If motherhood was so great, men would have swiped the job

MY HUSBAND was away on business and it was October half term. I was on my own with three children under eight. I decided to swap London for a friend’s empty cottage in Kent. I thought long nature rambles in the Weald. Apple scrumping. Picnic teas. It would be perfect.

So I loaded the car with the clothes, the medicines, the hairde-tangling sprays, the eczema creams, the asthma inhalers, the special blankies, the nit shampoo, and all the things Coco the puppy needed, and drove to Canterbury. This took all day. In the morning I was shaken awake. The rain was drumming loud on the roof. It was still dark. ‘We can’t get the TV to work,’ Milly whispered. ‘Yes you can,’ I said, ‘You’re a small child. Don’t ask me! Go away I’m trying to sleep!’

Five minutes later she was back. ‘The video’s not working either,’ she said. ‘Please Mum!’

I heaved myself downstairs and my three children were sitting in silence in front of a small, snowy screen in a cold, dark, strange room. Reader, it was at this point I knew I couldn’t do it. It was only 7am in the morning on the second day of half term, and I was a broken woman.

I knew I couldn’t hack it in a tiny, damp, borrowed cottage in the rain without the television and video as mother’s little helper to get through the long hours till the following Monday. We went back home to London. I only tell you this because it’s been half term again – and at long last, more women are coming out of the woodwork to admit they find motherhood lonely and existentially boring. ‘I lost myself,’ Louise Redknapp, wife of former footballer Jamie, who has left the nest, told Hello! ‘It happens to a lot of women when they get married and have children.’

Last week Marina Fogle, wife of adventurer Ben, also confessed she ‘wanted more’ than looking after small children, and said it turned her into ‘a bored mother and a bolshie wife… and more than that, I was lonely’. Amen. Hallelujah. About time. For some reason I don’t understand, in the developed world it seems to be only here and in the US that we expect mothers to be so child-centric that they spend every waking minute either with our kids, or in their service.

IN SCANDINAVIA there’s a far higher provision of wraparound childcare from the word go. Motherhood is not fetishised as a full-time vocation, and as a result in no other country I can think of is there this regressive cult of – or even words for – the cupcake-baking, ever-smiling, slim and satisfied ‘yummy mummy’.

It is just taken for granted that looking after small children is repetitive, dull and exhausting, and that not all women are completed by this important work alone, and the state must at times play a part. So well done Marina, and Louise, for coming out with it. We can’t say it often and loudly enough.

We love our children, it goes without saying. But if housework, childcare and cleaning were so damnably exciting and fulfilling, men would have elbowed us out of the way years ago.