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.

Present Shame

The other night we watched The Madness of Modern Parenting (BBC2). For “modern” parents read “urban middle-class with big swanky house” parents. This week’s theme was the extravagant folly of children’s birthday parties: the lengths and expense people go to to keep up with the Jones’ and impress other parents. One key status symbol is the birthday girl or boy’s present. As I remember it, the programme claimed that out of the 2-3 hours per week spent on shopping by the average “modern” family, just 17 mins are devoted to food and groceries with the rest of the time allocated to, among other things, “sourcing” presents for Joshua or Olivia to take to the weekend’s birthday party.

No wonder I fell on the first hurdle. With an average stamina window of 15 mins I very rarely set foot in a physical shop, let alone wander from shop to shop, perusing, comparing, deliberating, then purchasing which I imagine constitutes the activity of "sourcing". Even less so since Sofia was born because it involves co-opting my mum in the lifting and hauling of Sofia and pushchair in and out of car and I depend on her enough as it is.

So our first, (and so far only), experience of the aspirational birthday party came as a shock. I’m still smarting from the dreadful blunder over the present. My shame progressed in three stages:

1) Failing to arrive at the party with a present at all. My best laid plans were hijacked as the catalogue I had used to order a pretty stripey top from phoned the day before to say they were out of stock.
2) Watching the present-opening proceedings and realising, based on my careful research into the Early Learning Centre catalogue, that the other mums had all spent around £20 - £30 each. My present, had it arrived, would have cost a hard-saved £5. I know being relatively poor and being disabled with ME don’t necessarily go hand in hand but when they do, as in my case, what hope have I got?
3) I resolved nonetheless to salvage our dignity and come up with some kind of present fast. I could have ordered something else from a catalogue but that would have meant a £4 P&P charge and another wait. So the next time Dad took Sofia to the park I got him to drop me off at the shops nearby. Not the concrete megaplex of brand names but a villagey cluster of chi-chi shops. This was my only chance for the week to get into a shop. I estimated 10-15mins standing/walking power before I would collapse. Though I kind of knew there weren’t any dedicated children’s or toy shops around, compulsion drove me forward and selected a shop mostly selling expensive bags with a sideline in other accessories and bits and bobs including childrens’. The likeliest thing was a hand-made little figurine of a fairy to hang on a tree (it was nearly Christmas). Not educational, not developmental, not anywhere in the range of desirable toys in the Modern Parent sense. But exclusive/designer looking. I knew searching any further would lead to muscular collapse and the risk of coming away with no present at all. So I stretched to the £8 luxury version of the fairy figurine.

I wrapped it and went with Sofia the few doors up the road to deliver it. The birthday girl’s older brother unwrapped it for her and promptly exclaimed that it was broken. Indeed, at some stage between wrapping and unwrapping, the head of this stupidly fragile, stupid, stupid fairy had broken off. Her Dad asked me if it had just broken or if it was already broken in the shop.

At least Sofia is not yet two and is mercifully unscathed by my fatal blunder. But what shame will she have to undergo when she hits 4 or 5 and becomes aware of my dreadful failures? I hate to think about it..