Gaby Hinsliff, political editor of the Observer, has resigned to spend more time with her two-year-old son. She explains why she can’t juggle work and family any longer.
Source: The Observer : Read More
Gaby Hinsliff at home with her son, Freddie. Photograph: Suki Dhanda
Tucked away down a winding track on a remote Welsh peninsula, the farmhouse we rented for a family holiday last June was a much-needed haven from real life. My two-year-old son and his cousins ran wild on the empty beaches all day, chasing crabs through rock pools. When they all finally fell asleep in a sandy tangle of sheets, the adults cracked open another bottle and watched the sun sink slowly into the water. Months of tension melted away… until the night someone flicked on the television for the weather forecast, just in time to see James Purnell resign from the cabinet.
“That’s the end, then,” I said.
Of Gordon Brown, someone wondered? But I meant, of the holiday. The point of journalism is being there when things happen: the blessing, and the curse, of political journalism is that things happen so often. I rang the office, and started packing.
All the way back down the motorway, the car seethed with resentment. “Freddie NOT go home,” said my son mutinously, kicking the back of the seat. “Yes, well, Daddy doesn’t want to either,” my husband muttered. Even the dog glowered.
And was that the tipping point? The moment I realised I couldn’t do this any more, couldn’t do it to my family any more, and would therefore have to resign from the job I loved? It would make for a convenient story if it was. But in all honesty, it was a slower, subtler thing than that.
Surrender steals up on the working mother like hypothermia takes a stranded climber: the chill deepens day by day, disorientation sets in, and before you know it you are gone. In the sleepless blur of the last three years, I can barely even remember now how it started.
But perhaps it was back this spring, when I took my son to be measured for new shoes: the woman asked what size he took, and to my embarrassment I couldn’t remember. I felt like an imposter. Or perhaps it was the summer morning when our nanny had to peel my howling son off me: he had a fever and wanted his mother, but I had a cabinet minister to interview. I shot out of the door, hot with shame.
Maybe it was back last December, on a trip to Afghanistan, when I saw that the young army officer briefing us had a snapshot of a small boy paper-clipped to his folder. “My son. That’s what it’s all about for me,” he said, briskly.
Four of his colleagues had been killed hours before in a roadside bomb, and I was about to struggle back into my flak jacket and fly to Kabul. I went out into the dusty sunshine, wet-eyed, and called home. “Mummy?” said my 18-month-old son repeatedly, in a puzzled voice, when my husband put him on the line.
But if anything, it probably started earlier, in those bittersweet baby days. For months Freddie woke, bright-eyed and uncompromising, at 5.30am: I’d always be torn between willing him to go back to sleep and gratefully sucking up the extra time with him. Because there was never, ever enough time. I used to keep a secret running tally in my head: if he woke at dawn and stayed up late enough at night, and if I counted every stolen minute, some weeks he spent more of his waking hours with his parents than his nanny. Then I could feel I was still the one raising him: but too often, the scales tipped the other way.
And if there wasn’t enough time for him, there was less for me. Sunday newspaper life is relatively relaxed early in the week, frantic at the end: I might be in the office on a Friday until 2am, snatch three hours’ sleep before the baby woke, then put in another 15 hours’ work. On days off I still dragged myself out of bed at dawn, not wanting to miss any more of him.
The result was constant exhaustion, and a social life-sapping desire to go to bed at 9pm. This by way of a public apology to almost everyone I know: I’ve missed too many of your weddings, your birthdays, your new love affairs and your breakups, the intimate stuff of your lives. Female friendships are built on knowing about the minutiae, and just like news, they require your presence.
At first I simply tried to become more efficient. I juggled childcare months in advance for the September party conferences (three weeks away from home, working round the clock): I multi-tasked dementedly, suddenly understanding the minister who once confided she saved several seconds in the morning by brushing her teeth while on the loo.
My husband, then working in PR in the City, was also doing a gruelling week finished off with Friday nights and Saturdays looking after Freddie while I was at work. Sundays, our only day off together, were too often spent each with a diary in hand, frantically horse-trading over who was meant to be doing what and when.
Every day became a battle against the clock. I never listened properly to phone conversations with friends, because I was always simultaneously doing something else. I was so on edge I raged at the tiniest delay – tourists blocking tube escalators, a computer slow to spark up in the morning. Running for the train in high heels, I sprained my ankle: the doctor prescribed some exercises, but who had time for that? I wore flat shoes, took painkillers.
