Grappling with the Christmas sugar-rush insurgency, wrestling small molten lumps of rage into wellington boots and manoeuvring spoons towards defiant little mouths, I suspect most families with small children were encouraged and amused by Michelle Obama’s breezy definition of toddlers as “terrorists” — demanding, irrational and needy, however much you love them.
She made it even better by saying that for one fraught decade she “couldn’t stand” her husband Barack, who was powering on towards the Senate while she clung on to her own legal career and did more than half the childcare. She cited outraged wifely remarks like: “You’re going out? Where? You’re GOLFING?”
It’s 33 years since I was provoked to write a book called How Not to be a Perfect Mother, drawing on questionnaires from 50 women of three generations and varied classes. I weighed and relayed their advice on everything from bathtime to tantrums against the experience that we were having, one under-two roaming the house and the other under the desk in a Moses basket.
The provocation to write it was simply that too many early-childcare books have been composed in tranquillity by doctors and “experts”, from Locke to Spock to Gina Ford. None of them — there’s a marvellous history of the genre by Christina Hardyment — ever seemed to acknowledge that there is nothing unnatural about sometimes wishing you were at the pub, or in a nice orderly office, not wiping bums and being screamed at for omitting to sprinkle hundreds-and-thousands on a pernickety diner’s fish pie, while feeling personally inadequate. Nobody ever painted a Madonna with gritted teeth and a scowl of frustration.
That was reality but I can say from sympathetic observation that the job of raising a fresh generation with good humour in the UK has got harder since. Housing costs are heavier, employment more fragile, two jobs often essential. When I was writing, it still felt natural to say that if, as a working mother, you felt guilty, the answer might be to take a few years at home if you could afford to. Many did so, and others went comfortably part-time.
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Now, though, delegating a patchwork of expensive early-years childcare is often both an inescapable norm and a constant anxiety. The irony, meanwhile, is that the sanctification of motherhood is intensified by both social and commercial media: there’s pressure to buy designer baby kit, to perfect the child with constant stimuli and complicated dietetics, all while remaining fashionable and “hot” yourself. Which presumably not only involves desperate self-grooming but not doing what Michelle Obama calls “turning her ire” against your partner.
The former first lady’s jokes about terrorist toddlers and wisdom about enduring marriage were widely noted but, later on in the panel show, I relished more her remarks about older children. She spoke of her effort to ensure that despite their weird White House years, her daughters Sasha and Malia emerged with the ability to make ordinary friends, take a bus and find their way about.
But more universal was her scorn for mothers and fathers who meet rebellious cries of “I hate you, you’re ruining my life!” with anxiety, as if trying to be a friend, not a parent. The Obama response is robust, apparently: “Go away, think that in your own room. I don’t need you to like me — I GOT friends!”
She also pointed out that when you constantly shield a child from feeling fear you are stopping them from ever feeling competent. As for the small but intense trials of childhood, those black furies at unfairness we all remember and proudly relate to our therapists, Mrs Obama said flatly: “Kids have to learn how to live with unfairness and unhappiness. They have to learn it in their own house. Their first bout of unfairness shouldn’t be at school. Or when they’re 30 . . . ”
Wonderful: could be a voice from 70 years ago, before our present obsession with curating personal victimhood and thinking that “mental health” involves untroubled happiness. It never has, and the process of growing up and adapting to the realities of life was never simple and sunny. Parental cruelty and neglect are obviously wicked, but there is no real kindness in a flailing, anxious, needy surrender to every childish demand.
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We have all been guilty of that at times and I suspect it is more tempting today than ever, because the financial pressure for both parents to keep earning brings a haunting fear that by being busy elsewhere you might somehow lose the connection to that child. Observe the nervous spoiling that goes on every precious weekend in every resort, café and shopping mall.
One other unexpected point Michelle Obama made was more specific to her life, about privacy versus celebrity. It was a charming reflection from one of the world’s most famous women, saying that on a soccer field or at a school event, off duty, she was always happy to chat “like a regular mother” to anyone until the awful moment they took their phone out for a selfie or asked some favour. Doing that suddenly made it “a thing”, and uncomfortable.
So she had learnt to control her defensive annoyance and say: “I will talk to you like a regular mother, bring your kid over. But the moment you turn it into a thing, no, we have to stop it.” This works, she says: “Give people credit for understanding, and they respond.”
I have never before heard a crabby, pestered celebrity say anything as generous as that. Respect.
