A* or C? What grade would your child give YOU as a mum?
After years of being a single working mum, GILL HUDSON took the bold step of asking her daughter just that . . .
After dropping off my daughter at university for her first term six years ago, I drove back home down the M1 in a state of shock. Where had all those years gone?
Once home, I bawled my eyes out for an hour before bracing myself to go into her bedroom to have a clean-up — only to find myself bawling again for another hour.
I’m not someone who cries easily, but this experience was in another league.
this was not so much a cheery ‘goodbye darling and good luck!’ as a bereavement.
the sudden void stopped me in my tracks. All that noise, all that busyness — then, suddenly, here we were, childhood years over. Aged 18, elle was standing on her own two feet, while I was left barely able to stand. I felt overwhelmed with feelings of loss, emptiness and, yes, guilt.
As a single working mother, ‘guilt’ is the word I associate more than any other with parenthood.
Guilt about not giving my only daughter a more balanced, two-parent upbringing.
Guilt about not always being able to afford everything that some other families had — a beautiful designer home or extravagant birthday parties.
Guilt about dishing up a hasty stir-fry of leftovers, rather than a saintly organic Ottolenghi creation using 19 ingredients, at least three of which I’d never heard of.
Guilt about charging through bedtime stories, trying to get away with turning two pages at once (and failing), just so I’d have the chance to flop in front of the telly before collapsing into bed with exhaustion.
And up there at No 1 on the guilt-ometer: guilt about the sheer lack of time I’ve been able to spend with the most important, and dependent, person in my life.
It’s a complex emotion, guilt. It creeps up on you, although, to be honest, I never felt guilty about going back to work. elle was six months old and I was editing the glossy women’s magazine New Woman.
I loved it and didn’t want to stop — but then, I didn’t have a choice in the matter, anyway. Although it would be another yearand-a-half before I split with elle’s father, I was already the main breadwinner.
I simply didn’t have the option to step out of the race and spend all day with my toddler. It was just what I had to do: bring in enough money to cover not just all the usual outgoings, but also childcare — an experienced nanny to start with, then a lively mix of au pairs on whose, usually eastern european, shoulders my entire tottering edifice rested. alarm would start beeping at 6.30am, heralding the start of the great daily Hudson Steeplechase — and they’re off!
I’d shoot out of bed, stunned with tiredness, to make sure school and work commutes were achieved with both of us wearing the right clothes, carrying the right packed lunches and the right homework.
WITH a shudder, I remember those awful moments when, just before we had to leave the house, my daughter would look stricken and announce she’d forgotten she was supposed to research Archimedes / have her swimming kit ready / build the eiffel tower out of straws. By today!
I wondered whether this miserable merry-go-round would ever stop. except, of course, then it did, leaving me feeling utterly bereft. that was another thing to feel guilty about: that I had ever wanted that wonderfully sweet part of our lives to be over.
And now it was over, how had I done as a parent? As I wandered around my now-empty house, the questions swirled: had I chosen the right path all those years ago? Could I have done things better? Was I an A-star graduate heading off to lecture in advanced parenting skills at Oxbridge? Or an epic fail, consigned to the bin of parental uselessness?
It felt like mine was the first generation to juggle so madly, to combine single motherhood and an all-consuming career.
Maybe it was faintly masochistic of me, but I knew I had to ask the one person who could ever really judge my parenting efforts: elle.
So, when she returned home after her first term, I sat her down, took a deep breath and asked her to rate me as a parent while she was growing up.
A quite awful silence fell. We sat facing each other across the kitchen table and I suddenly took a keen interest in the red wine stain on the table-top, the chipped blue varnish on her thumbnail, the scuff on my shoe — anything to distract myself.
I felt unsure and agitated. One of the most wonderful things about my daughter is that I know she’ll be nothing but honest with me. And one of the most alarming things about my daughter is that I know she’ll be nothing but honest with me.
Nature’s not the only one who abhors a vacuum. I rather nervously broke the silence by suggesting that the obvious scab to pick at was how little time I was able to give her. ‘I always felt I wasn’t there enough for you. Out all day and often in the evenings, too, because I had to go to so many work functions.’
Her response was immediate and heartfelt. ‘Oh, Mum, no. I absolutely loved how you let me find out who I was for myself, without imposing what you wanted on me. I look at the “helicopter parenting” some of my friends had and it makes me shudder. they could hardly breathe. I wouldn’t have wanted it any other way.’
