Motherland; Good For Whatever Soul I Have Left

 I'm really enjoying Motherland on Netflix just now.

If you haven't caught it yet - have a go.  It is a somewhat slightly exaggerated take on the trials and tribulations of parenting school-age children and the school-gate politics that arise.

As a mama to three boys and having dealt with the school gates for the last 13 years, I can find a wee bit of myself and people I know in each of the characters.

I'm no fan of trying to make mum pals - in fact, I flat out suck at it.  

It's caused me a lot of heartache and confusion over the years.

I've come to the conclusion that actually, I am far too eclectic, too full of dark humour and just not 'proper' enough to make it with the 'in' crowd and actually, I have totally given up.

On a Motherland scale of Amanda to Liz, I am 100% a Liz.

Diane Morgan as Liz in the brilliant Motherland

From the moment she chopped her own finger off slicing frozen cheese for Julia and calmly headed off to A&E after doing her own first-aid, to the drunken promises she made on behalf of Julia and Kevin for the school fundraiser, I can totally relate to being the outsider who just does herself and fuck whatever anyone else thinks. I appreciate her down-to-earth take on things, her patience, her wit and I absolutely see her dogged determination to survive and make sense of whatever shitty hand she is dealt.

As a mum at a small-ish village school, in a relatively higher class area, I stick out like a sore thumb.

I'm not well-off enough to carry off anything classy.  Messy bun? Tick.  Running late? Epically. Tick!

I'm the one whose son wears princess dresses because he can if he wants, who champions unbranded school uniforms to keep the cost of the school day down for everyone, and asks awkward questions around fundraising.  I'm a rule-bender, a risk-taker and someone who speaks their mind.

 My kids are not in the expensive swim team, football club, art club or drama group, nor are they sporty.  I let them spend a lot of time on their computers.  We have very loose bedtimes at weekends.  

I can't afford to send them to the various 'lovely' activities the other kids enjoy, nor do we massively value academia. We would rather the kids were safe, happy and loving what they do, because we both tried hugely and did all the right things, kicked our own arses to get the grades and have struggled ever since!

As two people who have been very roughly shafted by the world in the pursuit of such stuff, we are more than a little disillusioned and probably a wee bit traumatised, and so we are focused on raising our kids to be decent people with kind, compassionate, inclusive values, where you aren't afraid to roll up your sleeves and get your hands dirty and where you open your mind to as much as possible - we can't begin to imagine a world for our kids where fitting in with an ever-decreasing elite of paid-for opportunity and outstanding grades at all costs would be a 'good' thing to do.

Me and my husband both work in the third sector - not only do we both know what it is like to live in relative poverty and deal with the many social, physical and emotional challenges it brings, we also spend our days scooping up other people who are dealing with the effects; the time for giving a shit about manicured lawns or whether our cars are immaculate is not really now for us.  

Is everyone fed, clothed, washed, happy, achieving, nurtured and well-humoured though? Yes! Isn't that what counts? 

Does our lack of care around some of the finer details come off as bad parenting?  

Probably.

I am tired.  My life has been a fucking struggle.  Girl, I am surviving and I will absolutely take that.

Motherland tackles this to some degree. It encompasses the spectrum of mother characters quite aptly; the single mum, the stay at home mum, the stay at home dad, the seemingly-has-it-all mum, the queen bee mum and her side-kick and the mum who has run out of shits and just wants to get through it.

Joining the school PTA has become a recent favourite weird pastime for me - I'm not sure the Head Teacher knows what to do with me.  

Here's the woman he has pegged as an incompetent mother (veiled very thinly) showing up, giving a shit, interacting, giving opinions that he finds he 9/10 actually agrees with and it's always entertaining on the Zoom call (with the brilliant rural wifi 1.5 second lag) inadvertently showcasing my dark humour, which the other mums really don't seem to understand. 

The dark humour usually comes out around some of the more mundane topics, like dog shit or parking and I can't help myself.  It's been nearly two hours talking about dog poop and I start making quips, and it's like unleashing the beast.  And guess what?  Apparently, giggling about dog poop on kids shoes isn't that funny, Genna. 

"Why am I such an outcast?" I'll sob to Dave (usually the day before my period when the world is a dark black spot of shit and everything is pressing harder on me than usual).

