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Wednesday 25 April 2018

Am I a "success" now I'm just a stay-at-home Mum?

I saw an old school friend last week who mentioned a young man I'd briefly had a crush on in Year 9. "Any idea what's he doing these days?" she asked. Funnily enough, the "young man" in question, now in his late 30s, had recently befriended me on Facebook, so I did know what he was up to: living somewhere in the Arctic circle, doing climate research. "Wow," she said. "Good thing you never got together or you could be freezing your butt off out there with him right now!"

I laughed: who'd want to be doing anything (literally) that cool, right?! Well, actually I would. Quite a lot. After I got home, I had a bit of a poke about on LinkedIn and Twitter to see what other ex-boyfriends and former crushes were now up to. Turns out they're all busy being awesome. One is deputy headmaster of a posh independent school in London. One is a film director (his dream even when I knew him) for a popular liberal news publication and spends his life in Borneo, Paraguay, Antarctica and other places I will almost certainly never visit. One heads up an EU policy think tank in Brussels. One lives in Berlin and translates books into English for a living. And the last guy I was with before Drake is now a senior director at a national newspaper who happens to volunteer in Greek refugee centres in his spare time. Nothing like a spot of cyber-stalking to depress you.

The point is not that "I married the wrong man". Far from it: Drake leads a pretty travel-heavy lifestyle himself, and I've had the opportunity to visit Germany, Malaysia and the USA thanks to his job. Also, I love him and I really wouldn't have wanted to marry any of the others anyway. I may apparently have a thing for globe-trotting high achievers, but most tend to come with planet-sized egos and notable committment issues sadly.

The point is that at nearly thirty-seven years of age, I haven't done anything anywhere near as cool as all of these clever, successful men. Despite having a degree in French, a Masters in International Development, and working for international charities for thirteen years, I've never travelled overseas for my job (Oxford is as far as I got). I haven't had anything in print (this blog doesn't count) or on film (except a cringey interview on BBC news) and now I'm not even working. My primary achievement today was deftly steering both kids round a pile of dog poo on the way to nursery. The term 'wasted potential' comes to mind.

These men - most of whom I considered intellectual equals - have somehow gone on to live the life I always expected to have. As I sighed at their pictures of sun-drenched European capitals and snowy Nordic forests, I pondered why this was.

Mostly, I think it's my own fault. Despite thinking a bit of adventure might be nice, I never went out of my way to forge a glittering career. I simply didn't want excitement enough to choose anything other than a safe and sensible path. I was relatively senior in my last paid role, but it was a job where I quietly made things happen behind the scenes, rather than loudly broadcasting my grand visions to all and sundry. It suited me and I mostly enjoyed it, but I was never going to set the charity world ablaze. I suppose I'm a level-headed realist (and maybe a bit lazy too). I know earning lots usually means considerable stress and the requirement to take "business" very seriously (I can't), while living abroad involves language barriers and instability and homesickness. I love to travel, my extended family all live in far flung places, and I lived and studied overseas in my youth, but I also have strong family ties here - all the more so now I have a husband and kids. And despite my feminist pretensions, marriage and children were always as important to me as a career.

Is this lack of ambition a personality thing, or a result of societal pressures that seek to quash women's dynamism and persuade them procreation is still the most important thing in life? Probably a bit of both. My personality is undoubtedly shaped by gender norms. I think when nobody expects great things of you, you don't really strive for them as hard. Men know their most important role is to make money and society affords them the freedom to do that however they see fit. In my early twenties, I had that same luxury in theory, but I also knew if I wanted children (which I REALLY did for some reason), I'd have to work on finding a partner too, so I could embark on the suitably long-term relationship that produces them. After a few false starts, I eventually did that, with a man who kept buggering off abroad all the time. Could I have travelled too? Yes, but with my chosen profession, I'd have been in developing countries while he was in developed ones.  We'd never have seen each other. So I held down a steady job in the UK and waited for him to come back and propose. For seven years. Annoying, but ultimately necessary to be with the man I loved and have his babies. Before I knew it, my chance to be free and travel the world had gone...  Excuses excuses.

My recent decision to become a stay-at-home Mum has been driven by this slightly regretful, perhaps even resentful, pragmatism too (and has no doubt enhanced the feeling of failure as I saw what my former paramours were doing). With Drake's far superior salary and tricky working patterns, it was always going to be the most sensible option, and unless I totally screw up my parenting, I know the kids are going to benefit. But let's face it, professional parenthood is just not very exciting. Identifying yourself as "a Mum" is never going to make people go "oooh!" in the same way that telling them you're "a film director" might. Maybe that's the fault of our patriarchal society, or maybe it's just that Mums are ten a penny, while directors are more one in a million. Either way, as much as I love my children and enjoy being with them (mostly, ahem), I don't want raising them to become the only thing I achieve in life.

Yet there are people who spend so long seeing the sights and being successful, that they run out of time to pass on their genes and their passion for the world.  So as we all must do these days, I recognise my privilege too. Wiping bums and hands and noses, isn't quite the same as undertaking pioneering arctic climate science, but it's important in its own way and it won't be forever. I will get my non-Mummy identity back eventually, even if it is linked to a job in Uxbridge rather than Uzbekistan. I also need to remind myself that Social Media can be deeply misleading in how it portrays people's lives.  None of the guys (except one) I cyber-stalked apparently have children - which perhaps explains their more untethered lives - but I have no idea if this is through choice or sad circumstance.  And the one who does, someone I dumped back in 2004 for being a bit too impulsive and overly emotional, is currently divorcing his wife and the mother of his four young kids to shack up with a new young lady from Carshalton, who keeps insensitively blabbing on Facebook about her "incredible new beau". So it could be worse.  I could be him, or heaven forbid, his poor ex-wife. Sometimes having a sensible side is no bad thing at all.