If you’d been within a five-mile radius of me at the time, you’d have felt the air pressure change as I gave a huge exhalation and slumped, flooded with relief.
All that worry, all that fretting, all that waking up in the night in a sweat, wondering how I could compensate for the general lack of me in her life. It turns out that not only had it not bothered her, she’d revelled in it. Well I never.
I sat back and beamed. ‘I always knew you were there for me, whatever. You are my rock,’ she continued. Pause. ‘there was one problem, though . . .’
And so it came out. Sometimes — and I’m the first to admit this
— I would come home from work in a state of such complete exhaustion that I could barely speak. And sometimes, in that state, it would just take one small thing — where were my keys, my phone, that birthday card to be posted? — to tip me over the edge. My simmering rage and frustration would boil over into a monumental meltdown.
At the time, I prided myself on making a point of reassuring my daughter, and whichever au pair it was, that it was nothing to do with them. I was just in a dire mood and I would soon be over it. not to worry.
Easy to say; much less easy to live with, it turns out. Looking back, I recall how my daughter and au pair would silently melt away into their bedrooms, while I continued ranting to myself downstairs before eventually finding the wretched keys/ phone/card and sitting down with a large glass of something to recover, feeling wrecked.
The truth is, at times, stress made me irritable and difficult.
I suppose I never really acknowledged how much it got to me. I loved my career — I can’t imagine anything else I could have done that would have been so rewarding.
But when you’ve edited as many magazines as I have — no fewer than 17, from old favourites like radio Times, to brash newcomers such as the men’s (yes, men’s) title Maxim — you need vast reserves of energy.
Energy to get it all done against the clock and never, ever miss a deadline. Well, at some point, all that stress had to come out somewhere, and raving and ranting about the small things was how it came out with me.
In fact, I barely recognised it at the time. I thought I succeeded in leaving it at the office. But how wrong I was. ‘The air was toxic, Mum. It was just horrible.’
This was a sobering thought. But, as we continued to talk, one thing became abundantly clear: it is all but impossible to know at the time what will affect your child and what won’t.
The fact that I had to leave her wailing at the nursery while I headed off to work feeling anguished? Someone else collecting her from school when she was ill? What damage had I done to my poor, blameless daughter? Maybe not quite as much as I’d glumly assumed, judging from her responses.
To compensate for my absence, I’d splurge on exotic holidays — South Africa, Mauritius, Japan and more. But now, as we started reminiscing about past trips together, I asked what she’d liked most about them.
That whale-watching in Cape Town, maybe? The buggy ride over the sand dunes in Brazil? It turns out her only abiding memory of our last holiday was of a particularly yummy ice cream at the airport on the way home.
And here, it seemed, was another important message for parents. The amount of money you spend has no bearing on the significance of the memory your child is left with. The fact I wasn’t physically there all the time mattered less than my mood when I was there.
But, ultimately, the most important thing was that she knew I was a constant support in her life; that if anything was troubling her, then she could turn to Mum for help. And lovely Elle gave me an A+ for that.
THOUGH I might not always have been in the same room as her, I always made a point of returning her calls as soon as possible, of dropping everything to help her sort whatever crisis she was facing, be it friendship issues, exam fears, teen traumas, so she could get it off her chest and find a way forward.
I had been there for her emotionally, even if sometimes I was miles away.
none of us has had lessons in parenting: we muddle through as best we can. I watch mothers today charging round organising all manner of activities and playdates and amazing experiences, piling on the pressure to achieve top grades, hovering over their children’s shoulders — it seems to me they are striving for an impossible level of perfection.
Their children are projects and childhood a series of ever-more ambitious boxes to tick.
But that’s not how real life works. It’s time to stop beating ourselves up for not replicating all those carefully choreographed adverts of perfect families in their perfect homes.
real-life parenting is sticky-fingered and messy, with blobs of yoghurt on the wall, Play-Doh in the carpet and doors that occasionally get slammed.
Who said you had to excel, anyway? Perfect Parents set a daunting precedent. Indeed, any such parents would be so insufferable that their children would surely be damaged for life. Touché!
The weird thing is, while our Truth Session was a huge milestone for me, when I reminded my now-24-year-old daughter of it the other day, she could barely remember it. ‘oh, yes,’ she finally said, vaguely, ‘ that does ring a bell.’ Like I said: just because it matters to you, doesn’t necessarily mean it does to your child.
When it comes to my parenting report, I’d mark myself pretty much in line with what my French teacher used to write about me at the end of every term: ‘Satisfactory work and progress.’ And you know what? That’ll do.