On Sunday, the Radio 5 Live presenter Helen Skelton announced she was hosting her last show for the time being, in order to step back from work to spend more time with her children. That phrase, with its ring of politicians getting in front of a scandal, is rarely used publicly with any sincerity and it was arresting to see it in this context. “I’m not all right about it,” said Skelton, prompted by her co-host Steve Crossman’s lachrymose farewell. “But you know, needs must.” With apparent reluctance, she said, “an eight-year-old will be happy about it”.
The striking thing about these remarks was Skelton’s willingness to admit to ambivalence. Parenting norms change, as do models of family and work, but the one consistency, seemingly arcing across the generations, is the need to persuade oneself that one’s choices around parenting aren’t merely reasonable but superior to whatever the alternatives may be. This mindset is particularly appealing to women, on whom the majority of caregiving responsibility still falls and on whose parenting choices judgment rests more heavily than it does for male partners. If you are going to be subject to criticism, internal or otherwise, you’d better be sure your position – to work or not work; to bottle or breastfeed; to co-sleep or kick them back to their own beds – is fully if not fanatically entrenched.
As a result, it can be hard to get to the truth of how anyone’s life is actually going, although as most of us know, nothing follows clean lines. Skelton’s off-the-cuff phrase, “I’m not all right about it,” describes a starting point for many of us on any given day, particularly during a cost of living crisis when people are stretched to breaking just to cover their outgoings. With this in mind, the choice appears to be between working so hard one never sees one’s children, or, on the flip side, succumbing to financial and emotional pressures to forgo wraparound childcare, slash one’s costs and become a stay-at-home parent.
There is judgment, I’m aware, in my reflex use of “succumb” in this context. There are plenty of parts of the world where traditional mom-at-home, dad-at-work models prevail, but Radio 5 presenters, I would hazard, don’t occupy them. One surprise of having children is discovering how deep-seated the wariness remains between mothers who work in and outside the home, and how, at least in my community in New York, the two groups don’t mingle. Politely, one might say that the schedules of women who pick their kids up at school at 2.30pm and those who come home at 7.30pm don’t allow friendships to flourish, but of course it’s more than that. There is an air on both sides of “why aren’t they screaming?”.
For women in Skelton’s position, running homes and demanding jobs outside the house, there is, on the most testing days, the shadow of the alternative, should money allow. Rationally, most of us know that full-time caregiving is more demanding – and without the public reward – than working outside the home, where however annoying your co-workers, they don’t grab hold of your sleeve when addressing you or demand to follow you into the toilet. You can exhale at work. You can eat snacks without sharing them. Midway through the long summer holidays, parents who spend the rest of the year longing for the break may be starting to look to September, and a return to business as usual, with a certain amount of longing.
Clearly, my own biases are at work here. The choices – or lack thereof – of our own mothers seep into these calculations to frighten us one way or the other. Contradictions abound. I assume most parents would agree that when we audit our lives, the kids matter most, and yet the fear remains that to be “only” a mother is to be nothing at all. Ditch work, and you potentially store up trouble for yourself 20 years down the track, versus “on your deathbed will you wish you’d spent more time at work?”. Round and round they go, the old arguments, never concluding.
We are too absolutist about all this, perhaps, judging ourselves and others in harsh either/or terms. The pertinent line in the Radio 5 presenter’s statement was, perhaps, “for now”; these choices – to double down, “quiet quit”, or step back altogether – aren’t commitments to a fixed identity. And of course, as people with busy lives know, scheduling tends to be less of a problem than space on our hard drives – the challenge of being fully mentally present at home, while keeping one’s head in the game at work. If we could figure out how to fix this – be 100% where we are, at any given moment, not dream of being somewhere, or someone else – life might get marginally easier.
Emma Brockes is a Guardian columnist
