Ach, you’ve got to feel for Stella Creasy. Pretty much everyone and his wife has “a view” on her taking her three-month-old baby into the Commons, asleep, in a sling, for a recent debate – something that has now earned her a formal reprimand from the deputy speaker.
As Creasy is still breastfeeding, this has put her in a quandary. “Having already taken my baby into the chamber previously without any complaint, I’ve asked for urgent clarification as to what would happen if I keep bringing the baby with me, and where they expect me to leave him,” Creasy said.
However much she is pondering what to do next, though, is dwarfed by how much other people are pondering what she should do next. In a nutshell, 90 per cent of the reactions to this incident have been variants on, “Who does she think she is?”, “No one else is doing this,” “I never did this,” and “Why can’t she be more like Jacob Rees-Mogg and Boris Johnson? They have millions of kids and they never bring them into work.” The general tone is, “Stop trying different things and just be NORMAL, Stella Creasy.”
You never get to be a maverick mum, do you? You never get to think up a new way to manage parenting, which might be different, or look weird, or break new ground, without a bunch of people getting really nervous or tetchy and telling you to stick to the old ways and the rules. No matter that the oldest ways meant mothers went everywhere with their babies strapped to them – peasant mothers tending their mud farms or pig shops with half a dozen babies stapled to various body parts. No – in this case, “normal” means, specifically, “middle-class western professionals parenting in the postwar era” and therefore complete separation of work and parenthood via babysitters, wives and/or nannies.
You can’t be a maverick mum. You can’t try a new thing or a gentle bending of a rule, let alone a balls out, “take off and nuke this place from space” revolution in the way things are done. You can be a maverick dad, of course. Films, books and TV shows are full of dads who are variously alcoholic, wise-cracking, addicted to gambling, self-destructive, gun-toting and/or party animals, who continue being maverick cops, detectives, spies, astronauts and/or superheroes and dads. Maverick dads can jump through time portals, engage in suicide missions, storm embassies, go under cover or single-handedly save the world and they’re just seen as amazing dudes with an unexpected soft side. In the latest Bond film, because of his job, 007 ends up with his daughter being kidnapped and held on a very sparsely furnished island full of toxic veg and, simply because he remembers to pick up his daughter’s teddy bear while shooting 400 baddies, everyone’s like, “Oh my God, he’s such an amazing dad. So tough, but still loves that kid! This is going to change the way we think about fatherhood! So progressive! So modern! So sexy!”
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By way of contrast, Stella Creasy takes her sleeping kid into what is basically an office in SW1 and everyone’s like, “But think of the child! What if, in some way, it went wrong?”
I know this sounds mad, but maybe Creasy knows her baby. And knew he would be asleep when she was in the house? And that, by every conceivable measure, this was something that was working out really well?
In 2002, when my first baby was four months old, I had to write a review of the Glastonbury Festival. I went, on my own, with the baby, on the train. I put up my tent, walked around the site with the buggy, fed the baby, put her down for her nap and wrote and filed a 1,500-word report before she woke up. I knew my baby’s schedule and how I could fit in work around it.
I know I sound like a lunatic, but what if there weren’t any scientifically discovered rules for being a working mother and every “acceptable” option we now have was invented, at some point, by a working mother just doing it and then other mothers cheerfully copying her? Because that is how every current template and piece of legislation we have came about. All mums are maverick mums. The women who’ve spent the past few weeks saying, “I’d hate to bring my baby into work,” are just as maverick, in a historical, peasant-in-the-field context, as the ones who want to and are now attempting it.
The truth about modern motherhood is that everyone is making it up as they go along – and I find it perfectly plausible that, over the coming years, we might well invent thousands of new, utterly maverick ways to combine work and motherhood. So long as we stop bitching about it when it happens.