My reward was that for two crazed but fantastic years, I did – in that loaded cliche – have it all: terrific job, plus small child. Thanks largely to a brilliant nanny and a hands-on partner, I don’t honestly believe either suffered from the other.
But what got lost in the rush was a life, if a life means having time for the people you love, engaging with the world around you, making a home rather than just running a household.
So when my long-suffering husband was offered a new job in Oxford, involving the move to the countryside he has always wanted, there was strangely little to discuss. For years he had organised his own career to let me do what I loved, and now it felt like his turn. I closed my eyes and jumped.
But I never expected the emotional outpouring that followed. “Wish I had the guts to do the same,” texted a junior minister, when I announced my resignation.
A seemingly unflappable PR confessed secretly agonising over “not being the kind of mother my son deserves”: a colleague whose slickwork-life balance I had always envied admitted she was “at the end of my tether”, dying to quit.
Confessions tumbled compulsively from people I barely knew: tales of stricken marriages, miscarriages, only children who were meant to have siblings but then a career got in the way. “Too many of us once had relationships that we haven’t got now because of this job,” said a veteran male reporter, now divorced.
“I can’t afford regrets,” mused a cabinet minister, “because I’ve had this fantastic career, but…” Politics had, he said, dominated his children’s lives.
Not everyone sympathised. “Fine if your husband can afford to keep you,” sniffed a Tory frontbencher. But the shock was how widespread the fantasy of leaving work, even among parents in gripping careers, seemed to be.
Survey after survey suggests a deep-seated, buried misery over the eternal battle between work and family. Half of working mothers with children under 15 would stay at home full-time in an ideal world, according to a 2001 survey for the then Department for Education. Eight years on, this month’s She magazine reports nearly three-quarters of its readers want to cut their hours: the journalist Cristina Odone’s recent think-tank pamphlet, What Women Want, claimed if money were no object only 12% of mothers would work full-time.
Such guilt, such longing: yet there is something terribly puzzling about it, given that working motherhood should, in theory, now be easier than ever.
When I was born in 1971, almost half of British women did not work and maternity leave did not properly exist: by the time my son was born, 36 years later, I got nine months off, paid. Not for me the battles of my mother’s generation over the basics of an autonomous working life: the right not to be fired for getting pregnant, affordable childcare, reliable contraception. So why, despite all these advantages, are working parents still so torn?
The thesis advanced by both Odone and the right-wing think-tank Policy Exchange, in its report Little Britons last year, is that focusing on making work easier has ignored the fact that many mothers simply don’t want to leave young children with someone else, however generous the nursery provision.
I remember writing about the Policy Exchange study shortly after I returned from maternity leave, and considering it just another thinly disguised call for women to get back into the kitchen. Besides, its proposal to pay mothers £60 a week for staying home made no sense: too little money to provide genuine choices, but too much (over £5.4bn annually) for taxpayers to bear.
Rereading it this week, the economics still don’t add up, but it does capture something about the inconveniently messy emotions involved. The desire not to be parted from your children, like all great love affairs, is powerful but irrational and thus almost impossible to legislate for. Yet there are hard-headed reasons why a partnered mother of a primary school age child is almost half as likely to work than a partnered man.
The Equalities Review chaired by Trevor Phillips two years ago concluded that the most discriminated-against group in Britain today was working mothers: easy to see why the 30,000 women a year who lose their jobs after falling pregnant, or the one in 10 whose applications for flexible hours are rejected, might want to quit.
And while young women have the energy to fight colleagues who undermine them, bosses who underpay them, or a culture which undervalues them, an already exhausted and conflicted working mother is more likely to decide life is just too short. Add in the women whose wages would all be swallowed by the cost of childcare, or those who survive the toddler years only to be squeezed by caring for elderly parents too, and the siren call of home sounds even stronger.
But if the guilt of working mothers is well documented, there is guilt, too, in giving up. Is this really what I was raised, educated and trained for?
After all, my mother belongs to a generation of bright middle-class women who were only ever expected to work until a family came along, whose education was skimped and ambitions stifled – and who subsequently encouraged their daughters to believe the sky was the limit. The careers advice she was given boiled down essentially to a choice between nursing and secretarial work: there was no sense that university might be a serious option.
