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The guilt-free way to parent (ten) kids
Georgina Fuller speaks to the woman with 10 children who insists she still manages to find time for herself
‘Are we honestly not evolved enough to realise that this isn’t working for us?
‘I’ve found that all mothers, no matter what position they are in, feel some guilt’
The idea of writing a book came to Danusia Malina-Derben, an entrepreneur and mother of 10 (yes, really) in the most unlikely of places. She was chopping wood for a fire at her cottage in the South Downs with Dickie, her miniature dachshund, last spring and thinking about lockdown.
“I was out, in a bobble hat, wearing no make-up, dirt underneath my fingernails, living the sort of life I wouldn’t usually live. I’d been working on the framework of this book for ages and for the first time in years had a fairly empty schedule, no travelling to and from London for meetings, doing the school run or shuttling the children to and from activities,” she says.
She had recently taken part in a podcast (not hers, The School for Mothers, more of which later) and been asked for the 100th time why she had chosen to have so many children.
Her answer was: “Why wouldn’t I choose to have a large family?”
“When people hear I have 10 children, their first questions are inevitably ‘why’ and ‘do they all have the same father?” she says.
“These two questions generally seek to categorise and understand that there is, inherent in the questioning, an imperative for me to explain myself, my life choices and why I haven’t followed ‘the norm’.”
These “microaggressions” are, says Malina-Derben, either a subconscious or deliberate attempt to keep her “in her place”. Why don’t we ask men to justify how many children they have and the decisions they make, she asks.
The title of her new book, Noise, which is described as “part manifesto, part guide and part memoir”, comes, Malina-Derben explains, from the cacophony of voices women are subjected to from the moment they get that blue line on the pregnancy test. “These voices, this low murmur of judgment, start from conception, where women are expected to justify how they live and the choices they make. They continue throughout our lives. They seek to undermine and subjugate,” she says.
For Malina-Derben, who prefers not to reveal her age but is probably in her mid 40s, and who runs a leadership consultancy (her clients include Coca-Cola, Mars and Microsoft), this first happened when she was 17 and found herself accidentally pregnant.
Her parents, a proud housewife and a Polish immigrant entrepreneur, were horrified. “I, a well-brought-up, Catholic convent girl who had a place at Italia Conti drama school, was supposed to be more than a no-hope teenage mother,” she says, wryly.
Malina-Derben went on to have two children in her teens, three in her 20s, two in her 30s and four in her 40s (including Madeline, a stillborn daughter) as her last baby was, in fact, triplets.
She also got a PhD and became an associate professor of organisational behaviour and development.
Her book attempts to answer a question that has plagued her ever since she became a mum. How can I be a mother and still be me?
She spent years looking for something that helped her answer this, but never found it. So, she says, quoting author Toni Morrison, “If there’s a book that you want to read, but it hasn’t been written yet, then you must write it.”
One of her main purposes is to reframe how we look at motherhood, especially for women who have career ambitions. She hates the patronising “have it all” stereotypes that are still so prevalent and doesn’t believe they have any place in today’s society.
If lockdown has shown us anything, it’s that women are still martyring themselves at home, she says.
She’s not wrong. A recent study by University of London showed that women spent more than twice as much time as men on homeschooling during the lockdowns.
So how can we overcome this? Firstly, says Malina-Derben, we need to look at all the assumptions we have already made around motherhood. Namely, that we should sacrifice our careers on the altar of motherhood, that we can only be happy if our children are, and that guilt is inevitable. We need to unpick this, she says, and realise that these ideas are all just outdated myths.
“One of the universal themes I’ve found from interviewing successful women for my School for Mothers podcast [which is, incidentally, ranked in the top 2 per cent of podcasts globally] is that all mothers, no matter what position they are in, feel some sort of guilt and worry they are not doing enough,” she notes.
She thinks we need to renegotiate our terms and take a more measured approach. We have inherited the idea of endless self-sacrifice from previous generations but it’s no longer relevant.
