Just who are we kidding?

From the Echo, first published Saturday 18th Oct 2003.

WHAT'S behind all the crocodile tears from Trade and Industry Secretary Patricia Hewitt over stay-at-home mothers?

"We have given the impression that we think all mothers should be out to work, preferably full time, as soon as their children are a few months old," she says.

"We have got to move to a position as a society and as a government, where we recognise and we value the unpaid work people do in their families."

Blimey. What's brought this on? Has someone made a cutting remark? Are her own kids about to leave the nest?

She was commenting as a new survey reported that two out of three working mothers in Britain say they would rather not work, and be at home looking after their kids.

Hmm.

I'm deeply suspicious of surveys like these, because I don't believe for one minute they reveal the whole truth.

What a goodly proportion of these women, who work full time when it's not absolutely financially necessary to do so actually wish, is that they WANTED to spend their time at home with the kids. Because, in reality, they don't.

They love working full time. They love being able to buy Armani when all their stay-at-home mates are slumming it in Bhs. They want dinners at the sort of restaurants that are reviewed by the Sunday broadsheets and they want to be able to drive sports cars and 4x4s, not 10-year-old Mondeos.

They hate mashing up boiled carrots, changing dirty nappies, singing The Wheels on the Bus, and everything else that goes into raising the average child.

But I detect a sea-change. The hate campaign against stay at home mums began in the mid-1980s. Feminists sneered at them for wanting to do the traditional thing. Thatcherite harpies sneered at them for not seizing the opportunities to make a fast buck, and dump their babies on the nanny. Magazines like Cosmopolitan advised the working mum to make friends with the others in the school playground. But only so they could help provide a useful safety net if her regular childcare broke down. And never mind returning the favour.

But all those babies born to the thrusting young mums of that era are around 18 and 19 now. Just the right age to fly the nest, off to university and bright futures of their own. Leaving, I suspect, all those mums who believed their carer was more important than their kids, rattling around in an empty house, wondering where it all went.

This isn't a pop at women who work part-time, or who have to work full time because of a lack of money, or because they're a single parent. Funnily enough, children seem able to accept this, and live happily with it.

What children can't accept is the parent whose lifestyle revolves around pointless acquisitions, endless meetings, and constant phone calls interrupting their precious time together.

When you first have a baby, every hour together seems as long as a week. But, one day, you look up and they are starting secondary school. Next time they're leaving home.

There are lots of things to wish for in this life. Many of us wish we'd gone for that promotion, written that book, taken that gap year. But the worst wish of all is that you'd spent more time with the children. Because it's the one thing you can't get back. As I suspect Patricia Hewitt and her generation are sadly finding out.

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