Most Flexis are either part-timers or at-homers when their child is under-three. Their ideal scenario is to share the care with a partner and to work from home. However, in some cases, they do opt to work full-time – even when there is no financial need. There are intriguing differences between them and the Organiser in their reasoning for this, and how they arrange matters.
Jess is 40, with three children, the youngest of whom is 18 months. Her husband Paul is the successful chief executive of a medium-sized business which he created and owns, in Bristol.
Jess is an intelligent woman who did well enough at her comprehensive to get into Cambridge University without being a workaholic swot – you have to be pretty bright to do that, since 45% of Oxbridge places still go to alumnae of public schools. She probably could have been one of the leading commercial lawyers in this country, earning the millions that they do. Instead, she has always felt impelled not to let her work dominate her life and is satisfied to be restricted in her career horizons by living in a relatively small city, limiting the amount she can ever expect to earn and the degree of challenge she is likely to face.
The subtleties of the Flexi’s search for balance permeate her approach. She has several Hugger characteristics when it comes to babies, yet she is by no means so in love with them that she is prepared to give up her career – she has the Organiser’s strong commitment to her worker identity. She has wangled things so that even in a very hostile economic climate, she is indispensable to her employers. Twice she has returned to work full-time after maternity leave but with her third child, she has negotiated a part-time job.
Because they have plenty of money, she can choose the substitute care arrangements that she wishes. So can several hundred thousand other mothers of under-threes, but money does not guarantee getting it right. As we shall see, Jess is particularly instructive in how to create a satisfactory substitute regime.
With the first child she took six months’ maternity leave, nine months for the others. She ticks the Hugger box in many important respects, although always with a Flexi twist. During each pregnancy she felt relaxed, looked forward to the birth and had strong intuitions about the gender of each child (Hugger). Yet she also says ‘I wasn’t sitting there talking to the foetus all night, every night’ (Organiser). She had the Flexi’s open-minded attitude to the birth, not strongly committed to any particular delivery method, finding that all three went without problems (only gas and air in each case). She enjoyed breastfeeding all three children until six months (Hugger) but would have been unhappy with much longer than that (Flexi). Asked about what a baby needs, it’s ‘someone kind, maternal, giving them love, someone who communicates with them rather than overstimulates’ (Hugger) but ‘as they get older they need boundaries, you need to give them a nap but not force it, there’s no need for strict routines’ (Flexi).
When one of her babies was born not very cuddly, she did not take it personally, did not feel rejected. If the baby liked lying on the mat kicking its feet and staring around the room, that was fine by Jess. But equally, after the birth of her middle child, she made a point of doubling up the cuddles and snuggles for the oldest at the times when it was feeling a bit under the weather or snivelly, just to be on the safe side, to avoid that child feeling neglected or unfavoured. Whereas Huggers adore a hug and Organisers restrict cuddles to what’s needed, the Flexi is more driven by what she thinks the particular child requires at the particular moment, depending on what is practically feasible: pragmatism.
She is against being against particular approaches, advocates non-advocacy. ‘This is a task where however good you are, you always fail to some degree, unlike your career where you can get nearer to perfection. If things go pear-shaped at the office I know I can regain control, I like to do a good job. But as a mother I’m not someone with a fixed view of how it’s going to be. I didn’t expected to get the babies into a four-hour Gina Ford feeding regime. It was chaos quite often.’
The pragmatism of her Flexi approach is consistent. After the birth of her third child there were problems with all three not sleeping. ‘Some nights I’d be up every hour with one or all three at a time. The lack of sleep was really, really hard and I was in a permanent fug.’ The Hugger would take them into the bed, the Organiser would do some controlled crying back in the cot. Jess just kept on ducking and weaving. Some nights it turned out Paul was willing to offer a bit of human sofa service propped in front of the telly in the wee hours, to give her a break. Other nights she would go with a different flow. When her eldest wanted a glass of water Jess would sometimes let her ‘snuggle up with me in our bed for a cuddle then after a few minutes, I’d ask if she would like to go back to her bed, take her there, lie for a little with her to cuddle her back to sleep’. She believes that approach meant having them in the bed did not arise as an issue. ‘We’ve never said no. Because it’s never been forbidden they don’t really know about it as an option.’
