolio, he handles gender equality matters. Last Friday, for instance, he made a speech in which Finnish fathers were urged to take a greater part in the care of their own children.
“Usually he manages to say hello to the girls before he leaves, as they are waking up. But sometimes he has to take the 5 o’clock train - we call it the Horror Express”, explains Wallin’s wife Elina Pirjatanniemi.
The family’s morning carousel is left for Dr. Pirjatanniemi to operate. She feeds and dresses the children and takes 7-year-old Stella to preschool and her 5-year-old little sister Freja to kindergarten, before she heads off to her own workplace - teaching future lawyers at the University of Turku, preparing lectures, and writing scientific articles on her special subject of environmental law.
The 40-year-old Pirjatanniemi also picks the kids up in the afternoon before her husband gets back home from Helsinki.
“The house is not in the sort of shape where we could invite guests over any old time. There are piles of piles everywhere: piles of washing, piles of stuff, piles of papers”, says Pirjatanniemi.
Fortunately these days a minister is no longer obliged to have a “representative home”.
The modern government minister can in this respect at least enjoy a normal family life. This whole vexed question of putting together the ministerial duties and those of parenthood has in recent years been increasingly in the news. Back in the 1990s, the then Prime Minister Esko Aho was branded by his political opponents as “a cellphone daddy”. Before that, nobody paid much attention to how much a male minister contributed to family life.
In the last government term, the Foreign Trade and Development Minister Paula Lehtomäki took off for maternity leave while in office. There were a few questions asked as to whether this was the end of her political career.
Now Lehtomäki is back, this time behind the Environment desk in the new centre-right administration, and she is expecting her second child, but she is not the only member of the government with the patter of tiny feet in prospect.
The young men in the government have pointed out that they, too, have small children at home.
The Swedish People’s Party chairman Wallin in particular has come out and declared himself a feminist, and said he firmly intends to make sure he has enough time left for his family.
How do ministers manage the juggling act of work and family? Are they simply ludicrously hard-working, do they have some kind of robot at home to do the chores, or are there more hours on their wristwatches?
Can the state be a flexible employer with regard to ministers’ family matters?
Elina Pirjatanniemi is particularly pleased at a recent comment by Prime Minister Matti Vanhanen.
“Vanhanen said more or less that now we are not in crisis mode, and that the work can be done during the daylight hours. This won applause from the troops at home. And it could also be an example to the corporate sector.”
She notes at the same time that according to the statistics it is the upwardly mobile fathers of young children who put in quite the largest number of overtime hours.
Pirjatanniemi finds the feminist sentiments of her husband perfectly natural. She says there are plenty of feminist men among her colleagues and circle of friends.
“There’s nothing so very special about him. But it is nice that in this position he has been able to bring out that side of him. Some might think that there is a little home-tyrant lurking behind it all, but the truth is that this is his own personal mission.”
Wallin intends to be away from home for a maximum of two nights a week, and no more. He wants to take his turn at ferrying the kids to their medical check-ups and he will not give this up for ministry meetings.
“I did suggest this to him once, but he almost got upset at the idea [of skipping a visit]. I was, I suppose, more traditional than him in my way of thinking.”
What about doing chores around the house? Does it work?
“We do things in different ways. Sometimes I get annoyed at the way he goes about it, and I’m sure the feeling is mutual at times.”
The job of a minister of state is not some emergency detail; it can go on for years.
This means that routines have to be developed for getting through the everyday, ones that keep everyone satisfied, says Pirjatanniemi.
“My own work is important to me, too. It’s not like I shove my own needs into a bottom drawer.”
Two years ago, when she was writing her doctoral thesis, Elina Pirjatanniemi’s husband stayed at home for two months. Her study on environmental crimes was very well received as a pioneering piece of research.
“At that time everything revolved around me. Steffi was wating at home with the kids, when I came back tetchy after a day of writing. There was no need for me to spend my time and energy wondering if he’d be able to find the girls’ welly-boots and coveralls, and that was important for us.”
Things probably would not have gone as smoothly if one of the partners had not concentrated totally on the home front.
“It is a utopian idea to think that two people with a family can simultaneously be in an intensive phase of their career. You have to get a sense of rhythm going.”
She takes the view that working life allows a woman rather more freedom to have different phases in her career. A man is supposed to go ballistic, like a rocket.
Now it is the wife’s turn to stretch herself thin between home and work. The Wallins are fortunate in that Pirjatanniemi has a flexible job. As a researcher she can to some extent determine for herself whether she works at home or on the campus, at night or during the day.
