Chapter Eight

2pm: The Hour of Working Parenting

This is, obviously, the easy bit. I do work, for which I am paid, and where I deal with adults who thank me when I do something, and don’t – most of the time, anyway – lie down on the floor and cry if their piece of cheese gets ‘broken’. This is, really, my leisure time. Work. Work is the fun-time for women!

In between the work, I fill in the passport forms, put on the tea, kill clothes moths in the coat cupboard by hand, email a child’s friend’s mother about a ‘playdate’, i.e.: ‘child-dump’, get as far as measuring up the stair for a new carpet, load the dishwasher, fill in a Haringey voting census form, tweet a petition about the NHS, order an inflatable mattress for Christmas (you can never start the prep too early!!!!), pour boiling water down the bathroom basin, because it’s issuing a ‘bummy’ smell, then take the U-bend off and remove a slimy, rat-like fist of hair, phlegm, soap and toothpaste, because the boiling water has just ‘cooked’ the bummy smell, book in to donate blood, yadda, yadda, yadda. The doorbell rings. The phone rings. Often, it will be a child – oblivious to the notion of ‘mummy being at work’ – asking me if I can ‘swing by’ the school, and ‘drop off’ a folder they ‘forgot’. During these kinds of days, I always think, with merriment, about how legendary the story is of Samuel Taylor Coleridge beginning to write ‘Kubla Khan’ ‘in a fever dream’ before being interrupted by ‘a person from Porlock’ and then becoming furious at ‘losing his vision’ for ever. I think it is so repeatedly mentioned – as one of the ‘all time’ stories of frustrated literary ambition – because it’s the only instance in history where a man was interrupted whilst doing some work. Women have fifteen ‘persons from Porlocks’ a day.

Anyway, I won’t give you the full list of my day’s tasks because you, too, are probably a working woman, and this list will be giving you by way of PTSD a reminder of what you were doing but twenty minutes ago.

I do all this now because, at 4.30pm, when the kids arrive home from school, I will be too busy being a parent to be a housewife. The wife, the employee, the mother and the housekeeper all take it in shifts. You’re more than a woman. You are many women. You’re every woman. They’re all in yoooooooooou. It’s kind of cool. You get to live many lives. Who doesn’t want to do that? That is the ultimate dream of mankind!

The only niggle is, that they all happen at once.

‘Could this be any easier?’ I ask myself, every working day – trying to ram ‘motherhood’ and ‘earning money’ into the same tattered, bulging, inadequate twenty-four hours. ‘Have I learned nothing that would make it fractionally “less impossible”?’

Whenever I am asked for advice for working mothers – and it has happened three times, now – I feel I invariably disappoint. What is longed for, I think, is some detailed advice, along with specific links to websites, for clothes you can purchase, companies you can work for, phrases you can use, techniques you can employ and magic flying nannies you could hire that would make it even 1 per cent easier. There must, surely, be a powerful silky Stella McCartney blouse you could wear, and a conversation you could have with your managing director – ‘Did you see the match last night? Coh! P.S. please let me work flexi-time. And pay me the same as the men’ – that would allow you to both pay the rent, and not feel like a terrible mother.

Unfortunately, if this advice exists, I don’t know it. I don’t have a Stella McCartney blouse, I still don’t know how to bond over football, and the first time I asked for a pay rise, I, shamingly, wept throughout: ‘I’m sooo sooo sorry – ’ hiccup ‘– but I have two children now, and just need more money – or I can’t do this.’ Thankfully, my boss at the time was a lovely man who handed me a box of tissues and agreed to my suggested sum.

‘My wife cried the first time she asked for a pay rise,’ he said, calmly. Good male bosses who have wives that work are a blessing you will never forget. And if you have a female boss, who gets where you’re at, give thanks to God every day.

I give thanks also to another good man, who gave me two useful truths before I went to ask for my pay rise. As I agonised over whether I should ask in the first place – ‘It’s too cheeky! They say they love me – what if asking them for a pay rise made them so angry that they fire me??? If I deserved a pay rise, surely they would have just given it me! Oh, I can’t do this!’ – he looked me in the eye, and told me two things.

