‘Mum guilt’ and ‘mother load’ weren’t words Sarah Catherall was familiar with, until she had her first baby at 31 – now 25 years ago – and found herself thrown in the deep end. Now, with some time has come perspective. Here’s what she’d like to tell herself back then (perhaps it may be helpful if you’re in the trenches right now too!).
Welcome to Midlife Musings with award-winning journalist Sarah Catherall. Sarah has spent more than 30 years writing for publications such as New Zealand Listener, The Post, The Spinoff, Vanity Fair and the BBC. She’s also the author of How to Break Up Well: Surviving and Thriving After Separation. Sarah is currently embracing her midlife years and in this instalment she writes about the trying to stay sane amid the anti-ageing movement.
As soon as my first daughter was born 25 years ago, the mother guilt and mother load began.
I loved being a mum and felt the maternal bond straight away. But I was 31 years old, with a successful journalism career, and used to my freedom. With a newborn baby, life – as it does – was transformed overnight to a constant blur of baby routines. Sometimes I didn’t leave the house all day, and it wasn’t unusual for my husband to come home from work and find me still in my dressing gown.
The walls closed in but I felt guilty for wanting, at times, to escape them. When Isabella was old enough, I enrolled her in a gym creche for a couple of hours, when I would go for a run or simply for a coffee on my own. But I always felt guilty and anxious – would she be okay, what if she wakes up and needs me, and I’m not there to soothe or feed her? These constant ruminating thoughts made me feel I was doing the wrong thing by taking time out for myself.
I wanted to be a working mother, so I returned to my journalism job when she was 10 months old, when she went into daycare four days a week. That felt like throwing her into the lions den – you might relate if you’ve got kids in daycare; my baby always had a cold or a virus, and I was also often the mother running in five minutes later than everyone else because I had a story deadline to meet.
But I was so hard on myself, and in hindsight, I shouldn’t have been.
Her father didn’t feel guilty that he was at work while our child was in daycare. I did most of the worrying for both of us. He cared for her and loved her, of course, (he was a lot more fun than I was too) but he didn’t feel the parental guilt like I did.
We were products of our generation. I was a Gen X woman, growing up with the slogan ringing in my ears: “girls can do anything’’, which was code for “girls can do everything’’. The men/fathers of my generation loved their kids, but they usually expected their wives/partners to do most of the parenting. If a woman worked with kids, she had to do the juggle, or at least organize to outsource it like a household PA.
By baby two, I resigned from my job because I decided two kids and two ambitious, working parents was too much. I made the terrible mistake of taking on short-term contracts and trying to work from home with very little hired help. Picture a frazzled woman with a baby on her knee in front of the laptop and that was me.
When my youngest daughter, Mia, was born, I decided I needed the contrast of a work and home life, and I returned to work 3.5 days a week. Into our lives stepped a woman who would change everything. Her name was Penny (Panagiota) Kasoulides, and she was a Cyprus-born nanny who became like a second mum to my daughters. A decade older than me, she was everything I was not: content with running the girls around, making meals, washing their clothes, and waiting patiently for them when school was late to come out.
We also hired some amazing babysitters, who became like big sisters to my three girls. Anastasia lived down the road, and she turned up and put music on and the girls danced and had fun. I could enjoy date night with their father without feeling the guilt.
The moral of this story is that it takes a village to raise a child, and my daughters’ lives were made richer by others who helped raise them. Yes, I was privileged for being able to afford hired help, and not all of us can, but Penny saved my sanity.
Tragically, darling Penny passed away a couple of months ago, in her mid-sixties. Isabella, now 25, came from Melbourne for her funeral, and we mourned her as though we had lost a family member. Her husband and sons requested we sit with their family at the funeral, and her adult son talked about Penny’s second calling as a nanny, which she loved with a passion.
Penny was like a guardian angel who flew into our lives for 15 years, who thought of my three daughters as her own. Even after she stopped working for us, she dropped off her famous spinach filo parcels to Isabella’s flat when she was at university, and we continued to see her regularly, until she became ill.
I can also share that my three daughters are now young adults with their own ambitions – who all hope to be working mothers – and absolutely respect that I chose that path for myself. The difference, I hope, is that the fathers of their generation are expected to share the load: it’s no longer the case that just because you’ve got a womb, you’ll do all the nose-wiping. If finances allow, my daughters will also think nothing about hiring a nanny, but she/he/they will have big boots to fill.
