On Mothering Sunday, when I was little, we children would go and pick a few limp daffodils and present them to our mother, whereupon she would tell us it was all nonsense. She was a woman of firm views.
She hated the mawkish sentimentality of the day and the way children were manipulated into saccharine demonstrations. Mothering Sunday, she would explain, is the fourth Sunday of Lent and was traditionally the day when girls and boys in domestic service were given time off to go home to visit their mothers. Therefore, she would conclude, it was hardly relevant to children who lived with their mothers all year round in a godless family like ours. We could pick flowers for her any time.
The result of her firm-mindedness was that we never observed Mothering Sunday; at least I never sent cards or floral tributes but simply rang up to agree yet again how ridiculous it all was. But I think she minded secretly and felt sad which only goes to demonstrate the implacable rule of mothering, any day of the year: that a mother’s place is in the wrong — as she often told us.
No amount of firm-mindedness can protect a woman from the contradictory and sometimes impossible demands of being a mother. Motherhood is a circle that women are somehow supposed to square. There will always be a host of people to tell a mother that she has got everything wrong: her children, their father, their therapists, her friends, her divorce lawyer, the aggressive hordes of self-styled experts in the media — and perhaps her own under-confident heart as well.
Either she will, as in the accusation levelled at my mother’s generation, have devoted herself too much to her children and family and, as a result, become clinging, smothering and financially dependent. Alternatively, these days, she will have devoted herself too much to her job — neglecting her children and family in all sorts of disabling ways, thereby contributing to the breakdown of society.
It is hardly surprising that millions of European women are avoiding motherhood altogether or only, cautiously, managing 0.9% of a baby. In some European countries the birth rate is below the figures needed to sustain the present population level, even if the high birth rate of some ethnic minorities is taken into account.
The only people who are embracing motherhood with unworried enthusiasm in this country are, of course, the wrong ones — the fast-growing contingent of gymslip mothers and irresponsible teenagers who happily get pregnant, again and again, careless of how to support their babies or even who the father is. Perhaps there will be glossy Mother’s Day cards for these teenagers before long, if they aren’t in the shops already: “Congratulations! Three before you’re 17! Way to go!” One girl who would be entitled to such a card is Courtney Cassidy from Leicester, who recently made the news with her startling sexual history. Now 18, she produced three babies by three different men by the time she was 17, the first of them when she was 14 and “felt ready”.
Courtney does not even know the name of the sire of her second baby, Lennon, who was the result of a drunken night’s clubbing when her first baby, Laina-Leagh, was six months old. She does not think there is anything wrong in expecting other people to pay for her and her babies in their bleak council flat.
Although Courtney appears to be optimistic this is still a sad story and an increasingly common one. Man hands on misery to man, as Philip Larkin wrote in his poem about what your mum and dad do to you — and woman hands on misery to woman, too. Courtney’s mother has four children, all by different fathers, and her older sister Emma also had her first baby when she was 14.
The really shocking thing about this story is not the deprivation and the irresponsibility that underlie it. It is that now her story has made the news, Courtney is becoming a minor celebrity. She has been bombarded by television companies and newspapers that want interviews and “glamour modelling”, possibly topless, which she might do. “I’d love to be like Jordan,” she said. In other words, the poor girl is being rewarded for her feckless behaviour.
The message to other young girls from backgrounds like hers will be obvious: have babies and skip school. You have nothing to lose and maybe a lot to gain, starting with a place of your own and maybe a bit of fame. The message to young women who have been responsible is also clear: they need not have bothered when irresponsibility carries no risks.
Something strange is going on here. There seems to be a huge and growing confusion about motherhood. On the one hand motherhood is publicly celebrated as never before. This in itself is odd, because fewer and fewer women devote themselves to it, even part-time. When most women were full-time mothers, motherhood may officially have been apple pie, but it was not triumphantly hyped up the way it is now.
These days celebrities are chosen as mum of the year; last week the winner was Ulrika Jonsson, who is expecting her third baby by a third father. Pregnant film stars proudly display their bellies and never stop talking about motherhood being the best thing that ever happened (while doggedly pursuing their brilliant careers). In a startling aggressive celebration of motherhood a statue of a disabled, armless woman with a huge pregnant belly has just been unveiled in Trafalgar Square.
Meanwhile we are inundated with alarming advice from all sides about how to give birth the right way, feed babies, make the right choices about nappies and play and how to cope with sibling rivalry. We are nagged constantly about the many dangers our children face — medically, psychologically, socially, sexually and so on — in our extremely risk-averse society.
Motherhood is presented both as amazingly wonderful and amazingly difficult and demanding. Yet it seems, mysteriously enough, that it is not too wonderful or difficult to combine with a demanding job — and not too difficult for a deprived, troubled young teenager. It just doesn’t add up.
All this suggests to me a striking public hypocrisy about the rights and wrongs of motherhood. Most mothers are in the wrong in one way or another — they are too demanding, not strict enough, wrong about the MMR injection or unable to breastfeed. Yet the only mothers who do not feel that they are in the wrong are precisely the ones who are clearly in the wrong. They are the schoolgirl mothers or the women who drift from pregnancy to pregnancy in a haze of irresponsibility and poverty, who neglect their fatherless children and themselves and who are wholly dependent on welfare.
All this confusion is depressing. Perhaps it’s for this reason that Mother’s Day does not really seem to me to be a day to celebrate, any more than it did to my mother.
