One of the lucky ones...

Of the few blogs I've written, one sentence has attracted more comment and support than any of the other paragraphs and pages of my thoughts. I referred to myself as 'lucky' for having a husband who is so good around the house - and then questioned the fact that I think that it is good fortune to have a husband who actually manages to parent his children.

I am lucky to have him, and he is lucky to have me. We rub along nicely together, usually agree on life's big issues and often on its smaller ones. There is no doubt that we are fortunate, and I am grateful for the life we have together. My gripe is not with him, or with us - it is with the way that we speak about fathers which simultaneously disempowers them and lets them off the hook. It is as if complete disinterest and incompetence is the standard paternal attitude towards children and anything more is a bonus. What father worth his salt wouldn't be offended by that? When my husband struggles up a curb with the double buggy he is understandably insulted by the pitying looks that are shot his way, which seem to say "ahhh - he's trying his best."

The thought of transposing some of the stock phrases said about 'good dads' show us how absurd they really are. When was the last time that anyone said to my husband "you're so lucky to have her aren't you? She's so hands on with the children!"? By calling ourselves 'lucky' or, for example, suggesting that the fathers of our children are 'babysitting', we affirm that in undertaking essential and daily tasks, our partners are doing us a favour. When my husband changes a nappy, or gives a bath, or rocks one of our children to sleep he is not helping ME, he is fathering his children. And should he be applauded for doing so? Yes of course, just as I should be.

But this is hardwiring that we're battling, in our bodies, hearts, our language and our history. Most of the fathering I see around me is good, loving, positive care. Why do will still talk as if the most we can expect is a child to be dandled on a knee for ten minutes before the tea is placed on the table and he can rest after a hard day at work?

The key to true equality, I heard someone say, is not making it easy for women to mother, but creating more space for men to father. We should never stop appreciating each other for trying our best to raise healthy, happy children, but perhaps we should start expecting the best, and stop being surprised when we get it.

The one who got

There are three kinds of mum friends. The ones you are pleased to bump into at the park, the ones you actually arrange to meet up with, and then the rare and wonderful ones who become real friends. Those women with whom baby talk can segue into relationship talk, work talk, life talk. All three kinds can be life savers. On a bad day, a friendly face pushing a swing next to you is all it takes to remind you that you are a sentient adult, a coffee with someone who is also navigating toddler tantrums or charting the waters of sleep and wakefulness in a new born is an invaluable support. But it’s that extra understanding that you get with some women, which gives a unique space to be the thinking, political, funny person you are, without having to make any apologies for also being a mother.

I spotted my best mum friend across the circle at my first NCT meeting. My husband teased me over my new love affair, and I laughed along, but he tapped into the way I felt exactly. I had met my parenting soul mate, someone who was like me, was going to do it like me, and who wanted to be my friend. Our affair began whilst still pregnant when we hung back from the other women in the group, walking home from a pre-baby get together during the early days of maternity leave. As we took a different direction from the others, I knew that we would be friends, and I cherished it like a teenager. We romanced each other over coffee and cakes and strolls in the park. From baby massage to mini music we learnt our new trade together and slowly unpacked our lives in the process.

Being on maternity leave is a totally democratising experience. We were, in those early days, completely equal. Both at home, with our babies, with acres of time to fill. Bliss. Like any first flush of love, the beginning provides a canvas for you to paint a perfect portrait of yourself, leaving out the flaws and imperfections. But then it was time to go back to work. She to her high powered, long hours, high profile, high earning job and me to…

I have always been freelance, and my working life has been sporadic at best. Even before children, I was on maternity leave of sorts. I’ve never earned much money, had the need for office clothes, or had a job title. I’m a bumbler, and I probably always will be. My lack of direction and drive has been a constant disappointment to me and despite my best efforts and many sleepless nights, the desire to succeed has never been strong enough for me to really make decisions and push myself. Having children has provided a perfect foil for putting off my career once more.

So, career-free and newly abandoned by my friend, being on maternity leave morphed into being a Stay At Home Mum. Frustrated, bedraggled and with a new sense of desperation to get my house in order, I put it off again, and a second pregnancy followed quickly. And what joy I felt when I heard my friend’s voice on a crackly phone line saying “I think I need to talk to you about double buggies”. Not only would she be around during the little babyhood of my second but this meant we would be the same again! Forget the job, forget the money. We are mums of two – war vets – doing it together.