I tried to make mum friends - I really did.  I suck at it.  I'm in the wrong area; outcast, out-resourced and outnumbered.  I'm in a weird middle ground and I guess I have resigned myself to a lifetime of lonlieness.

Fuck it.

For now I'm taking my solace in Motherland and enjoying their take on Mum life.

If you are like me and feel totally left out of the mum circle with no hope of getting in any time soon, give it a watch.

It's a source of real comfort in an ever-weird and confusing world of parent politics.

I never thought I'd say this, but...

Tom and I (and bump)'s fancy photo-shoot

About 4 years ago, when I was pregnant with Ethan and Thomas was only about 18 months old, I responded to a journalist's request on a parenting forum.  She wanted to speak to mothers under the age of 25 who had children and chose to stay at home with them rather than return to the workplace.  She wanted to examine the 'Rise of Generation Y' and why young, smart women would choose to be at home instead of pursuing a career.

It was an awesome experience - I was flown down to London for the day and given a swish makeover and a fancy photo-shoot, before appearing with some other young, hip mothers on the cover of  The Times Magazine.

The request kind of hit home for me - here I was, 18 months into my post-graduate year with a baby on my hip and another on the way, and a career wasn't so much an option for me as a closed door.

Hiding my bump (kinda) under my gown!

I felt like I'd had no other option than to be at home with my kids.  Having graduated with my undergraduate degree while six months pregnant, I was well aware that any career pathways were closed to me until future notice.  Dave was still finishing university himself, and all the job experience I'd had, albeit a lot, had amounted to cleaning tables, pulling pints and changing bed linen.

Dave finally graduates and I'm not pregnant for a change! Hooray!

This, coupled with and MA in English wasn't really going to cut it in the real world.  Recession had just bitten and the country was flooded with thousands of people who had just lost their jobs and had 20 years of experience and training under their belts.

Any job interviews I'd had always amounted to the same end question; 'what do you plan to do with the children while you work?'
And I had no idea what my answer to that question was.

Perhaps, somewhat foolishly, we had started our family a lot earlier than we should have.  In fact, in hindsight, it really wasn't a great idea.  It was daft.  And we were crazy.  But, like anything we do, we made it work.

Tom and I do some reading!

After making some degree of peace with what I'll always believe to be the female sacrifice, I'd recently committed myself to being a full-time mummy.

If I couldn't afford to pay someone else to look after my child while I worked, then I would do it myself, and I'd make a damn good job of it too.

I would love to say I felt like this, like, any of the time...

Trying to make peace with the fact that I had to stay at home with my kids through getting pregnant at a stupid time in my life was the reason that I answered that journo call.  I needed to justify to myself and the naysayers what I was doing.

The postpartum depression I experienced after having Thomas had been grueling and borne, in retrospect, out of doing just the thing that I had just committed to doing; being the domestic home-body who stayed at home changing bums and washing clothes, while my loving husband and father of said sprog enjoyed adult company in an intellectually stimulating environment while making his own money.

Can you tell I'm still bitter about it?

What I told that journalist about what I wanted to do in the end was true; I did want the best for my children. And in their formative years, yes, I did want to be there in person.  I knew how damn important it is for children to have their mother around in the very early years.

In having no job, indeed, I was very lucky that I had that as an option and didn't have to return to the workplace within months.

But what I did instead actually nearly killed me.

Me doing my mummy thang

Anne Perkins for the Guardian today reported on Lily Allen's return to work after she proclaimed so passionately that she wanted to retire from her own successful career in order to care for her kids.

Lily took to the headlines to announce it all - so sure that she was about to fade into the distance with two wee babies slung on her back.  Domestic bliss called and she ran into it's open arms.

Lily doing her mummy thang too

But now she's back, back to work and back to doing what she does best; saying it as it is.

Speaking to Hello magazine she said:

“I didn’t get ... I mean, I’m not bored by my children. Actually, I am, you know, the oldest one has only just started talking now. So it was really hard because you’re spending all day, every day, with two human beings that can’t communicate back to you.  And for someone like me, when my whole existence is about communicating and response and reaction, it was quite frustrating. I felt like I needed to get out and do something else with my time.”

Now I am not a massive Lily fan - I certainly don't agree with everything she says.  In fact, when she announced that she would love nothing better than to stay at home all day and look after her kids and her man, I laughed hysterically a wee bit.  And then I cried.  And then I laughed a bit more.

Have you got enough time for this?