Classic Flexi, she completely refuses to be a combatant in the Mommy Wars (R4), neither supporting nor opposing The Contented Little Baby Book nor The Continuum Concept. ‘Women who work aren’t evil; home full-time mothers aren’t lazy. There is a happy medium.’ Her approach is always to look for the middle way, the compromise. ‘I accept “good enough” as a mother but there is no book describing The Right Method. The key is to know yourself and avoid the wasted emotion of guilt. If you have decided to go back to your career but wish you could be at home, it’s pointless sitting feeling guilty all day so if you possibly can, go and be a mother instead. Equally, if being at home is not for you don’t sit in a heap of frustration when you could be back in your career. There’s no absolute best way, it all depends on who you are and what’s practical.’ While she has many times had moments of feeling she is a rubbish mother who is making a mess of her children with the wrong approach, including doubting that it’s right to be satisfied by only being good enough, she always comes back to a baseline feeling that her best is sufficient.
At the heart of Jess’s successful regime is her nanny. Readers who cannot afford one may be asking ‘huh, what’s so clever about finding someone else to do all the hard work?’ For one thing, even if you could afford to offer your nanny a flat, unlimited use of a Golf GTI convertible, £400 a week pay, with hot and cold running boyfriends thrown in as a bonus, you would be surprised how hard it is to get it right. The difficulty is not so much a shortage of good candidates, as in getting your own head straight about two things.
First, where care of under-threes is concerned, it is vital you grasp that you are looking for someone who is effectively going to be a second mother, not a teacher or life coach or moral educator. As described in Chapter 1, babies need love and subsequently, along with that, toddlers need empathic help with accepting they cannot always get their way. This kind of highly personalised responsiveness is hard to provide even if you are strongly motivated by being the child’s parent. It’s found even more rarely in unrelated women who are being paid to do the job for the working week. But Jess found just such a woman in Sasha. ‘I didn’t want someone who’d be the life and soul of the party. I thought “lowkey, down to earth, easy, calm”, those were more important. She’s very nurturing, just particularly loves babies. If they’re a bit poorly she’ll take them off to the doctor without asking, she’s got initiative. If there’s anything important that comes up, she will call me, but I could completely rely on her to make the right decisions. It’s very important the nanny knows the child, how it likes to settle when sleeping, its favourite food, tiny details that mean everything to them when small.’ It was this thinking which ruled out day care.
In typically open-minded Flexi manner, she took the trouble to investigate it. ‘I went round a couple of very good nurseries. They were lovely buildings and the art teacher came in and gave a great talk, so did the gym teacher. But it didn’t feel right. I know a lot of people think all that socialises them earlier, giving them a head start. But I was going to be working full-time, it would be a long day, and it seemed much too young. My three-year-old is just starting nursery and she only quite likes it even at that age’ (this was a rare admission that she was putting her desire to work ahead of the well-being of her child – Flexis are highly skilled at convincing themselves that their arrangements are win-win, even when they are not win for the child).
Jess completely understood the necessity of having someone who was not focused on education or stimulation but on providing warmth and sensitivity. ‘You get other nannies who rush about, take them to the Science Museum, with manic play dates twice a day. Sasha does do stuff with them but it’s nothing frantic. She knows that home’s important, where they mostly want to be at that age.’ Jess could feel completely confident that the care was as good as she could have given. ‘It was very important to me that they were at home with someone basically doing what I would do with them – pottering, going to the library for a new Babar book, moseying around in the park. From day one I’ve been able to go to work and not worry at all. It would have been very different without that.’ So it’s absolutely vital in choosing any substitute care to find someone who understands that the true needs of under-threes are for love and responsiveness, not for stimulation and education, and who is emotionally equipped to supply them. On top of that, you need someone who is going to stick in there right through until the child is aged three, a major issue. While changes of nannies can be done successfully, it is terribly difficult because, in effect, the child is losing a mother if the substitute has really been doing her job.
The second key insight necessary to make substitute care work is that it is actually a good thing if your children really love the nanny (or any other permanent substitute), perhaps even as much as they love you. Jess grasped this. ‘I’ve never had a problem with them being attached to Sasha. I know some where the children run to the nanny rather than the mother but because I’ve had long periods of maternity leave, we’ve never had that.’ Having established strong personal bonds with each of her children, despite working full-time with two of them, Jess continues to play a pivotal role in their weekdays, as well as weekends. ‘I’ve never felt she’s taken over as mother. I get them ready in the morning, put them to bed. I’ve repeatedly been up in the middle of the night at various times with all of them, I know how important I am to them.’ Perhaps that is why she is able to feel unthreatened by their closeness to Sasha. ‘You wouldn’t want them to be not attached to the nanny. It’s obviously right for them to be with someone they love.’
