Mother’s Day always leaves me with an uncomfortable feeling I’m not the mother my children would like me to be. I’m certainly not the mother I grew up with. Unlike me, my mother wasn’t ever late for school, and she never forgot my swimming kit or failed to turn up for assembly. I can’t remember her ever putting me to bed an hour early so she could spend the evening working, or skipping a school play because she was at a meeting. She was never short of that most precious commodity, time. Because it’s your time, more than the newest Nintendo DS or the coolest pair of high-tops, that your children really want from you. In the starkest terms, my mum had time for me because she didn’t have a job, nor the sense that she needed a career to define herself. She was a mother.
Back then, in the 1970s, she wouldn’t have felt she had to qualify that last statement with just. She wasn’t just a mother. It was what she did, and she was proud of it. Time doesn’t stand still, though, and being a full-time mother is both a devalued currency and a luxury few can afford. Today, I work because my life is expensive, and I have to pay for it all myself, but I also work because I love it, and I know I’d make a lousy full-time mum. I don’t even feel guilty admitting this, as recognising that motherhood is really hard is something lots of women will cheerfully do.
“Even if I won the lottery, I couldn’t give up work,” says the artist and textile designer Helen Steele, mother to Chloe, 14, Halle, 8, and Ronnie, 6. She employs a mother’s help and shares childcare duties with her husband, Stuart. “Work is essential to who I am. Full-time mothering is a difficult thing to do. I would go mad without work, so I have the utmost respect for the women who do it full time. It takes a special sort of person.”
I’m not this sort of woman. I’m impatient, selfish and terrible at crafts, and I don’t have the skills my mother had for the job. Yet, although it requires these skills, placing any sort of value on motherhood is something we’ve become bad at. It’s often derided, seen as a luxury necessitating a rich husband. Let’s face it: many women would love to stay at home, but, in these cash-strapped times, they need a second income to support a household. And as men play ever-larger roles in their children’s lives, the value attached to the full-time mum is shrinking even more, to the point that she is becoming almost invisible. Unlike work, mothering is sometimes seem as a nebulous role, something Kirsty Young drew attention to recently when she said: “We’re all defined by what we do.”
Sometimes it is easy to forget that mums who are at home all the time are probably having the hardest time of all Young expressed sympathy for women who have given up work to raise children, only to find that they’ve rendered themselves invisible, “someone people wouldn’t necessarily want to strike up a conversation with”. Looking after children, she says, “is a hidden thing. You got them to eat some brussels-sprout purée, but you’re not going to get public recognition for that”.
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As it is, the fierce competition between work and kids means the time given over to mothering is squeezed into smaller and smaller sections of the day. The BBC newsreader Sophie Raworth drew attention to an American parenting scheme called Families and Schools Together, in which parents dedicate 15 minutes of undisturbed attention to their children every day.
Competing with the insistent bleep of my mobile and computer, I struggled to give my kids five minutes without a frantic scroll through my BlackBerry to check I wasn’t needed somewhere else.
Work seeps into our home lives on a daily basis: the concept of a 9-5 working day, one in which we could close the door at the end of it, seems as archaic as Sigourney Weaver’s power suits in Working Girl. I know, too, that in comparison with my own mother, I’m often a rubbish mum because of my work, yet I would never, ever give it up. I’m distracted and snappy on a deadline, and most days my brain feels like a Rubik’s Cube, crunched into opposing directions several times a day, shadowed by a great big cloud of maternal guilt.
I struggle to remember the spelling books and swimming kit every morning because the space that organises that in my mind is competing with deadlines and meetings; and the fact is that, frequently, when something has to give, it’s usually home, not work. The last time school rang me to say that my son was sick, I was on my way to a meeting and snapped back that unless he actually couldn’t stand up, he’d just have to tough it out. Juggling is such a cliché, but it makes you feel busy — and, when you feel busy, you have a sense of importance.
Having fought so hard for the right to choose our own paths in life, we have somehow turned our back on the women who have chosen to stay at home with their kids. “As a working mother, sometimes it is easy to forget that mums who are at home all the time are probably having the hardest time of all,” Steele says. “I miss the kids terribly when I’m away, but I also crave those trips away to Europe with my work. Hats off to women who don’t get that.”
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Isn’t it time we recognised mothers with the same heroic accolades we bestow on the women who appear to “have it all”? Motherhood is one of the most demanding and selfless jobs in the world. It has little to do with the glossy, irony-laden image of Stepford wifeyness that we’ve eulogised over the past few years, as our obsession with cupcakes and scented linen cupboards got completely out of control. And for most women who do it, being a full-time mum is a world away from a certain image of glossy, glamorous motherhood — that sort of mummy can only look quite so yummy because she has legions of staff and a vast bank balance to support it.
Elle Macpherson looks good clattering across the playground in her sky-high Louboutins, but she isn’t, honestly, behaving like a mother. Being a full-time mother means being totally selfless, endlessly loving, incredibly patient and wearing practical shoes that you can run across the park in, even when it’s raining. Being a full-time mother means always being there, always putting yourself last and always being exhausted. Being a full-time mother means being invisible, rarely thanked and a dab hand at finger painting. I couldn’t do it. Could you?