28 May Working Mum Guilt: Why Mothers Don’t Need Any More of It
For many working mums, the hardest critic isn’t a boss, a teacher or another parent — it’s the voice in their own head. Emma Robertson reflects on motherhood, guilt, grandmothers and the impossible standard of being everywhere at once.
What makes a “real” mother?
Mention childcare and sooner or later someone asks what makes a ‘real’ mother. My mum was a real mother. She still is. More than that, she’s a real grandmother.
So much so, that she’s forgoing a funeral on Friday to cart my kids to swimming lessons, because I’ve returned to work after a month off and can’t possibly take another moment’s leave. Not even to see my five-year-old put her face under water for the first time and emerge from the experience triumphant, looking for me — and finding Nanna.
Mum was chairman of the school board, before it was politically correct to be a chairperson. She was badge secretary of the Girl Guides. Convener of the cake stall. Stalwart of the canteen committee.
I can’t remember an afternoon when she wasn’t waiting at the school gates. She baked apple teacake and looked interested when we off-loaded the mind-numbing minutiae of school life. She helped with our assignments, pre-Google, when this involved a visit to the library. She was never ‘too busy’, even when she was.
Working mums don’t need other people to make us feel guilty. We do a good job of that ourselves.
The moments working mums miss
I, on the other hand, missed the moment my firstborn walked. I was taking minutes for a committee that was judging grant applications for research into the First World War — a conflict that ended precisely 81 years before the morning my daughter took her first steps.
A missed moment for which I will never forgive myself.
The guilt working mothers carry
I am a bad mother. Or so it seems from the window of my air-conditioned office at 2pm, when other mums are battling to the bitter end of school holidays, like martyrs in the Inquisition.
By the time I get home, I’m the one conducting the inquisition: “Why do you make such a mess? Will you ever stop squabbling? Why are you so childish?”
And that’s the point, isn’t it, when the logic falls apart? That’s the line you step over, before you remind yourself that they are, in fact, children.
Little people — who, in my day, were digging Smurf houses under trees and being catered for properly by mothers who didn’t stand in front of the freezer every night and sigh.
Or maybe they did sigh, but quietly.
Trying to be everywhere at once
I want to put in more than the odd appearance in my children’s lives.
I work to pay school fees. I go to each assembly. I volunteer to help with literacy groups. I Google homework. I sell fundraising chocolates. I read Enid Blyton until the words are swimming on the page.
My boss expects budget forecasts, while I worry if one of my daughter’s morning tea was meant to be in a labelled paper bag, because she is going on an excursion to the zoo — where my mum will be, of course.
She’s having her second motherhood, while I have my first one, once removed.
Working mums are doing a good job
Working mums don’t need other people to make us feel guilty. We do a good job of that ourselves.
We do a good job, full stop.
Editor’s note: This reflective piece was first published in an earlier edition of Child. Its themes of working motherhood, guilt and family support remain familiar to many parents today.
Illustration: Angela Pellatt
