Kirsty – Get a Grip

Kirsty Gunn, former columnist for the London Review of Books (one assumes), gives up literary glory for the quiet passions of stay-at-home motherhood. You Ask if I'm Lonely http://www.guardian.co.uk/family/story/0,,2019975,00.html

This article really got me. I’m moved by the sensitivity of her writing and yet infuriated by her privileged complacency.

Gunn is a highly educated, highly successful woman who has chosen to stay at home with her two children and put her career in second place for the time being.

How can she possibly survive, wonder her peers? She must be so lonely, outside of the hallowed professional circles she once inhabited, they think. She must be so bored with all that domestic drudgery, and so exhausted. It must be so mind-numbing to interact only with children all day and such a blow to her identity to no longer earn a viable income.

Most dramatically of all though, by opting for full-time motherhood she’s chosen to become “invisible”, she says. Well, it’s all relative, isn’t it? There’s “invisible” in the sense of not circulating in the corridors of power and not pronouncing regularly on public matters in prominent publications. Then there’s “invisible” in the sense of not making an appearance outside your front door for weeks on end because you’re too ill.

And the “breaking tiredness” of putting your children’s needs first that she describes. That’s relative too. Perhaps she chased them round the park for too long. “Tiredness”, to a degree that she couldn't imagine, is my default disposition but it rarely breaks my spirits. Only when Sofia drops her spoon on the floor at mealtimes for the umpteenth time and bending over to pick it up means I will use up the one remaining drop of strength I was saving to get to the fridge for her yogurt and then lift her out of the highchair at the end of the meal, do I want to cry. (Pacing myself is such an exact science; there is no room for the contingencies of toddlers creative urges.)

But then Kirsty Gunn’s precious heroism is a bit of an insult to normal full-time mothers too, not just Disabled ones. To no longer earn a viable income is presumably a choice she has been able to make because she is supported by a partner who does. And her great professional renunciation from being a columnist working on a novel to “only” writing “short stories, sometimes, little pieces, essays, amazed actually that I get anything finished at all”, doesn’t sound too bad. She hardly inhabits the intellectual wilderness that most stay at home mums without her privileged access and experience do. And as for the isolation her peers imagine – mobile mums are one of the least lonely people I know. They are knit together in little mutually supportive, day-to-day, communities of nursery drop offs, ballet lessons, going round to friends’ for tea and play. (Yes, as a non-mobile mum, I’m quite jealous).

So I do want to shout at Kirsty to get a grip and realize how fortunate she is. Yet she does actually admit in the end that despite all these sacrifices she has everything she wants from life. And she writes so delicately about the minutiae of domestic life that I forgive her and urge you to read her lovely poem at the end of the article. Deep down, I’m probably just angry because I wish I were her. Or because having ME since I was 18 has robbed me of the opportunity of finding out who I could have been. And whether I, too, could have had the luxury of putting a successful career on hold to enjoy motherhood.