“Anything that comes up suddenly is my responsibility. If one of the kids has a tummy problem, I’m the one who bends and tends to it. Our life would get out of shape immediately if both of us were working to a stopwatch schedule.”
Both husband and wife cook, and the washing machine gets filled by the one whose shirts or blouses happen to be on the bottom of the pile. “I do the ironing, yes, because I happen to like it. Steffi deals with the aquarium and the car.”
Evening tasks are divided: one makes dinner, the other reads a bedtime story to the children. If Wallin has been away for any amount of time, the kids are all over him like a rash, and their mother can withdraw into the background to do her own thing.
“He has to make up any shortfalls in his reading to them: the children calculate that each of us read about as much, and keep us to it. Then the other one can go and watch Sportsnight.”
A cleaning firm comes every second week to keep the place tidy - the result of a common Christmas present between the parents. Grandparents and friends also help out. Many of those friends also have small children of their own, so it requires some thought before asking them for help.
“In this respect, I think we probably are on the debt side of things”, Elina admits.
A good kindergarten provides the children with the sort of stimuli that they might not get at home.
“In my own personal version of Hell, the day would be spent in handcrafts and making stuff”, confesses Pirjatanniemi, with obvious relief that the task can be performed at the kindergarten and preschool instead.
Wallin has excellent powers of concentration. This helps in keeping work and home on an even keel. At the summer cabin he can answer an important call and as soon as he has hung up he can be back loafing on the jetty as before.
“He can also write a newspaper column at the same time as the kids are playing a board game on the floor right next to him. I can’t manage that sort of thing. If the children are getting over an illness and are with me at work for the day, drawing or something, I cannot get my thoughts focused properly.”
Sometimes Pirjatanniemi gets her own timetable wound too tight, and tries too hard. “I can get through the day’s tasks alright, but I’m glum, I sigh a lot, and I swig down coffee by the bucketful. And then at work when I’m supposed to be coming up with creative ideas, I can’t string a sentence together.”
Bad conscience is also a familiar visitor for Elina Pirjatanniemi. At work she frets over a child’s runny nose and at home she worries about an unfinished article. A sense of inadequacy strikes. On Friday it can feel as if she has run a steeplechase course and collapsed in a heap over the finish line. At that point it is necessary to stop engines, wind down, and read a good book.
It is worth keeping the weekday routines as simple as possible.
“The ideal is to just be and just wig out on Fridays. And on Saturday mornings you don’t get out of your pyjamas until it is absolutely necessary.”
When she was the Minister of Culture in the previous government, Tanja Saarela was criticised for not “getting about” more during her summer vacation, for not being seen at cultural events and the festivals that litter the short Finnish summer.
Saarela wanted to spend her holiday time in peace with her children. A Minister of Culture (and Sport) can very easily fill the evenings and weekends with work-related engagements.
Yes, it would be possible to go to family-type events with the children in tow, but for the kids it might not be so much fun to have their father along in “minister-mode”.
“Sometimes the girls ask their father if he’s going to be making another of those speeches. ‘Is it going to be a long one?’”
Speeches are always too long. The only way the children can be got through them without complaint is with the bribe of a lollipop in their mouth.
A minister from a small political party such as the SPP is less in the public eye than one from a big party. Even so, the publicity thing affects the children.
“I worry a bit that the girls will think that their father’s work is more important than others’. I’ve explained to them that there are jobs that are important, even if you do not see the people who are doing them”, says Pirjatanniemi.
She has even had to defend political cartoonists when her daughter was offended by the pictures of her father: ‘Why do they always draw Daddy like that?’
Mother explained that the drawings are part and parcel of democracy. If there is someone in power, there must also be counterweights to that power. It is necessary to be able to write and draw freely about those holding the reins.
The greatest difficulties for Elina Pirjatanniemi in the new situation have come from the way the people around tend to relate to her - although she is slightly embarrassed at having to make the admisasion.
“I have always been very egocentric in my way. It was a tough pill to swallow when people started to think of me through the filter of another person. It was annoying to be Mrs Minister.”
The law doctorate wife has been asked if she is “still at work”.
“I’m not a little girl any more, and to me it seemed like I was having a dishrag thrown in my face. Oh, so I should suddenly quit my job, because my husband is a minister? It’s a idea out of the stone age, and politics isn’t like that any longer. Yuck! Scary stuff.”
There have even been those who wonder aloud that she has her own surname. They don’t exactly grumble at it, but kind of stare, as you would at a strange breed of dog, she says.
One thing she has got used to, however, is that going out to do things with her husband in town can be a lengthy exercise, as people are forever stopping him in the street to talk.
“Yes, it’s like going out for a walk with a snail”, she laughs.
Helsingin Sanomat