The idea of the working mother still rankles, which is a retro kind of a notion. But it is also a retro kind of given that, in an ideal world, mummies would stay at home with their babies.
The 1950s idea of the contented housewife and mother is as hot as the 1950s look in clothes (which is to say, very — do keep up). The at-home mother is eulogised for sacrificing her career to the needs of her young. How noble she is, we think, how brave, how irrefutably maternal and touching — how very slightly boring, but never mind about that. Compare and contrast with the working mother — harder, spikier, racked by guilt, “missing bath time” (which has now become shorthand for this kind of female guilt), longing to pack it all in and move her family to somewhere scenic, an organic farm, say. In Somerset. With meadows.
While I’d be the first to agree that babies need their mothers — I am completely appalled by the idea of sending months-old babies to nurseries, for instance — this argument peters out later on.
I habitually, guiltlessly, miss my 10-year-old’s bath time, for example. I asked him last night whether this made him feel tragic and forlorn and whether it has instilled any desire in him to stomp down to the end of the garden, weeping, to torture bugs. He looked at me as though I’d gone mad.
The problem with being a selfless mother is just that: selflessness. Who needs it? Given the choice between a parent with a strong sense of her own self and the wits to pursue her own as well as her children’s interests, and a placid, benign, selfless vacuum, I know which I’d pick.
And so, interestingly, do children. In research published last week in Science magazine, a study of 2,402 children from disadvantaged backgrounds — thus, perhaps, more sensitive to the emotional nuances of everyday existence — found that teenagers’ levels of anxiety go down significantly if their mothers work. If the mothers give up work, or lose their jobs, there is an increase in teenagers’ behavioural problems, drug and alcohol abuse. When mothers take up work after living on benefits, their children are not harmed in any way.
This can’t all be to do with money and the buoying up of family funds, and it is counter- intuitive: we’ve been led to believe that it works precisely the other way around, that children are deeply troubled by parental absence and having to get their own tea. But no: they thrive on it, and in doing so illustrate a truth that remains elusive for most guilt-tormented working adults: namely that a contented and stimulated mother makes for a contented and stimulated child.
This is not to say that it is impossible to be contented and stimulated by housework and childcare alone: millions of women are, and hooray for them. But it does mean that working mothers might like to relax a little. The worst, most farcical kind of guilt-driven competitive parenting inevitably comes from working mothers who feel they must constantly prove themselves to parents who don’t work or who work from home.
These women feel compelled, at all times, to present themselves as an Admirable Parent — not, usually, so much for the benefit of their children as for the benefit of observers: no telling-off, no grotesque indulgences, no omnipresent children who never go to bed.
This is both tiresome and fraudulent: most mothers who stay at home know how boring children can get, and aren’t — or shouldn’t be — embarrassed to say so.
Mothers who work would often rather die than admit to such emotions, especially when they see their children for only a few hours each day. You can hardly blame them, though: blinded by guilt — at the back of every working mother’s mind lurks the notion that if her child grows up maladjusted it will be her fault — it’s not always easy to see the wood for the trees.
This new research goes some way to assuage the guilt, which turns out to be effectively groundless in the first place. I’ll just add my tuppence worth: working women suffering guilt, and those who take pleasure in pointing out that they jolly well should, never seem to think very far ahead.
It is my strong impression that women who have spent a life devoted solely to their children at the expense of any personal interests often make for the most disappointed, difficult and demanding people in late middle age and old age, when the children are grown up and have families of their own.
I’m thinking specifically of my paternal grandmother, an impressive (and lovely) matriarch, who was also oppressively involved in the minutiae of her children’s lives because she had no real interests or concerns of her own, and was wounded to the core if she wasn’t visited and comprehensively debriefed by her adult children daily.
I can think of lots of people like her, some still relatively young. I have friends with mothers who are never off the telephone, unusually concerned with the ins and outs of their daughters’ marriages. It’s not particularly attractive or inspiring to watch.
Think about it next time you sit in judgment on some poor woman who finds her work as stimulating and challenging as she does her children. And if you are that woman: ease up on the guilt.
A story last week made me shout with laughter at breakfast. Ron Davies, MP — he of “moment of madness” on Clapham Common fame — was photographed in some bushes in Tog Hill, near Bath. The Sun printed some of the pictures — the printable ones, it says.
Confronted, Davies, whose wife gave birth on Valentine’s Day, said he was looking for badgers. Yes, really. Looking for badgers. You come out of the bushes doing up your fly, having been photographed, and what springs to mind? Not needing to pee, not stretching the old legs, not looking for the lesser cormorant or shag, but . . . badgers.
Alas, Tog Hill is a known gay cruising area and the chairman of the Somerset Trust Badger Group says there are no badger setts there. What would Davies say if he’d been caught cottaging? That he was looking for lobsters and sea anemones among the pissoirs? Never mind: this is still the best, most surreal, excuse I have ever heard and should go straight into The Oxford Dictionary of Quotations. As for Mr Davies: he needs to have a word with himself.