If there are any tiny niggling feelings of rivalry for their love, Jess has a way of reframing it to negate any possible sense that she is second best. ‘They know at some level that it’s not quite the same, Sasha and me. They can deal with us doing things slightly differently – Sasha is not a duplicate. It’s like them having a strong bond with a grandparent.’ However you frame it, be very, very glad if your child loves the substitute. That is exactly how it should be and if it is not like that, the arrangement is not as satisfactory as it should be.
It was because Jess had such a clear understanding of these two key points – that under-threes need a mother-substitute, not a teacher, and that they need to love that substitute like a mother – that she was able to find Sasha. She did all the standard things that affluent mothers do to find a nanny; the difference was that as soon as she met one who fitted these criteria, she knew it. Having spoken to many on the phone (making contact via a website), Sasha was the first and only one she interviewed. An hour with her was enough. If you know what you are looking for, you should be able to find it.
Of course, there was always the perennial problem of hanging on to Sasha. In her late twenties when Jess first employed her, she had trained and worked as a teacher in her native Eastern European country and she had a husband. Her love of babies was all too evident and it was obvious she would have her own. Luckily for Jess, it is only now that Sasha has got pregnant.
Jess has found a replacement, who she feels will do just as good a job. Realising that it will be disruptive for her 18-month-old and three-year-old, she is introducing the new nanny gradually, making sure she is always around for the first few weeks. However, given that Jess understands the needs of under-threes so well, I pressed her about why she did not consider giving up her work altogether at this point to save her children the potential distress that a change of nanny could entail. It would only require her to be a full-time mum for a couple of years, four at most, with her youngest being already 18 months. Jess wrestled with the question, her Flexi mind batting the problem around in a typically even-handed manner, but perhaps in this case making it harder to cut right to the truth. She skated around all sorts of reasons, often obscuring from both of us what she really felt although she seemed absolutely sincere in her desire to find it and I think we did get there in the end. It has nothing to do with financial necessity.
Both her mother and her school had had quite a strong ethos that girls were as clever as boys and should be able to achieve whatever they wanted. Giving up work to care for her youngest would betray that and lose her hard-earned place on the career ladder. She worried that she would have nothing very interesting to say to her uber-bright husband and felt she would be a bad role model for her daughter. She didn’t fancy sitting around discussing nappies and food with other mothers, or spending so much time cooking, washing and cleaning, none of which she considered herself good at. Although her own mother had a successful career after being full-time at home until she and her sister were well into primary school, she feared finding herself on the career shelf if she dropped out for a bit.
At the same time, Jess would not be heartbroken if she was made redundant tomorrow and she is fairly certain that her present job will not last more than five years – the credit crunch could mean it ends any day now. Especially if she had been having a bad few weeks at the office, she says she would be happy to give up work and get rid of the nanny. But immediately she says this she is plagued by fears. She has a friend who stopped her successful career for a couple of years and cannot get back into the job market at the same level. That means ‘she ends up going for coffee mornings with other mothers and wondering what to do with her life’.
This kind of mental to-ing and fro-ing is a risk for a mother with Flexi mentality. While it has the considerable merit of being able to adapt to the real demands of mothering and of life at any given moment, it is also potentially obfuscatory, making it hard for the Flexi to distinguish what is vital from what is subsidiary. Being well-educated, bright and a lawyer can only serve to make this more likely, so that the Flexi can end up seeing too many sides of the argument and lose touch with what is really important. Only by being quite persistent in pointing out that she knew it could be tricky for her 18-month-old to have a new nanny and that it would only entail a few years out of the workforce for her to do the job, did we eventually get to the heart of the matter.
There were two basics.
First, she really does not enjoy caring for three children as much as doing her work. ‘Part of what motivates me to work is how hard it is to be at home. It’s full-on looking after kids, very hard work.’ Whereas some Organisers find it toxic to be at home all day with under-threes, that is not the case with Jess. It’s just that ‘caring for three under-fives is really, really hard work, physically, emotionally, everything.’
Second, Jess thinks the nanny is better at caring for her children. ‘With two children, and certainly three, you can’t meet every need they have, right when it’s required. It takes a lot of skill and a certain kind of patience. Sasha is very in control, she’s fine with them. Actually, I think she’s always found it a lot easier to look after them than I have.’ With all the adeptness one would expect of a lawyer, she quickly tried to backtrack away from the implication that she felt Sasha was actually better at mothering than she was, mainly by saying that it is one thing to do it as a job, nine to five, quite another to be kept up all night and then do it.