‘Firstly, people never just give you money, or power. You always have to ask. ALWAYS. And, secondly, the way big institutions show that they really love you – is with cash.’

Over the years, I have thanked him, again and again, for telling me vital things at such a young age. I have borne them in mind in every business meeting I’ve had, and not cried since.

However, the single piece of advice I have to give is much simpler, yet harder, and more basic than this. It is: do not marry a cunt.

When I gather together with my Janets, and we talk about what we would tell younger women if we did not worry that we would come across as just yet another instance of older women seeming to rag on younger women, it would be this: nine times out of ten, a woman’s life will only be as good as the man or woman she marries.

I don’t want to say this! I don’t want it to be true! Because it feels, on first analysis, to be unfeminist to tell bright, hardworking, joyous women that it doesn’t matter how incredible they are, how many degrees they get, how many businesses they start up, from scratch – if they then shack up with a self-pitying woman or man called Alex who’s not very good at replying to texts, ‘freaks out’ when they have kids, doesn’t use the washing-machine because ‘I’m just not good at stuff like that’, ‘always’ has to see ‘the guys’ at the weekend, to ‘wind down’, and flies into terrifying rages if e.g. he/she can’t find their favourite suede jacket, they are doomed.

We want that woman to do well. She should still get promoted, be happy, and succeed in life – because of her sheer determination, hard will and charisma. But she almost certainly won’t.

Life is an experiment that bears this out. I’m forty-four now. Of all the married women I know, who have children, all the ones who are successful in their careers, and are happy, are – without exception – the ones who married, for the want of a better term, ‘good men’, or ‘good women’. Gentle, clever, kind, funny people, usually in cardigans, who just show up for everything. Ones who at a bare minimum cut it fifty/fifty with the housework, childcare and emotional upkeep.

Furthermore – and again, without exception – the women who have done the best in their careers, and are happiest, have the partners who do more than fifty/fifty. The more their partners do – the more they engage in childcare and housework – the more those women fly.

It’s amazing that this shouldn’t be an obviously known fact – the equivalent of knowing if you marry a butcher, you’ll have a lot of sausages; or that if you marry a lighthouse keeper, you will live really near the sea – but the maths is simple: if you have children, you can only have as much career and happiness as your partner will help make for you. You are dependent on them. Because: all you have is your time. And as we all have such short, finite lives, every tiniest increment counts.

Even a partner who does 40 per cent of the childcare and housework – who you’d think was a good guy! 40 per cent! That’s nearly half! – is leaving 10 per cent of their shit for you to sort out. Their trousers to wash, their kids to raise, their meal to prepare. Here’s what that would look like, if it were a picture: a woman pulling a sledge on which was her career and her children – with her partner occasionally jumping on, 10 per cent of the time, ‘to chill’.

This is why, of all the things young women say, ‘I’m into bad boys/girls’ makes older women wince as hard as if they had just said ‘I’m into heroin.’ No, girls! Do not want a bad boy or girl! If you find yourself saying that, you go and get CBT right now – or else say out loud, ‘I formally renounce all my plans for a career, and happiness, in order to marry the wrong person, and spend all my time feeling tired.’

Because: if she wants children and a job, a woman’s life is only as good as the man or woman she marries. That’s the biggest unspoken truth I know. All too often, women marry their glass ceilings.

For here’s the thing: if you and your partner have jobs, and children, then every day you are, essentially, both in trucks, on a road, laden with the day’s deadlines, driving them at each other. Whoever blinks first, and swerves off-road, is the one who will be looking after the children that day.

Given what a risky situation this is, you really need to know the guy in the truck coming towards you is a good sensible, altruistic person, who can realistically assess who is actually best positioned to swerve that day, and is rigorous about taking it in turns for who stays on the road, so that you might both not get fired.

The trucks metaphor is a useful one, because it accurately conveys how fucking stressful it is to both be working parents. It also explains why so many women – shattered by adrenalin, and pressure – feel inclined to give up work completely, in order to look after the children. In the short term, it can often feel like the only answer. The peaceable solution.

Of course, everyone’s circumstances are different, and I do not proffer myself as an infallible wisdom broker. You must do what you feel in your guts to be right.

