I’m not sure I’m actually enjoying being a mother all that much

My attempt at being all things to all people can be largely summed up by the mothers’ race at my daughter’s sports day today. I came third.

Not winning is basically how I would describe my motherhood experience. I never quite feel like I’m doing anything well enough. 

Asking to work from home this week so I can show my face, not just at sport’s day – though my daughter’s face lit up when I arrived with the pug some hour after it started because of, well, other shit to do –  but because I also have an important meeting with her class teacher about next year which I couldn’t get to otherwise, I was aware I was asking for a favour. It’s hard, three weeks into a new role to be seen to take the piss, but the sad thing about my situation is since becoming a mother at 25, I’ve hardly been in a role long enough to start taking the piss before someone deems fit to shaft me. There has been no piss taking. Noone’s cut me any slack.

Now I work somewhere proper and grown-up, I was granted said day from home, and because I’m new to said role, I’ve been working like hell from home, to prove that I’m in fact working and not shirking, and as is usual accomplishing far more, more quickly, than if I was in the office.  I did manage to get to the sports day, stay for half an hour (while also walking the dog) and run in the mother’s race where I came third – not bad out of 15, but then I’m still probably one of the younger ones and therein lies my problem. It’s always been my problem. 

When I was in my twenties, it mattered that my ‘bikini body had all gone to pot’, and now that all my mates are post-partum, suddenly, it doesn’t matter a jot. When I was in my twenties, I cared that I couldn’t go to Glastonbury and now the thought of partying in a raincoat feels like an anathema. I’ve always been out of sync. Back when I was a SAHM, I cared that all friends were working. Now most of them have gone freelance and it’s me who’s a wage slave, it suddenly it doesn’t feel quite so much like fun. And in the meantime, even getting this far has felt like an uphill battle. Now, of course, I’m too old. Too old to do the things that might have been fun in my twenties when largely I was knocked up, breastfeeding or sleep deprived. Now it just feels unseemly to lie on my couch all day in my pants with a hangover, but still it must be done – a reaction to all that’s gone before.   

This week, when a lady brought her baby into the office, and everyone gathered round to coo, I thought of my own experience: a phone call to see how I was getting on, then radio silence as everyone independently assumed I wouldn’t be going back. Thereafter, every job opportunity was a battleground against my peers without kids, every concession hard won and heavily scrutinised, every wage slip eaten into by childcare – no one cared. And I grew resentful as across the board because however hard I tried, I failed. 

I’m still one of the few in the office with two kids, but now they’re older, asking for flexitime feels like I’m making demands. But waiting until I’m more established feels pointless too – all the while their childhoods slip away and I never quite feel like I’m making anyone happy – especially myself. I’m either spread too thin, or cut adrift, going nowhere. Never feeling quite at home in the playground, or with my friends who all have young kids now, or at work where I’m too old for my paygrade and feel like a failure, nor having the time or finances for further study. Having kids out of sync with my peers has put me in no man’s land. No woman’s for that matter – there’s never been much solidarity – either I was deemed to be having it easy or not hard enough. And it’s always the kids that suffer.

It’s harder than you’d think to be the ‘supported’ partner of an older mate. No matter what my ambitions, Tom’s the bigger earner, so at every turn my career’s taken a hit. So when the school announces out of the blue, they’ll be striking next Tuesday, who has to go cap in hand to my manager and ask for another day working from home? Not the man sorting out the current state of the financial markets. It’ll be little old me. 

But then, as they say at my daughter’s school, it’s not the winning, it’s the taking part that counts, though how far this translates to adult life, I’m not so sure.