Have I just sacrificed my identity for being a mother?

DEAR BEL,

I’M at a junction in life which has been perplexing me for a few years. I suspect my situation is far from unique.

I am a 40-year-old mother of two, not in paid employment. I’m a qualified teacher with a First class honours degree in sciences (2001) and a postgraduate degree in education.

I ran my own business for five years, then had two children and briefly had some ill health as a result.

I haven’t been in paid work for the past nine years, but volunteer extensively, keep a well-organised, clean, tidy home with good attention to mine and my family’s diet, and physical and mental well-being.

Yet I often feel I am not doing ‘enough’ — whatever ‘enough’ is. For me, I probably feel that being on a somewhat defined career path, pension etc would perhaps be a way to justify my existence fully.

I feel continually perplexed that I can’t do it all or be able to achieve more.

I feel I might be letting myself and my life down, though arguably I am equally quite content with my family situation.

Do you feel this is a phenomenon of modern times to do everything and be ‘busy’ always?

Am I perhaps being lazy, having grown accustomed to being just a mother and housewife?

I think that the social pressure to work very long hours, constantly juggling everything, makes me reflect that my life is the opposite to this.

I realise that since I left paid employment I’ve had few (if any) periods of sickness — coughs, colds — which makes me wonder if my stress levels, sleep, mental well-being, physical health and diet are perhaps akin to a more gentle way of life.

This fact itself makes me question if I am simply not built for modern life. I have friends who work and others who don’t. Neither is notably significantly happier than the other.

AMY

YOUR letter touches on a problem that’s far from new, although I agree it may be madeworse by more modern pressures and propaganda.

When (in 1974) I became a mother at 27, the women’s movement (which I supported) had already helped create a climate where women who wanted to be stay-at-home mothers and take care of their families felt somehow at fault.

Even at the time I thought the Wages for Housework lobby was all wrong — pushing women into a pigeon-hole of narrow resentment as surely as we’d been shoved into boxes by men for centuries. What happened to free choice and mutual respect? I’d never stopped being a freelance journalist, but one of my sistersin-law complained she could tell people thought her ‘boring’ because she was ‘just a mum’.

Trained as a teacher, she brought up four children while her husband made a precarious living as an artist. Of course, much later she returned to teaching.

And that’s what I want you (and all women in your situation) to realise - that our lives are not fixed but a series of stages, while ‘identity’ shifts and changes with them.

If asked whether I have regrets about decisions in my own life, I admit that during my adored son’s first years, I thought writing trivial articles for newspapers and magazines and clinging to a fatuous idea of ‘freedom’ more important than teaching him to read. I was so wrong.

You worry that you’re at fault for ‘being just a mother and housewife’. I beg you never use that belittling word ‘just’ in that context.

Yes, you could be rushing out to work each morning, frantically trying to remember what the children need, worrying if the childminder is good enough, feeling shattered at the thought of dashing home to make supper — and I have utter respect for all the women who make that choice, whether because they need to financially or because they love their work and find ‘identity’ within it. That’s to say ... just one identity.

Remember that magnificent women like you and I (and so many reading this) can be multifaceted.

Instead of all that stressful juggling you have chosen to create a good, peaceful life for your family and should be proud of the fulfilment you find in that vocation.

‘Lazy’? I doubt it! Lucky, more like.Believe me, Amy (and think of me as a wise old granny) this is the only justification you need.

Live in the present - but understand that things will change. Your children will grow older and become teenagers.

Your volunteering may lead to an occupation as yet unimagined. You might become a supply teacher or find a new passion in developing a business from home.

Relax, love the life you have — and be proud.

Were a man’s sorrows and disquietudes summed up at the end of his life, it would generally be found that he had suffered more from the fear of evils that never happened to him than from those…which had really befallen him

JOSEPH ADDISON (ENGLISH ESSAYIST AND EDITOR, 1672-1719)