But the other piece of advice I would give you, in my older years, is: if it is at all possible, do not give up your job. Do not become financially dependent on your partner. I am at the end of observing a solid decade of divorces in my social circle, and I beg you to consider that there is a one-in-three chance you are going to end up divorced. One in three. As the woman, you will almost certainly get primary custody of your children. And this will mean that – in the middle of all the heartbreak and pain – you will end up in a financial mediation meeting with your soon-to-be-ex partner, being mortifyingly ordered to make a list of everything you spend in a year, and essentially begging someone you have fallen out with to give you money for gas, bread and shoes for you and your children. There is nothing quite like being convulsed with the humiliation of having to ask someone you are trying to get away from for an extra £20 a week so you can, say, feed the dog.

Unless you’re divorcing some cash-bloated oligarch, and you have amazing lawyers, you are about to become quite poor. You will almost certainly have to get a job anyway, in order to make up the shortfall. And you will now be trying to find a flexible job, that you can fit in around childcare, with a CV that has huge gaps in it i.e. the magical dream job you would have been looking for anyway, had you decided to remain in work.

Statistically, whatever choices you think you’re making about being a stay-at-home or working mother, in the end, you’ll probably end up as a working mother anyway – so you might as well painfully grit your teeth, and stay in the game.

As a gender women are not generally ‘blithe’ about their futures. We know it will be tough, and we’re prepared for a fight, and we do not shirk from hard work. But, before you have children, there is one fundamental misconception almost all of us have: that we will somehow find a way to make motherhood work that is different to everyone else. That it won’t be as difficult as everyone says it is. That, if you are really clever, you’ll find a way to avoid all the things that older, haggard mothers complain about. Even though I was the eldest of eight children, and took on a huge part of their childcare – sharing a bed with one, teaching another to read, almost fully parenting a third as my mother was recuperating from a difficult birth – I still swaggered into my first pregnancy convinced I’d find a work-around. I believed I’d somehow have more time than I did before I had children? That I’d put the baby in a box under my desk, when it was asleep, and knock out a book in its long, calm hours of snoozing.

What I discovered, immediately, was that however much mothers might complain about motherhood, they’re still not telling you the half of it. Not even a quarter. No one has ever conveyed how long it goes on for. This is possibly because it’s longer than a human can actually conceive of. It’s soooo looooong. You simply don’t have a temporal-reference point vast enough. I caaaaaaan’t convey how very looooooong it is. It’s. So. Looooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooong.

Imagine if I just carried on there and wrote the word ‘long’ with so many ‘o’s in it that it filled this book. This entire book, just ‘o’s. And you had to read each one – no skipping! You must read every single one, individually. Out loud. With due care and attention. No matter how tired or busy you are. ALL THE ‘O’S.

No one else is going to read those ‘o’s out. It’s just you. Doing the ‘o’s, every day. You. You through fever, you through menstrual cramps, you through mourning, you through rainy days when you just can’t be fucked. ‘O’ every day of your holiday; on Christmas Day; on your birthday. On Mother’s Day. Enjoy that sweet irony. On the toilet, on a train, in your sleep, in the bath, at your desk. Does it bore you? Do you wish you could do something else? Do you think, even now, ‘Fuck those ‘o’s! I wouldn’t spend eighteen years reading ‘o’s’! I don’t have the TIME! That system sounds like it’s for dummies! I’m clever! I’d find some work-around, to make it better – I’d find some other letter to read! I’d get help! I’d have breaks! There must be a work-around. We wouldn’t design a system where you spent all that time doing something so enragingly, maddeningly repetitive and dull.’

Guess what? We haven’t. This is it. This is what you’re working with. There’s no way out.

Read Michelle Obama’s book. She’ll tell you exactly the same thing. If even Michelle Obama – insanely clever, emotionally intuitive, incredibly rich, strong of arm, married to a president – hasn’t found a way out of this, then we’re all fucked.

This is why the third piece of advice I would give to working mothers is: campaign for systemic change. We need a government-led initiative on the practicalities of childcare for working parents, and one of the simplest would be allowing working parents to pay non-working partners childcare fees – so that they might still be financially independent – and for all childcare fees to be tax-deductible.

