Raising a daughter is so much HARDER than it was 20 years ago
As Britney falls pregnant at 40, author TILLY BAGSHAWE describes the generation gap between her girls
THE news last week that Britney Spears has announced she is pregnant again at 40 cheered me. This was mostly because of everything the poor woman has been through to get to this point, but also because I know first-hand how magical it can be to experience new motherhood again after such a large gap — the youngest of Britney’s two sons with her ex-husband Kevin Federline is 15 — and at a very different stage in your life.
I became pregnant with my first daughter, Sefi, when I was only 17 and still at school. My youngest child, also a daughter, Summer, was born 20 years later, almost to the day.
I also have two lovely sons, born in between them. But it’s the vast age difference between my girls that people seem to comment on most often.
‘How weird is it,’ girlfriends ask, ‘having a ten-year-old and a 30-year-old?
There are new and different challenges that simply didn’t exist back then
Motherhood must be such a different experience for you now than it was back then.’
Well, yes and no. It is certainly true that a lot changed in the two decades between Sefi’s birth and Summer’s. And while some aspects of motherhood — the love, the exhaustion — remain timeless, there is no doubt that raising children today, in particular raising girls, presents new and different challenges that simply didn’t exist in the 1990s.
Sefi’s birth was traumatic. Nothing can really prepare a teenager for what childbirth actually is — I remember thinking between contractions how bizarre it was that I could feel so much agony and yet still be conscious.
I loved Sef since the moment I knew she had been conceived. The love grew once she was born, a sweet, squished dark-haired chimp of a baby, and has been growing ever since. But the first few months of her life were a dark time for me.
What I now know was that postnatal depression descended as soon as my milk came in (as it has with all my later children. But with them, at least I was prepared).
I felt listless and hopeless, but no one ever suggested I talk to someone about it, never mind take medication. Awareness of mental health issues in general, and support for postnatal depression specifically, is one huge change for the better that happened between my two daughters’ births.
But as soon as my hormones righted themselves, I adored motherhood. Sefi was born in my ‘year off’ between A-levels and taking up my place at Cambridge, so apart from a bit of reading I had nothing to do in the first months of her life but enjoy her.
Of course, I made plenty of mistakes, some of which the poor child was lucky to survive. (Years later, playing the game ‘Articulate’, Sefi shouted out, ‘When I was a baby, Mum dropped me on my head on the . . . ?’ To which my sister answered correctly: ‘Concrete!’)
Happily, Sef lived to tell the tale. I was still at home with my parents in Sussex when she was born, and their hands-on help was invaluable. They had conveniently decided to have a late-life baby, my sister Alice, who was only three when I got pregnant with Sef.
I remember Mum and I driving all over the countryside with the girls, taking them to the seaside or the farm, where Alice could pet the rabbits, Sef strapped permanently to my chest in her little sling. These were some of the happiest days of my life.
Cambridge was happy, too, although daunting at first. Sefi was only ten months old when we arrived for Freshers’ Week. St John’s, my college, was astonishingly generous and supportive, providing a little cottage for us and contributing to Sefi’s nursery fees. My parents paid for the rest.
I am acutely aware that the fact I had financial means put me in a very different situation to the vast majority of teenage single mums. Yes, I was young, but I never had to worry about putting a roof over our heads, or having enough money to feed my child.
To be honest, back then I didn’t worry about much. I always feel a fraud when people say how ‘brave’ I was to have a baby so young. To me, brave implies you are afraid of something but do it anyway.
But at 18, I felt confident bordering on the invincible, and profoundly optimistic. Of course I could raise a child on my own! I mean, millions of people were doing it, all over the world and in circumstances far worse than mine. How hard could it be?
I was frankly too naive, and too immature, to feel anxious about our future. I met my husband, Robin, as soon as I left Cambridge, when Sefi was four. I fell madly in love, but (at that time) Robin was definitely not ready for fatherhood.
I still remember his look of abject panic the first time I took Sefi to visit his cool bachelor pad in South Kensington and she cast an eye around before saying, ‘Hmm. OK. My hamster cage can go here.’
We eventually married when Sef was ten, and her first brother, Zac, was born three years later. But for all her pre-teen childhood, I was her sole parent, financially, emotionally, in every way. By the time her sister Summer arrived in 2011, things were different. I was in a long marriage, financially secure and an experienced mother, with two little boys aged four and seven.
On paper, I should have had far less to worry about than I did in my first pregnancy. But in reality that wasn’t the case. By my late 30s, I was mature enough to think about the challenges ahead. I worried that Robin and I were too old. He was 54 when Summer was born. When I grew up, that was grandparents’ age. And even my own hospital chart had the words ‘maternal, geriatric’ at the top.
Then there was the uncertainty of raising a girl in what was already a fast-changing culture. Toxic social media, and all the bullying and pressure that goes with it, was in its infancy when Sef was in her teens.
But for Summer, I knew it would be an inescapable part of her world that I would have to help her navigate, despite having zero experience of it myself.
She’s only ten, but this is already very much the case. I am all over all of my kids’ social media like a deranged rash, but stopping the wave of porn, misogyny, violence and spite completely is an impossible task. There are many days I feel like King Canute, hopelessly trying to turn back the tide.
Here in Los Angeles, where I currently live, gender identity politics is also a massive part of young children’s lives, far more so than I think is healthy.
American teachers seem to talk about it non-stop. In the past three months alone, Summer has wondered aloud to me whether she might be non-binary, gay, cisgender, gender fluid . . . I’ve lost track of the rest.
Most of the other mums have had similar conversations with their daughters. We jokingly refer to it as ‘the great awakening’. All of a sudden, after Christmas, there was a simultaneous frenzied ordering of Pride water bottles and rainbow socks. Then, last month, Summer got a crush on a boy and it was all on hold.
I try to roll with all these social changes with as light a touch, and as much kindness, as I can. But these are things that ten-year-old girls have to deal with in 2022.
Sefi never had that, and nor, thank God, did I. It’s just one of the many ways that I feel my elder daughter and I were luckier than my younger children, despite all the material advantages they have. Nice homes and PlayStations are all very well, but the freedom children used to have, even as recently as the 1990s, to bike off to the woods and play all day, phoneless, with their friends? That was priceless. And it’s gone now, I suspect for ever.
The good news is that I doubt Summer would agree with me. She is a profoundly happy child who loves her life, school and friends. As Sefi was, back when I was a young mum and, as my teenage sons like to say, dinosaurs roamed the Earth.
I hope, in the end, that neither of my girls would change much about their childhoods, or themselves. I know, deep down, I wouldn’t.
I knew toxic social media would be inescapable