“We need to ask ourselves, how can we thrive as mothers without giving in to annihilation? What would happen if we said we have needs of our own and not be seen as selfish? Wouldn’t it be liberating?”
What Malina-Derben does not want, she says, is to tell women how to live their lives or offer any sort of Gina Fordtype parenting “manual”. “I want women to think about the concept that motherhood is really the pinnacle of every woman’s life.”
She has noticed, through her podcast, the same issues crop up time and time again. “Women always say things along the lines of ‘I can’t be happy if my child isn’t’. But I have 10 children and it would be impossible for them all to be consistently happy. Shouldn’t we be asking ourselves, how we, as human beings, can ever be responsible for other people’s happiness?”
She is also cynical about the recent zeitgeist of “self-care”. She believes it is, in many respects, just a middle-class privilege. “Self-care for middle-class women might take the form of a few glasses of white wine in the evening, wild water swimming, yoga or a night out with their girlfriends,” she says.
Yet, she believes if we are living under a “Mother Stopper” culture, we are also living in a “Father Stunting” one, which doesn’t expect fathers to take an equal share of responsibility at home and with childcare. This, says Malina-Derben, is something she has addressed in her next book, the aptly titled Spunk, due out in November, and the School for Fathers podcast, which she launched in 2019.
So, judgment aside, how has she managed to have a successful career and raise such a large family?
Her children, Freddie, George, Jack, Tom, Harriet, Isadora, (Madeline), Meredith, range from grown-ups to her eight-year-old triplets, Montgomery, Seraphina and Horatio.
“My children are obviously my life’s work, but it’s not as though I have 10 babies and toddlers. The older ones are pretty much self-sufficient,” she says.
She had six of them staying at home during lockdown; the triplets, two teens and her eldest daughter.
She managed by running a very organised, almost military routine and by outsourcing aspects of homeschooling to her older ones, she says. Her eldest daughter, Harriet, moved back home to help out, and each day they have a timetable they all operate by. Homeschooling, making slime, lunch, an hour or so of screen time, and so on.
The book, in the end, “poured out of her” over three weeks, as it had been in the making for so long. The result is a debrief on motherhood for today, described by Malina-Derben as “an invitation to think differently about motherhood”. It looks at the different assumptions we’ve made and take as gospel, including that guilt is an inevitable part of motherhood and that women lose their ambition when they become a mother, and turns them on their head.
“I lived on tomato soup and toast. I was dreaming of the book, writing it in my sleep and thought about nothing else, except, of course, the kids.”
She has, she says, like most working mothers, been negotiating with her children how she can continue to work around them. “I’ve told them that I need to sit and concentrate for a certain amount of time. I am really self-disciplined and I think that’s at the heart of everything. I forgo Netflix boxsets and lots of other things to get work done.”
What about her two ex-husbands? Have they helped out at all over lockdown? In a word, no.
“I’ve had more support from my girlfriends than I have from anyone else,” notes Malina-Derben, who is currently single. “We’ve had Zoom calls and lots of chats. The children’s two fathers have been busy with their work over lockdown, so I’ve shouldered everything.”
That hasn’t always been the case though. “I’ve had periods, earlier on, when I’ve worked and my husband has been a stay-at-home dad,” she says.
Despite the fact that lockdown has shone a light on the glaring gender divide at home, Malina-Derben thinks now is an ideal time for women to challenge the status quo.
“When we really unpick things, these sorts of assumptions, that women will take the lion’s share of the domestic duties and put their career on hold, is really just a convenience for the patriarchy.”
Right now, we should be looking at whether this serves us.
“Why aren’t we thinking this through? Do we want our children, especially our daughters, to feel as though they have to have a little career and then have a baby and feel as though they have to morph who they are and sacrifice themselves to motherhood? Are we honestly not evolved enough to realise that this isn’t working for us?” she asks.
It’s not women who are failing, it’s our patriarchal society making them feel like rubbish.
“I want women to realise that they don’t have to feel constant guilt when they become a mother.”
It is, Malina-Derben says, time for women to put themselves first.
It’s time to drown out the noise and for women to start making their own.
Noise is out on March 30