At first, this idea seems outrageous – pay the parents of a child to look after their own child? You’re supposed to look after your own children! That’s 101 parenting! What next – tax credits for having sex?

But childcare is a job – millions of people are paid to do it – and so why should we not pay the person who most loves the child to do it? Why does love suddenly exclude you from earning a living? We can’t constantly quack on about how important a parent’s love is to a child – but simultaneously say it’s worth nothing. Big institutions show you how much they love you with cash. Currently, British parents pay the highest childcare costs in the world – with 68 per cent of the earnings of the second earner, usually the mother, going on childcare. If you were to be blunt, you would say, simply, that the British government show no financial love to working mothers and their children.

And governments also show you just whose lives they see, and whose lives are mysterious to them, in the taxation policies. When I finally became well-off enough both to need and afford an accountant, I was astonished at the things I was allowed to claim, because of my ‘media’ career: clothes, for television appearances; accountants (of course); magazines; first class travel; hotels; taking clients to lunch; golfing lessons. All of these have been argued as necessary to the continuation of people’s careers – the appearance, the schmoozing, the research, the travel.

This tells us that the person inventing the tax laws knew a lot of ‘media’ people, who were able to lobby successfully for sweet bonuses to their accounts – but knew no working mothers who could chime in with a mystified, ‘Erm – childcare? Why can’t we claim for childcare? FUCKING HELL YOU THINK GOLF IS MORE IMPORTANT FOR PEOPLE’S CAREER THAN WHO’S LOOKING AFTER THE KIDS????’

This isn’t about ‘treating’ working parents to something ‘lovely’ – it’s about the foundations of society. Stressed working parents – either together, or divorced – both scrambling to earn money and raise their children, are less able to cope when something goes wrong. They have fewer resources to get help. We have to remember what the absolute, bare minimum, core mission of parenting is: it’s not giving children a ‘delightful’ childhood; or having an enchanting time – much as we dearly wish to do those things. It’s raising children who are loved, cared for and safe, and who have all the tools to thrive in later life. A recent US report showed that providing just $3000 per year in benefits to working, low-income families boosted their children’s future earnings by 17 per cent. There is a powerful economic argument for helping families – for, every time we make things easier and better for parents, we make things easier and better for society. Relieving some of the financial burden on working parents won’t solve everything – not even close. But it wouldn’t do a single piece of harm.

So that’s my main advice to working mothers, really: don’t marry a cunt, and totally change society. Given what you’re dealing with on a day-to-day basis, you should be able to manage it easily.

And finally, in those early years, tired, fractious years, when you’re negotiating with your partner over whose career is the most ‘important’, and therefore must be ‘protected’ from the majority of childcare, beware any man who suggests that their work, and earnings, are somehow more vital to them than you. Who seem unhappy, or alarmed, if you suggest that they go part-time, and you become the primary breadwinner – ‘Because I’ve just got that old-fashioned “male pride” thing, of wanting to take care of the family.’

They might say this firmly; they might say this apologetically. They might even say it putting ironic quote marks around it. But let me tell you something that will be useful to both of you. There is no such thing as ‘male pride’ about work and income. It’s not produced by some gland in their balls, which you don’t have.

Instead, ‘male pride’ is this: fear about being poor and unvalued. A fear of having no money or power. A fear of becoming unemployable.

And as soon as you call it that, you realise, quite obviously, that duh – women have that too. We’re scared of having only £27 in the bank, no career prospects, and having to ask our partner for £10 for the pub! We’re scared of falling off the career ladder! We’re scared of being broke, and over! It’s literally the same thing! It’s just because men would, generally, rather die than say they’re scared of something that they invented ‘male pride’ – a sore, warning phrase that suggests they would somehow be fundamentally wounded and belittled by it in a way women are too amazing to experience. A phrase that suggests, unnegotiably, ‘Back off – this is a conversation that could end with me losing all sense of who I am.’

No. Absolutely not. All genders are equally scared of being poor. Insist on calling it what it is – fear – and start again from scratch.