It’s a shock to discover that motherhood is a state of permanent guilt. Should you work or not work? Follow Gina Ford or use your gut instinct? Helicopter or hands-off? There are no right answers, only a lingering sense that you probably made the wrong choice.
But there’s one thing on which all mothers agree. The best Christmas present ever might be a week at a health farm — somewhere wickedly remote. But you’re not really sure you’re allowed to go. Somehow, without realising it, you’ve turned maternal duty into a life sentence, with no time off for good behaviour.
It’s often said that a mum is the engine room of the family. But even if she’s running on Duracell batteries, she can’t survive at optimum levels if she doesn’t have a bit of time to herself. “You wouldn’t need much to recharge your batteries,” says Miranda, who looks after her three small sons full-time. “I used to think you had to go somewhere exotic, but it would be enough to take an afternoon off and go to see a film. That would be really decadent.
My husband could cope — he’s incredibly hands-on with the children — but he’s been working all week and I feel he needs a break, too.” There we go again, tripping over feelings of guilt. “What tends to happen,” says Thomas, “is that you shuffle yourself to the bottom of the pack. You put the children on top, your partner somewhere second, then family and friends and then — because mums are nurturers — even the mum in the playground or the person in the supermarket who needs help.” Squashed flat under the weight of other people’s priorities, it’s a wonder we can breathe at all.
Our biggest worry about taking off by ourselves is that the children will suffer, however careful our child-care arrangements.But generally children will not be harmed if their mothers take a break from them. The child might be upset, but you have to balance that against living with a stressed mum who feels too guilty to leave her child for a short time. Children have to learn from an early age that people go away, but they come back.
It’s not just the children who benefit. “When we go away, we become ourselves again and we remember who we are,” says Honor Rhodes, director of development at the Family and Parenting Institute, a national research charity. “The adult relationship can run out of petrol, like any tank. When we recharge our batteries, we have something different, new and exciting to give to our partners.” Sometimes you want to be not so much alone, but with people outside your normal everyday life. Even a date in the diary is better than nothing. Elizabeth Crossick, a single mother with two teenage children, Gabriella, 16, and Alexander, 14, is a lawyer who works full-time. Every six months, she spends an evening at a day spa. “For a few hours, the world stops spinning,” she says. “There’s no phone and no one can get hold of you. It’s priceless — a getaway from the real world.” So everyone benefits: you, the children, your partner, your employer, possibly even the cat if he can get a way with his more disgusting behaviour while the lady of the house is away. What’s stopping us? Part of the problem is that we get out of the habit. Exhaustion dulls the imagination. When my children were little, I had a permanent fantasy of sitting in a steam-filled café, heavy with cigarette smoke and the smell of fried bacon, because it was such an unsuitable environment for babies that it pretty much guaranteed solitude. But it shows how much my horizons had shrunk.
Equally sadly, we get to used to managing the minutiae of our children’s lives that we can’t really imagine anyone else doing it properly. It’s hard to see someone else doing your job. Deep down, what worries us most is not the cost of a weekend away, or the competence of our partners, but the nagging suspicion that going away without the children is plain selfish.Mothers are meant to be selfless and yet here we are having wicked thoughts about an afternoon at the cinema. Where will it all end? The sinfulness of our imaginations is almost too much to contemplate. “We go,” says Honor Rhodes, “and there’s a faint chance that we’ll never come back. It feels very, very naughty.”