The Curse of the Mum Guilt
This morning, unusually, I left the house before the school run, without children. For only the second day in a decade, I was going out for work based reasons, to record a podcast at Fiona Johnson Ltd. As I said my goodbyes, my littlest daughter burst into tears. ‘I want you to take me to school and pick me up every day!’ she sobbed. No amount of cajoling, or attempting to persuade her that it was much more fun to have Nanny take her to school sometimes, and surely she must get bored of me, could comfort her, and by the time I left the house, my makeup was smudged with her tears and my heart was breaking.
As I walked to the station, I couldn’t help but ponder the issue of mum guilt, a well known phenomenon which surely impacts on every mummy in the world at some time in their life (if not all the time). For me, it started as soon as Sasha was born, and nearly died on the same day. We had made the decision to have a home birth. If we had been in hospital, would he have escaped the period of oxygen deprivation which resulted in significant brain injury and the long term implications of this? When he was eight months old, I returned to work two days a week, teaching year 6 in a mainstream primary school, and left him with my own mum. The guilt intensified, both because I recognised that being away from him was a blessed relief, and enjoyed the time on my own, but also because I knew the stress and complexity of dealing with a brain-injured baby well, and was now inflicting this on my mum. Even being back at work was a source of guilt because I knew I wasn’t putting in the kind of effort I used to, as I was spreading myself across the home and work fronts.
When my daughter was born, my husband and I decided that the only sensible thing to do was for me to give up work and stay at home. We could not think of another solution to the issue of finding childcare for a baby and a severely disabled toddler. And so from that point, I threw myself into being a mummy, continuing after our youngest daughter was born three years later. I did every school run, watched every assembly, and was there every time they were poorly. But then, of course, I felt bad that the responsibility for financially providing for our family fell solely to my husband, and that he worked every day while I spent a portion of my time having coffee with the other mums. And I was concerned about the messaging that we were giving to our daughters — while their dad worked, their mum stayed at home. Don't get me wrong, I have always been busy. I have helped in the girls’ classrooms, been elected as a Parent Governor at Sasha’s school, done Spanish classes to revive my A Level language skills, run the house, organised social calendars, attended appointments… but I have still been a stay at home mum.
A couple of years ago, in one of those serendipitous events which sometimes happen to shape our lives, I began working in the sphere of statutory funding advice. It was one of those situations where someone I knew spoke to someone they knew… and things just fell into place. It has been ideal, involving working from home, using the knowledge I have gained in dealing with services on Sasha’s behalf, allowing me to help people who find themselves in difficult situations. It has helped to assuage the mummy guilt to a degree — I am still, as far as my children are concerned, a full time mum. I am always on the school run, never miss a school performance or medical appointment, and can be at home whenever they are sick. At the same time, I have regained some independence, started contributing financially, and sometimes wear clothes which are slightly smarter than gym kit. However, situations such as this morning illustrate the fine line that mums always walk, trying desperately to balance a whole host of needs, while occasionally even acknowledging that they themselves have hopes and dreams.