Given all this, then, what were Jess’s mental acrobatic tactics for reconciling her mother and worker identities? A reported 72% of part-timers repeatedly claim that they have successfully and satisfyingly integrated mother and worker, with win-win ‘reframing’ as their method – reframing means taking a problem, like that under-threes are hugely dependent on carers, and presenting it in a new light that makes it not a problem, like saying that ‘yes, under-threes are dependent but luckily it is not only their mother who can meet their needs’*. While half of them say they have a strong worker identity, they are much less likely than full-timers to emphasise money as their goal, stressing personally fulfilling elements instead*. As we have already seen, Jess genuinely and very wisely perceived that it was probably best for her children for her to have the stimulus of her career, so long as they had Sasha. This was not just a rationalisation, it really may be true that her nanny could do a better job than she can and there is very little doubt that she would be a more playful, loving companion for her children if stimulated (but not exhausted) by her career.
However, the win-win reframing did begin to sound a bit like a way of rationalising things when the need for a new nanny for her 18-month-old came along: it can be argued that that child would benefit if she stopped work for a couple of years. It all depends whether she can make the new nanny work, which remains to be seen.
But prior to this problem, there seems little reason to doubt that it really was win-win. ‘Having two identities is something you have to get used to. I was ready to do something when my eldest was nine months old. I remember being quite excited the first time I put clothing other than jeans on, got on the bus, sat and had a cup of coffee, read the paper. I was working 7.30 till 4 so my husband did the morning and I did tea-time. I knew my eldest had had a nice day, was never upset. And I was hugely pleased to see them when I got home. It’s a lovely feeling as you walk down the road towards the front door, especially so if you have had a rubbish workday.’ Not that it was always like that. ‘If everything was a bit slow at work I found it hardest, I would think I was missing out. But I resisted the temptation to ring up because that doesn’t do any good for you or the child.’
It was helpful that, just as she has a very well-developed, clearly understood mother identity, so with the worker. ‘I like doing things properly. But even in my mid-twenties I was never at the office till midnight, like the most ambitious people. I wanted to be seeing friends, going to parties, having fun – whatever. When I was 30 I realised that you could never be getting the top jobs without working very, very hard and I don’t think it’s right to if you have children.’ In true Flexi style, Jess fully grasped the necessity of compromise. ‘You have got to get your head around the fact that, if you have children, some people who are less talented or deserving will get promoted over you. There’s one of my colleagues who works incredibly long hours; luckily she has her husband caring for the kids at home. She will go higher than me but something’s got to give. You can’t do everything and you must not get wound up by that. It’s either your home or work life that has to be sacrificed; you must decide which and be honest about it rather than pretend you can have it all.’
Not that Jess is unambitious. ‘I never wanted to be a Mistress of the Universe but I do want to get well paid to do something interesting.’ It was after she said this that I believe we got to the very heart of Jess’s matter. I asked her if she really did find her work interesting, did she feel absorbed and intellectually stimulated by it? To my surprise, after some thought, she replied, ‘Well, it’s not really interesting. I certainly don’t have a passion for it. If I stopped I am sure there are many other kinds of things I would enjoy more. I kinda drifted into it after university, got picked up at the university milk round; none of it is close to my greatest interests.’
Of course, Jess is like the vast majority of us, doing work that pays the bills, trying to find something that is as stimulating as possible within that limitation, trying to do as well as possible given the time and energy she is prepared to make available to employers. But right at the very end of our encounter, when I was asking her about her background, she revealed something important about her Flexi motivation.
Both her parents had always stressed the importance of family and hard work. She had completely bought into those values. Then, when she was 17 in her A-level year, in what Jess described as ‘an absolute cliché’, her father had had ‘a midlife crisis’ and went off with his much younger, prettier secretary. For the rest of the year after her father had taken up with his fancy woman, Jess stopped working so hard (though she still made it to Cambridge). ‘Once he did that, I went out every night. I was quite upset and if it was all right for him to mess around like that, then why shouldn’t I?’
This revelation of her parents’ divorce occurred at the very end of our interview, so there was no time to explore it further. But I wondered if it might not provide an insight into some of her – and some Flexis’ – discomfort with absolutes. Perhaps she had always assumed her parents’ relationship inviolate, safe. Faced with the shock of its end and her father’s total flouting of his own stern injunctions about the importance of the family, she may have learned a lesson: stay flexible, you never know what might happen.
If so, she has managed to carve a splendid life for her children out of that adversity. While the Flexi’s greatest risk is of being inconsistent and too permeable, chopping and changing approaches to fit the circumstances so that the child is never quite sure what to expect, in Jess’s hands, she has managed to make compromise into a virtue, almost an art. You might ask Jess, ‘Why devote so much of your life to a job that is not really interesting to you?’ But such perfectionism and idealism is not for the Flexi. They just know that reality nearly always falls short if you aim too high.