By the time she said she was taking to the hills with her babes in her arms, I had been there, I had done that and I was clawing my own way back out of it.

That statement that she gave Hello magazine is the most sensible thing I have heard her say in years.

It's exactly how I felt as a mother of two small children at home.

There were great times, of course.  We had long days in the house playing games and making cakes and going to the park.  We spent days in our pyjamas when one of us was ill, we had long days in the garden and we had days where we watched a lot  of T.V.

I loved my time at home with the kids, in the main, but the truth of the matter is, I was just not cut out to be a stay-at-home mum.

Terrible two-some!

And whatever decision I thought I'd made by having it printed in a national magazine, complete with photos for all of my friends and family to see, just didn't stick.

I'm not ashamed (now) to say, I seriously struggled as a mum of two under 3.

I was not one of those mothers who took everything in their stride and got on with things, I really, seriously wanted to be out at work, out at university doing a Masters, out of the house to do anything.  My brain felt underused and I felt trapped. 

I know it was crazy postpartum me talking, but I genuinely thought that it was the end of my life.  I couldn't forsee a different time where it wouldn't be this way.

There were days when the four walls just closed in, closer and closer, suffocating me alongside two screaming, relentless children, who took everything from me, even when I had nothing left to give.

In fact, I probably would have loved to have been someone in the same position as Lily Allen, because unlike her, I didn't have the option of slipping back into an already-made career when the going got tough.

Lily with her fancy Silvercross pram - I had a Silvercross too, but not as nice as this one!

I'd stupidly gone about it the hard way, and I felt ashamed and useless and unwanted.  I felt judged.  While my peers had gone and re-trained and found new niches in the world, I was the only one who'd gone down the domestic route.

The world for new mothers, especially those younger mothers whose communities don't exist in the same way as they did for our own mothers ten years ago, or even older mothers now who have their own community and support systems formed through years of work, is tough.

In fact, it is tough for every woman in her very own way.

We are bombarded with information from the moment we find out we are pregnant.

We need to eat the right things, wear the most fashionable clothes, buy the latest baby gadgets and then, out of nowhere, there's this whole uber-cool 1950's housewife thing where we are supposed to be smart and ready with the home-cooked meals three times a day and also know all about early years care and development.

Everyone is happy to tell us what do and what we should be doing.  And very good at pointing out when we don't get it right.

Society is very good at judging mothers, but not so good at giving them a leg up, as Anne Perkins so rightly observes:

'But the value of the first months and the importance of the role of the parent-with-care – yes, that is still mostly the mother – is only one of a whole load of messages that bombard them. It is not even the loudest nor bossiest in the post-partum environment. When women have to launch protests in order to assert the right to breastfeed in public, it is crashingly obvious that ours is a society that values neither babies nor parenthood. Boarding school-educated politicians talk about the importance of parenting and make policy that treats every adult as a taxpaying economic unit. Or a scrounger. They threaten a law criminalising emotional neglect, but fail to provide the education and support to stop it happening.'

I'm glad to say that now I know that there is light at the end of the tunnel.  Now I can see possibility and finally, a pretty bright future ahead for myself intellectually.

Me and Ethan having a laugh at home recently - I'm a lot happier with a work/home balance!

Out of the fug of day-to-day childcare grind I can see how easily confused I was - I knew that this was the best for my kids, but I struggled with the fact that I was intellectually bored and that no amount of creative or clever parenting was going to cure it.  

I'm so much happier now, and this reflects on my ability to parent.

There's a difference between being so emotionally and physically exhausted and feeling the burn after mental stimulation, that looking after small children doesn't quite touch.  I hadn't quite worked out what I was going to be, and I think I lost a part of that along the way.

It's taken a long time to work out how I feel.

When I did that interview for that article I was so sure that that was how my life was going to go; that I was this new generation of super mum who didn't care about 'having it all'.  That we were the women who had gone the full circle and got to the point where we didn't need a career to make us happy.

Well, I don't need a career. But I really did need a lot more support when my children were young to stay in the home to provide them with what they needed.  To make me feel valued.  And I did need more validation for my choices.  Where that should have come from will remain arbitrary.  I do however think that there should be more general, properly funded, community support for new mums that smacks them in the face and helps them out more.

And I really want to thank Lily for saying it how it is for so many of us who are scared to state what we feel.

I'm very glad that I gave those years to my children.

I am equally glad not be in the same place now.