Gaby Hinsliff writes about her decision to resign as political editor of the Observer in order to spend more time with her two-year-old son. It’s a long, soul searching article about the inner conflicts experienced by her and other mothers as they try to juggle full-time work with parenting and family life:
For two crazed but fantastic years, I did – in that loaded cliche – have it all: terrific job, plus small child. Thanks largely to a brilliant nanny and a hands-on partner, I don’t honestly believe either suffered from the other. But what got lost in the rush was a life, if a life means having time for the people you love, engaging with the world around you, making a home rather than just running a household.
What makes the article so poignant (and painful) is that she’s not a strident campaigner for stay-at-home motherhood. The realisation that something needed to change came very slowly:
Surrender steals up on the working mother like hypothermia takes a stranded climber: the chill deepens day by day, disorientation sets in, and before you know it you are gone. In the sleepless blur of the last three years, I can barely even remember now how it started.
But perhaps it was back this spring, when I took my son to be measured for new shoes: the woman asked what size he took, and to my embarrassment I couldn’t remember. I felt like an imposter. Or perhaps it was the summer morning when our nanny had to peel my howling son off me: he had a fever and wanted his mother, but I had a cabinet minister to interview. I shot out of the door, hot with shame.
What surprised her, and surprises me, was the evidence (both anecdotal and statistical) of how many working mothers feel the same:
But I never expected the emotional outpouring that followed. “Wish I had the guts to do the same,” texted a junior minister, when I announced my resignation. A seemingly unflappable PR confessed secretly agonising over “not being the kind of mother my son deserves”: a colleague whose slick work-life balance I had always envied admitted she was “at the end of my tether”, dying to quit.
Confessions tumbled compulsively from people I barely knew: tales of stricken marriages, miscarriages, only children who were meant to have siblings but then a career got in the way. “Too many of us once had relationships that we haven’t got now because of this job,” said a veteran male reporter, now divorced.
“I can’t afford regrets,” mused a cabinet minister, “because I’ve had this fantastic career, but…” Politics had, he said, dominated his children’s lives.
Not everyone sympathised. “Fine if your husband can afford to keep you,” sniffed a Tory frontbencher. But the shock was how widespread the fantasy of leaving work, even among parents in gripping careers, seemed to be.
Survey after survey suggests a deep-seated, buried misery over the eternal battle between work and family. Half of working mothers with children under 15 would stay at home full-time in an ideal world, according to a 2001 survey for the then Department for Education. Eight years on, this month’s She magazine reports nearly three-quarters of its readers want to cut their hours: the journalist Cristina Odone’s recent think-tank pamphlet, What Women Want, claimed if money were no object only 12% of mothers would work full-time.
I don’t know what conclusions to draw. Perhaps, simply, that as a society we should do all we can to help those mothers who do hope to spend more time with their children to fulfil that hope. This would not, then, be a reactionary campaign to force mothers back into the kitchen; it would be a libertarian call to help individuals achieve their goals in whatever way seemed best to them – including, if this were the case, to have more time for their children.
i am a mother of three little girls. i quit my teaching job to take care of them. i am not surprised though that most of us in this situation share the same ambivalent feelings. sure there are lots of sacrifices and money is really tight. but i don’t regret the decision since i know this is only temporary. when my girls are old enough to take care of themselves [as i am training them to do], hopefully, there will be plenty enough time left for me to pursue a career and do all the things i want to do.
This issue needs a big picture view. This post indicates that women feel guilty about choosing to stay home with their children. I hear that women feel the need to apologize for bottle feeding their babies because everyone knows that a perfect mother breastfeeds.
What we need to realize is that we should be focusing less on perfect parenting and balancing needs and all that and recognize that children born today are going to face acute shortages of water, fuel, space and quality of life. They are not going to blame us for not being ther when they were little. They are going to blame us for making their world what it will be thanks to overpopulation.
Having read Anna Melchior’s wonderful book, ‘Mothering’, she notes that in many countries a husband supporting a wife and child would be taxed on only half their income. This would make an enormous difference to many of us. Worth proposing to your MP. I am at home full time (my former job as a teacher wouldn’t pay for a nanny, even if I did want to return to work), but every day there is a dull panic about money.