But the gulf was too wide to cross. We are still friends of course, and see one another regularly, but it has changed. Her second maternity leave was supported by her full time nanny who she kept on, so whilst I struggled on buses with the double buggy day in day out, she skipped off to mummy and me yoga and sat in coffee shops reading the paper. As I grew more tired, slower, more resentful, she sat back and enjoyed her newborn in a way that I could only dream of. And my attempts to fit us back into the same hole seemed more and more desperate by the day.

As even the just-coffee-mums can only squeeze me in on their one afternoon away from the office, I feel more and more like a Shirly Hughes drawing. I am living in Alfie gets in First, and all those around me are the busy working mothers that I presumed I would be. My mum who raised children in the 70’s doesn’t understand why I’m not organizing coffee mornings, and baby sitting circles, completely ignorant of the seismic shift in the lives of most middle class families over the last 30 years.

So what do you do when you are the one left behind? Hunker down and carry on potato printing? Cancel five years from your diary and mark your life “to be continued”? Move to the suburbs and make friends with the other Stay At Home Mums who I’ve done everything I can to distance myself from? Or finally make that shift and really start valuing what I do everyday, stop looking at my achievements as second rate, and start cheering every meal I make and every nappy I change as the vital acts that they are.

Hot Monogomy

A good friend once told me that she had found a book in her parents’ bedroom entitled Hot Monogamy, counseling married couples on how to keep things alive in the bedroom. It is written into our DNA that any mention of the sex lives of our parents or their peers will induce dry retching and a constricting of the airways, but it’s not the disgust that I remember. It’s the pity. How sad, I thought, that a couple could be getting it so wrong, they have to refer to a book to make it right again.

In my early 20’s, I thought that the key to happiness in love was simply this: finding the right person. Informed almost entirely by romantic comedies, I knew with certainty that the struggle was all in the preamble, and that once I had decided to seal the deal with a man who felt the same as me, the credits would roll, and the ensuing 40 years would play out in the reflective glow of our perfect first kiss. It never occurred to me to ask why rom-coms rarely get a sequel.

My husband is a good man and a great dad, we make each other laugh, we are respectful of one another, we are kind, supportive and loving. I am, 2 years into my marriage, happy, but it turns out that daily life has a habit of getting under my skin. The frustrations I feel behind my front door are unleashed on him when he walks through it at the end of the day. He becomes a talisman of my discontent: he is to blame for all my grievances from the fact that we’ve run out of milk to the continuing global oppression of women. It turns out that amidst all the ‘better’ the ‘worse’ is not just squabbling about washing up.

Yesterday, as he left for work under the cloud of an unresolved row, I remembered the experience of another American friend. During a year of living an East Coast/ West Coast life with her boyfriend, they had religiously read the same books at the same time, so that their nightly conversations had some focus other than the boredom and loneliness of being separated by 3000 miles of land mass. This suddenly seemed like a great idea. My husband and I live in the same house, but we too are conducting a long distance relationship of sorts. His blossoming career, the burden that he carries of our financial well being, my desire for more help, time and sleep all prove to create a distance that physical proximity doesn’t always bridge. And as I formulated the sentence “let’s have two person book club” I felt a pang. I suddenly realized that I am that person. We are that couple. The couple who needs to come up with plans and activities in order to keep out marriage healthy. For us, it’s not our physical life that needs spicing up, it’s our intellectual one. It is Hot Monogamy for the brain.

I have no fear that our monogamous life is threatened. We’ve been there and done that, and right now I can’t imagine either of us working up much energy for an affair. When would it take place? In between Big Cook Little Cook and a trip to the park? I don’t even fear the dreaded “emotional affair”, but I do fear the distance. I fear that too many nights spent sleeping in front of the TV, and too few conversations which steer away from the big four (work, children, money food) will make us forget what it was that brought us together, and I don’t want my marriage to become a lonely place to be.

In so much of my married life and my parenting, I find myself doing exactly what I promised myself that I would never do. Not because I’ve given up, or given in, or run out of ideas, but because all of a sudden, the very thing that I dismissed as pedestrian or pointless seems to be exactly the right thing. It turns out that I’m not the mother who takes her 12 week old baby to India, and we’re not the couple who never have to think about how to keep ourselves happy. While I don’t think that I need to turn to Hot Monogamy just yet, I might just need to start taking some hints and tips from those who have walked this path before me.

