Working Life for Working Mothers, chapter 2020: the Covid Years

Lady Writer on the Verge

What has working life been like for mothers under lockdown, I hear you cry?

Far be it from me to hold back. Here is my view from the edge.

My experience of 'working motherhood' is no longer linked to corporate life. As avid readers of this blog will know only too well, I was an academic, a lecturer at Cambridge in the early noughties, but was bullied into resigning after having my first baby, by my female head of department. Blah blah blah, old news.

Ever since, I have focused on, experimented with and written about effective practices for working mothers — been frustrated by the ineffective ones, and taken matters into my own hands.

Matters, maters, martyrs, eventually ending up on the yoga mat.

I have worked from home as a writer and education consultant since 2012, when I told my husband, “I’m not going back into an office again”. 

After my beloved mother died, I built an office in the garden, in the Autumn of 2018. It is my Room of Mum’s Own, my Shedquarters. It is a kind of shrine to my mother and place of solace, calm and regrouping for me. It’s also where I teach, and has NO WIFI. 

When we first locked down, I felt confident my family was already in a good position to face what was coming, at least in terms of keeping our working lives going. In fact, in all honesty, I felt smug. THIS was the proof of concept I’d been waiting for! Well, maybe not via a killer disease, but bracketing that…

Husband bought extra wifi boosters, we had a desk in place for him, a work station for our eldest daughter, now in sixth form and looking set to be on zoom all day, and we had the dining table for our younger son, turning 14, and being given tasks online by his school, when not on Minecraft.

My husband was – wait for this girls! – a chef before he became a TV exec, so even chores like cooking were off my back! I know, right? Hooray! Perfect!

To start with we had a strong routine — work morning, exercise afternoon, dinner and family movie evening. Instagrammable evidence that my decision to turn my back on corporate life was just early adoption.

That worked for a few weeks. I baked goodies and learnt to make icecream. I set up a whatsapp group for our street which turned out to be a big source of local solidarity — we organised street events, looked after each other, exchanged toys, books, DVDs, plants, veg and recipes. I felt like an Earth Mother.

Our world — at first —seemed BETTER than pre-covid. 

• No more commuting. 
• Cleaner air. 
• Fresh-cooked food I didn’t have to make.
• Kids and husband present to share the grim chores list. 
• My work collapsed, but hey! Time to write!

It seemed idyllic. We were the lucky ones. And we were – make no mistake, I am definitely conscious that we remain on the Post Brexit, mid-covid Lucky List. We’re not, for example, dead, sick, in hospital, in a British care home, living on the street or bankrupt. We have one income. Our kids are essentially healthy. Our arms and legs work.

As the war on Covid dragged on, however, through April, May, June... the bars of the gilded cage became clearer. 

We were living in a tiny house (because house prices), never designed for four people to live AND work in. One very small bathroom and toilet. No silent spaces anywhere. Hotdesking in your own living room where the WiFi was better. Pushing kids and cats out, when you were on a call, and they wanted food or tv. Misunderstandings created in work by lack of face to face meetings. Boredom. Alienation. A kind of mechanized quality to all interactions — as if we were all turning into robots.

This, as it turned out, only got worse, not better, as lockdown uncertainly lifted. Now the rules around working and socializing were impossible to understand or follow, and, come the school holidays, without any clear distinction between what was term and what was holiday, structures were eroded to stumps.

I found August, traditionally the month of holidays, absolutely soul-destroying. Time just stood still. Life was like walking in treacle.

As a working mother, August often sees my work fall apart completely anyway. But under the vagaries of lockdown lifting and then being reimposed by government, it felt as though Boris Johnson was a frightened policeman in my very head, making up rules as he went along. 

I booked and late-cancelled 3 holidays — to Spain, then France, then Suffolk. The education fiasco of late August was the final straw. The nightmare of exams being cancelled, then kids quite arbitrarily being handed out grades and futures was dystopian. Next year, that’s my kids. And if the idiots we voted into office can do it once and get away with it, make no mistake, Britain, they can and they will do it again.

Although I went into lockdown preaching that working from home was the way forward, in fact my views have shifted because of the lockdown itself.

Unless we can adapt our homes, and our offices and our public transport, our homes are NOT suitable for permanent home working. 

And as a working mother it is even more important to have enough childcare or external support (formerly known as ’school’) in order to keep going. 

To have the whole family crowded in together, working and studying from home, without access to other friends (online is a very poor substitute) is not a permanent workable solution. It is to conjure up some insane version of the 1950s on steroids, with women, once again, forced to carry the invisible emotional Motherload of the whole family. 

It is a silent killer, leading straight to depression. This time not just mine, but mine, my husband’s, my son’s, my daughter’s, and the cats’. 

And let me say it once again: I did not marry an arse. I’m not stupid. I married a wonderful, kind, funny man, who has done nothing but love and support me, and can cook. His worst fault is that he snores. I’m currently training son to do same (minus the snoring), and whoever he ends up with can thank me. 

This is not about me, this is about how we organise our society so that EVERYONE has a chance at work, life, earning a living and even self-actualising.

I am sitting here alone in Suffolk, in front of a woodburning stove. I took that third, cancelled holiday as my writing retreat. I have retreated from even my Room of Mum’s Own, because I just couldn’t damn well get anything DONE. I am writing. In my pyjamas. In London, my son went back to school for the first time in six months today. I am supposed to be learning the cardiovascular system for my yoga teacher training course, and revising my book for the nth time.

But instead, I’m writing this. To mark the day. We are in early September, 2020. It is four years since my cancer treatment and the Brexit vote. Three years since my mother’s death. Two years since I built a room of my own. One year since May was ousted, Johnson got in and Covid arrived.

This is not a “new normal”. 

This COULD BE a faltering, teetering first step towards changing modern working practices, that COULD work wonders for balancing the work and lives of mothers and fathers. 

But to do so, once again, those ghostly structures based on outdated misogyny, the assumptions that looking after home and family is (somehow, somewhy) “women’s work” — as opposed to a SHARED labour — it’s those tired old prejudices that first need to be reviewed, reduced and upcycled into a worthwhile vision of the future.

Who looks after the children? EVERYONE. 

Looking after those who cannot look after themselves? That’s WHY we have ‘society' in the first place.