y the time you read this, the Rice Krispies on my special Mothering Sunday breakfast tray will have gone soggy – and the single tulip head will be looking decidedly limp. I’ll have blubbed at a lisping rendition of You Are My Sunshine – and no doubt smothered an expletive after mistakenly stepping on my pasta shape necklace “gift” in bare feet. That’s motherhood in a nutshell for you – pain and happiness inextricably linked.
It all takes me back several decades to doing similar things for my own mum (substitute Rice Krispies for All Bran). Because despite having been a mother for several years, today always makes me feel a bit of a fraud. Not just because it feels like something I should still be doing for my own mother. It’s also because whenever they publish those statistics about how much motherhood is worth in monetary terms (research last year said it was the equivalent of £90,000 a year if you were employing someone else to do all the tasks mothers carry out), instead of totting up all the cleaning, washing and child care I do, I remain all too aware that this is a job you don’t get any training for, often fail to plan properly and frequently get wrong – usually, in my case, a microsecond after I stand on the pasta necklace.
It’s all too easy for mothers to be given a bad press no matter what they do. This week, the mothering skills of Kathleen Wyatt, ex-wife of Ecotricity founder Dale Vince, were raked over when it emerged she was suing him 20 years after their divorce. But the Supreme Court ruled that it should be taken into account that Wyatt had struggled in real poverty to bring up their son for 16 years, and so she should have the right to pursue such a claim against her former husband. (Little has been said about Vince, who left when their son was one, and his attitude to fatherhood in comparison.)
Meanwhile, even the poor Duchess of Cambridge has not been immune from censure. She was praised for looking effortlessly stylish while on trips to Margate and the set of Downton Abbey – but then critical voices were raised querying whether it was wise for the heavily pregnant Catherine to be doing so much.
The Duchess should perhaps scoff a doughnut and take some advice from a friend of mine, who pithily summed up the recipe for motherhood as “excellent time management skills, the hide of an ox and frequent bouts of guilt”. Because guilt has now become the must-have accessory for too many mothers today, along with a baby monitor and a Bugaboo buggy. This is not confined to the big decisions you make about how you parent – whether to work or not, have children early or late. No, even whether you drank half a glass of wine in pregnancy or allowed your child an illicit extra hour of Peppa Pig is now something that is magnified out of all sense of proportion.
This is nothing, by the way, to do with the supposed gulf between mothers who work outside the home and those who stay at home. I’ve heard both sides condemn themselves: working mums for rushing out of the playground forgetting that today is blooming Fourth Plinth For Trafalgar Square Model day, or stay-at-home mums equally fretting about not using their education while they do the fifth pile of washing that day. (Although anyone who thinks that they have “baby brain” should be comforted by recent analysis of neuroscientific experiments that suggests that motherhood actually builds the brain up in terms of learning and memory capability.)
Everywhere, mums are putting themselves under pressure. I once got badly caught out this way. Out of time and too embarrassed to admit it before a PTA cake sale, I nicked a trick from Allison Pearson’s novel I Don’t Know How She Does It, drizzling icing on some authentic looking shop-bought granola bars to pass them off as my own. It was only afterwards I looked at the discarded label, which said “may contain nuts” – which was a dead giveaway when I had to scrawl it on the Tupperware box.
What mums might want to think about, though, is a major Cambridge University study that challenged many of our parenting assumptions last week. Professor Susan Golombok, who carried out the research, claimed that children brought up by two mothers, two fathers or single parents fare no worse than those from traditional families, when they were raised in supportive societies.
She looked at 35 years of research around the world to try to examine the outcomes for children, and how different family structures benefited. What was key to the findings, however, was the fact that children flourished in families where there was love, security and support – regardless of who was giving the care.
Does that challenge mums from traditional families? Not at all. Instead, it’s perhaps a welcome wake-up call that warmth, responsiveness and sensitivity are what our children really need, rather than extra ballet lessons or guilt over getting it wrong – as our own mothers could have probably told us, when eating the soggy bowls of cereal without complaint.