The Eye of The Tiger

A good friend of mine went on a last-minute-late-night date last week that began with a phone call at 10.30pm, and ended at 5.30am at her flat with two large G & T’s and Emergency on Planet Earth at top volume (our parents turned to Rumours for nostalgia, we look back to Jamiroquoi to channel our early youth.) They both passed out, and when they got up he went to work. I imagined the scene: him stumbling into the office with a can of coke and a wry smile and saying to his colleagues “mate, I only went to bed at 6, I was wasted. I’m probably still pissed” and then sitting down to do a day’s work. Of course, this story has nothing to do with me, but my daydream did remind me of a time when a lack of sleep was something to be proud of.

Sleep is a precious commodity for the parents of the very young. Hours are collected like gold bars, as if we could stash them away for a rainy day; we barter on the nursery trading floor, selling midnight lullabies in exchange for lie-ins and cbeebies at dawn for breakfast. It’s a bear market, investor confidence is low, and all we really want are “just five more minutes”.

It seems to be a commonly accepted truth that the person who is working in the morning needs sleep in order to function properly and the person who is at home with the baby can easily get through the day with two hours sleep and a strong coffee. Biology and the politics of parental leave meant that more often than not there is a clear gender divide in the first months. Lots of couples, during the early days, decamp the daddy into the spare room to sleep all night, leaving the mother to deal with the baby because “he has to work” and “there’s no point in us both being tired”. Of course each family has its own internal logic, and it is not my place to judge the choices of parents who are doing their best to raise their children. But I do wonder if the tyranny of work needs to be challenged from time to time.

Is it not the same men who, pre-children, were drinking until 4 in the morning and rolling into work rubbing the stamp from their hand with a dab of red bull on a tissue, who now, after having a baby, need to approach a day’s work like an Olympic event: it seems that he needs to be Rocky (young and fit and training for the fight of his life) to tackle his in tray. Meanwhile there is a woman at home looking after their 10-week-old baby, with no idea what to do or how to do it, or worse, a toddler tearing around the house desperate for attention and activities, who is expected to parent, quite literally, with her eyes closed.

Biology has a large part in our downfall. Nature plays a cruel trick on pregnant women, making a good nights sleep impossible throughout the 7^th and 8^th months. And for breastfeeding mothers, night feeds are hers responsibility and hers alone. For all the convenience and comfort that breast feeding gives, it makes the partner’s role in the middle of the night practically irrelevant. For a lot of women, by the time they return to work, feel the freedom and pleasure of taking the bus alone, drinking a coffee, having a conversation with a colleague and realise that work is often by far the easier option, it is too late to redress the balance.

I was very lucky*. My husband took to nighttimes like a bat. He would leap out of bed at the first snuffle and deliver my son to me, with a clean nappy, and he would be there to put him back in his cot when he’d had enough to eat. It wasn’t such a big thing, but I knew I wasn’t alone. When my daughter came along, it was very different. It took a lot more than a snuffle to wake either of us up, and feeding her and getting her off to sleep was like falling off a log to me. Her birth coincided with a very difficult and stressful time at work for him, so much of the nocturnal activity was my domain. It was fine, I did it, and I didn’t resent it, but I was eternally grateful that first time around, he had been jigging the baby back to sleep and giving me a cuddle when I was crying with fatigue and frustration

We imagine that raising children is done on instinct and that the only muscle that is really needed to be in tip top form is the heart – the rest of the body can sail to hell in a handbasket. It’s true, of course, and if you love your children and keep them fed and warm, I really believe that it’s hard to go too far wrong. But I also know, that after a run of bad nights my patience is at zero, my fuse is short and my creative, physical and diplomatic energy is non-existent. The kids have a pretty uninspiring day and so do I. When I go to work feeling as tired, something about the air hitting my face, the paper cup of coffee, the banter and the focus keeps me going.

Sleep deprivation is awful, it’s painful and depressing, but it is part of the story of parenting. The night that my husband just gave up trying to get our son to sleep and watched an entire Thomas DVD at 2am is already part of our folklore. Those nights are the way we earn our stripes, our love for our children is tested almost to the limit and we learn that however much we might want to throw the crying bundle out of the window, we don’t. No body likes feeling that it’s impossible to cope, or that somehow they are underperforming at work, but for the 2 years or so that sleep is so fragile in babies, it’s worth it, just to know that you were in it together, and you came out the other side.

*At some point I will launch a campaign to stamp out the word ‘lucky’ when referring to having a partner who is so kind as to look after his own child. Now is not the time. I am lucky to have him, for all sorts of reasons.