She was at home until my younger sister went to primary school and then worked only school hours as a bookkeeper until we were in our teens: she was always there, taken for granted in the background. Many of the pressures I piled on myself – cooking fresh food from scratch rather than microwaving ready meals, for example – probably stemmed from an unconscious desire to provide the same sort of upbringing for my son, while somehow trying to cram in a job as well.
The irony is that, while I have had so many more professional opportunities than her, I have come full circle to where she started: wanting to work in a way that fits around my children. Part of me feels I squandered the chances she gave me.
Scanning the papers the weekend after resigning, I read with a growing sense of my own feebleness about a single parent of six who runs two businesses; the Jimmy Choo executive Tamara Mellon (six-year-old daughter, global business empire, court battle against her own mother, still looks like a supermodel); and of course, Samantha Cameron. Grieving the loss of her oldest child, the Tory leader’s wife still juggles career, famous husband, and raising two small children while finding time to badger Marks & Spencer into making her a frock.
Both Mellon and Cameron are, of course, wealthy women who can afford plenty of help. But from the little I know about how Cameron does it, even then I can’t honestly say it looked easy. I interviewed her husband at home one morning, some years ago. Samantha hurtled about, trying simultaneously to dry her hair, entertain the children and hold a rather testy phone conversation with someone in Hong Kong, while not tripping over the stray spin doctor setting up his laptop in her kitchen. Yet there she is, soldiering on, one of the two-thirds of British mothers still defiantly employed.
Which raises the question: if work truly makes mothers unhappy, what makes us do it?
“An interesting life when they leave home,” says a senior headhunter, and mother of teenagers. “A sense that you are still engaged with the outside world,” suggests a freelance writer. “Still-hot coffee,” says a TV producer, citing small children’s uncanny ability to interrupt all adult activity. And, of course, money. Odone’s poll got its startling results by asking what women would do if finances were no object.
But given more than 70% of employees who win the lottery will stop work, do her findings really tell us anything specific about parents – or do they just reflect the fact that most people don’t live for their jobs, regardless of family commitments?
Whatever they want, the majority of women need to work – and in a recession they may need it more than ever. A recent survey for the website communityjobs.co.uk found that eight in 10 mothers using it were considering returning to work or increasing their hours because they feared a male breadwinner losing their job.
But money isn’t the only, or even main, reason I work. The dirty secret about that aborted holiday is that nobody forced me back to the office: partly it was the classic working mother fear of not wanting to seem uncommitted, but partly I was dying to know what happened next.
Work offers stimulation, self-respect, the gleeful freedom of spending your own money: it brings the camaraderie of an office, and in my case the deep pleasure of ordering words and playing with ideas. And for every morning I hated leaving the house, there were times it was honestly a relief to leave toddler life behind. I have known demanding bosses, but none have ever hurled themselves to the floor and howled because “this carrot is too cut up”, as my son did last week.
Like many women, I still want to work: I just don’t want to work like this. The dilemma is how far parents like me can really expect conventional corporate life to bend around us.
When the millionaire fund manager Nichola Pease told a House of Commons committee last month that a year’s maternity leave was “too long”, she triggered a row about whether it has now bent too far. That may have infuriated many women, but Pease’s second argument that the “commercial realities” of some City jobs – covering financial markets in different time zones, perhaps – just don’t permit flexible working is harder to dismiss. There are limits on how far some highly demanding jobs can stretch.
Besides, with both the business secretary Lord Mandelson and his shadow, Ken Clarke, wary of extending employment rights during a recession, major changes in the law look unlikely for the next few years. Working mothers are going to need new ways to get the balance they seek.
Katie Perrior and Jo Tanner first met nearly a decade ago, when both were working as spokeswomen for Conservative shadow cabinet ministers. It was a work hard, play hard culture requiring gruellingly long hours, and then as now, Central Office staffers rarely stayed on into their childbearing years.
“I looked around in the press office and thought, ‘How many women here have children? None,’” says Perrior. “It’s not a place for families.” Three years ago, they set up in business together as Inhouse PR in the hope of finding a better way.
“We had this idea that we should be able to have it all, somehow: we didn’t quite know what that looked like, but we felt there was a way of working smarter that meant you did a very good job but had the family you wanted,” explains Tanner.
