There’s a rare euphoria to being a working mother… when your children are happy, work’s going well, the sun is shining and you like what you’re wearing.
Hold on to that fleeting feeling, for as we all know the day can unravel in the blink of an eye. And no more so than now, the brain-melting juggle that is the school summer holidays.
We’ve all done things that make us feel like terrible parents, and we also know how much better it feels if we admit to – and laugh about – them. Having interviewed more than 200 parents for my book Leaving The Ladder Down, I felt vindicated in particular by one Army officer who told me she’d postponed her toddler’s birthday to make it to a meeting. I’m still cringing years after having done the same thing.
Actress Natalie Cassidy, also interviewed in my book, remembered with horror the moment she received ‘the call’ (in fact she’d missed 15) from school because her child had broken an arm. ‘I wasn’t even working – I was shopping!’ she told me.
If you don’t recognise yourself in the above, I guarantee you will in other stories below – all fresh from the frontline of working motherhood.
There’s a rare euphoria to being a working mother… when your children are happy, work’s going well, the sun is shining and you like what you’re wearing
You talk to your children like colleagues
When my daughter was about three, she was given a questionnaire at nursery. She obviously couldn’t read or write, so the teacher read her the questions and wrote down her answers. They were mortifying.
Favourite food? ‘Pizza’. Favourite toy? ‘iPad’. Something Mummy always says to you? I’ll be fine here, I thought – I tell her I love her all the time. Sadly not. ‘You can talk to me when I’ve finished my call,’ was the answer my daughter gave.
I find myself retelling this story in a bid to unbind myself from the bone-chilling shame of it. And people (mostly) laugh. Psychotherapist and mother of four Julia Samuel told me that rather than torturing myself with guilt, I should instead lean into the power of apology, because ‘as a parent you have to own up and have humility because we’re bound to make mistakes’.
I tried it on (now ten-year-old) Loulou who was nonplussed to the point of exasperation. Despite my hot stress, it apparently wasn’t the end of the world.
It all unravels before breakfast
There’s a photograph saved in my phone of my children aged four and two clinging to my skirt, eyes brimming, begging me not to leave for work. I’d requested a happy picture to take with me, but the mention of my going had initiated a full-body beg which left me ragged on the train, their tears leaving me questioning all my life choices.
I now know that morning stress is a universal experience. ‘You feel like you’ve cracked the working mother thing, then they won’t put their shoes on, so you have a meltdown and dwell all day on the fact that the last thing they saw before school was their mother yelling like Medusa,’ says mother of three Deborah Fleming, founder of swimwear brand Pistol Panties.
A good tactic is to force more positive memories to the front of your mind. Remember some of your wins. ‘Our bedtime chats mean I always sleep well,’ is one pat on the back from my daughter I like to recall. ‘My desk partner cried because his Mummy never fills in his reading journal; I felt happy that you always do mine,’ is another. Once you start, the parenting gold stars begin to flow readily.
You put unwanted advice before common sense
I left my six-week-old baby for a night after a bossy female colleague compelled me to ‘acclimatise’ to working away from home as early as possible. A disaster, dressed as a date night.
The baby was safe with a much-loved stand-in, but my milky body had no interest in Claridge’s bed linen and I shuddered with panic all night as my husband slept. It was too much, too soon, and totally unnecessary. Generally, other people’s opinions can be unhelpful.
‘Doesn’t it feel awful to leave your babies with strangers every day?’ was one gloriously passive aggressive question that came my way, as if I was leaving them in the street on bin day rather than with a professional nanny.
The best antidote to mum guilt that I’ve discovered is to save a document of all my children’s funniest statements. ‘Don’t dye your hair Mummy, I like it orange,’ from my seven-year-old son when the brunette coverage of my greying hair had faded brassily over lockdown.
My four-year-old daughter belting out ‘the bears of Stephanie’ along to The Jungle Book soundtrack (instead of ‘the bare necessities’!). You assume you won’t forget them, but you inevitably do, so write them down and read in moments of self-loathing.
You treat the nanny like your best friend
Childcare can feel like a catalogue of only-just-avoided errors. A child’s misunderstanding of the arrangement can feel like a stab to the heart (‘we have an interesting family, don’t we, because it’s one Daddy and two Mummies,’ one of mine told their key worker at daycare one day), and we’ve all been fined for turning up late to nursery pick-up, haven’t we? Haven’t we…?
Then there are the pitfalls of blurred boundaries with childcare. We asked one 35-year-old nanny who’d been with us six months to stay for drinks one evening and the poor woman overdid it.
She seemed fine when she called a cab home, but then returned ten minutes later with an irate driver who claimed she couldn’t remember her address. We were happy for her to stay over until she sheepishly asked for carpet cleaner in the morning.
She was mortified, but things got much worse as she spent the entire 20-minute drive back to her flat with her head out the window of our BMW being violently ill. Perhaps even more dramatically Sony boss Cassandra Gracey shared her Pin number with her nanny, then had to fire her for stealing cash.
‘Boundaries are important for both sides,’ one nanny agent and mother of two told me. ‘If you become too friendly then having formal employment conversations can be awkward.
‘Like any successful partnership, it’s about mutual respect, empathy and rationality from both sides.’
You apologise for being a mum
When, in 2012, I emailed my then boss to apologise for being pregnant, he was adamant that having a baby ‘was an important thing to do’ and of course he was right. But it’s easy to feel judged as a working parent, whether by other parents (one fellow nursery mother told me it was ‘biology’ that women shouldn’t work after having children) teachers, in-laws or ignoramus colleagues who consider any flexibility to be wanton entitlement.
One male work acquaintance told me plainly when I returned to work that ‘you never get more than 40 per cent out of any woman at work after she’s had a baby’, apparently ignorant of the fact that most mothers are ferociously concentrated when they know their time is in demand.
Bear in mind, too, that all parents are working, paid or not. Don’t assume they’re judging you and don’t judge back. Keep the critical nursery mother onside for emergency pick-ups.
‘When I need to leave the office at 5.30pm I get up and leave – completely unapologetically.
If you say, “Sorry I have to go”, people are more likely to question it,’ said one private equity executive and mother of three.
Work doesn’t make us terrible parents; and parenting doesn’t make us any less good at our professional jobs. Replace any shame with triumph as you contemplate how much you achieve every single day.
- Leaving The Ladder Down – How To Combine Career And Motherhood, From The Women Who’ve Done It, by Dolly Jones (£16.99, Harper Collins)
