‘Mum filled my CHILDHOOD WITH JOY’
My stay-at-home mum gave me everything I needed to succeed, says author Rachel Marks
Iremember a few years ago reading an article about how daughters of stay-at-home mums were less successful and ambitious than those with working mums. I was incensed. I was the person at university who, instead of going out drinking, spent hours perfecting my essays, knowing that anything less than a First would feel like a failure. And I spent my first maternity leave writing my Masters’ dissertation while bouncing on a birthing ball trying to get the baby’s head to engage.
I fully support working mums. It wasn’t that I felt daughters of stay-at-home mums were better off; it was that I hated the suggestion my wonderful mum had disadvantaged us in some way.
So I wrote an angry Facebook post. But I kept returning to the article. The research study was from a well-respected university; there was evidence. Then I realised that I was one of the ‘unsuccessful’ statistics. I didn’t work in a managerial role and I wasn’t on a high salary. I was, guess what, a stay-at-home mum
(other than teaching one day a week to pay the bills).
‘Mum made me feel like I was the most important person in the world’
After university, I got a job as a primary school teacher, getting promoted to the senior leadership team after just one year. I remember sitting in the headteacher’s office in the early days of my first pregnancy (I hadn’t yet told him), and him talking about his plans for my career, and feeling a mixture of guilt and sadness knowing that I wasn’t going to get to experience it. But, from the moment I even thought about having children, I knew I would all but give up my career to be at home with them. And if I examine the reason then it is because of my mum, but it’s certainly not because she didn’t inspire me to be anything else. My mum filled my childhood with creativity and love and joy. When I look at this photo of us, I have no idea what it is she was showing me in the cup, but it encapsulates how she made even the most insignificant things interesting. Every walk was an adventure, every trip to the supermarket fun. We’d spend our days baking bread and making clay food for my Playmobil, growing vegetables, painting and sewing, and cuddling up and reading stories. My mum always made me feel like I was the most important person in the world.
In contrast to making me unambitious, she made me believe I could do anything. With the awareness I now have from being a stay-at-home mum myself, I’m sure there were days when she was bored, frustrated, utterly exhausted. Often it can feel like a thankless task. You don’t get to go on business trips or out for fancy lunches. There are no financial bonuses. But Mum always made it seem like the best job in the world. And for me (most days) it is.
Now I’m lucky enough to be able to write and be at home with my children. But even if I was still ‘just’ a mum, I hope I’d teach my children that they can be whatever they want to be. Footballers, astronauts, archaeologists, care-home workers… But I also want to teach them that success should not be measured by what job you do or how much money you make. And, most of all, I hope I inspire them to find a vocation that makes them as happy as being their mum makes me. Because really, what greater success is there than that?
✢ The novel Until Next Weekend by Rachel Marks (£6.99, PB, Penguin) is out now.
Even the tiny things were made to seem fascinating