At first their hours were longer than ever – spending days on the business, then working night shifts to subsidise it – but it paid off when they landed the account for Boris Johnson’s mayoral campaign. Tanner’s first baby arrived a few weeks after Johnson was elected, while Perrior also now has a five-month old son. They work partly from home and partly in the office, and are available to clients round the clock if necessary, but say they have far more control now than before. “Women’s lib has done a lot for us, but I think the Blackberry’s done a lot more,” says Tanner, who is quite happy “briefing Newsnight in my pyjamas”.
For Perrior, starting the business is “the best thing I have ever done in my life”: two women in her antenatal group were made redundant while on maternity leave, and she has watched several friends struggle to negotiate part-time hours with their employers.
According to a recent study funded by the Department for Business, more than half of mothers have considered starting up their own business, with small franchises and freelance careers more popular than multi-millionaire “mumtrepreneurship”.
There are signs of change, too, in the most popular option for working parents – the part-time job market. A lack of genuinely senior part-time roles has traditionally forced women back down the ladder to get the hours they want, sacrificing pay and status.
Yet Karen Mattison of Women Like Us, a social enterprise which matches women returning after a career break with part-time roles, says the recession may be changing that. Employers cutting budgets are suddenly open to hiring cheaper part-timers even at the top, she says: “What we are really about is helping women not to trade their skills in return for flexibility. If you have reached a certain level, you shouldn’t have to trade down.”
Perrior and Tanner agree: they have just hired a new part-time director who is also a parent. “There are some really good people who just don’t want to work the conventional hours. You can bring in people you could never normally afford,” says Tanner.
Intriguingly, their new recruit is a man. Both he and his partner chose to cut down their hours after having their daughter, another way some couples try to keep both careers alive while still seeing their children.
Such an arrangement suits Toni Sharma, a project manager from north London. She and her husband Vijay, a shiatsu practitioner, both work part-time and split the care of their two young sons between them. “I’ve always felt that I wanted to have children in order to be with them, not to pass them on to someone else. Because of the nature of his work, often at evenings and weekends, it just somehow seemed to fit,” she says. “It was a financial equation, but also it was ‘Let’s just try and make it work’.”
The downside, Sharma admits, is that parenting becomes a relay race. “We are often like ships in the night: he comes in and I go out. But it also means that we get time together when people don’t traditionally, in the middle of the week.”
The boys also benefit from time with their father, she says: “What’s interesting is how many fathers there are on the school run now, doing the same.”
Nonetheless, most requests under flexible working legislation are still made by women, while TUC research suggest men’s requests are more likely to be rejected.
For Britain to follow the Dutch model – where parents are encouraged to do “one and a half jobs” between them, with both sexes reducing their hours – would need a quantum leap. Could the recession, which has already seen more men than women lose their jobs, be the catalyst for that?
After all, the modern five-day working week is originally a legacy of the Great Depression: previously six days was the norm, but the longer weekend evolved from a need to spread what work there was around. And by 19th-century standards, we are all part-timers now, with annual hours worked per person employed in Britain falling from 2,624 in the UK just before the first world war to 1,489.
More fundamentally, as the banking crisis reshapes attitudes to money, that may also open up questions about our definition of success. Is the prize really still a fat salary, big car, victory in the office power struggle? Or is it meaningful work, an interesting day, a secure family – and a life that aims wide, rather than high?
In my own working life, I admit I don’t have all the answers. The plan is for a portfolio career, juggling several writing and policy projects part-time, but that is still a tricky concept to explain.
“I’ll just put homemaker, shall I?” said the woman arranging our new mortgage, apologetically. “You don’t fit any of the other categories.”
So the first priority is an identity that doesn’t start lamely with “Well, I used to be…” I’m giving myself a year to find out whether there really is a better way to work, and will be charting the ups and downs on a blog, usedtobesomebody.blogspot.com. I would be lying to pretend I never have doubts. But I have very few regrets, and that means the time is right to let go.
There is a condition known as raptures of the deep, brought on by breathing under pressure, which affects divers who stray too far down. First comes a feeling of euphoria: then the diver gets overconfident, lulled into a false sense of security, and dangerously overestimates how long they have left.
I don’t regret a minute of my time in professional deep water, but staying down here too long would be fatal. It’s time to start swimming towards the light.
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