Picture credit: Karla Gowlett
The four options for paid childcare are: childminder, au pair, nursery or nanny. All solid options, all bloody expensive. The average cost for a full-time nursery place for a child under two in the UK is £252 a week or edging close to £13,000 per year (more if you live in London). If you opt for a live-out nanny it’s a staggering £500-800 per week (again, more if you live in London). Compare that to the family utopia of Sweden where every child is guaranteed a spot at a public preschool where charges are capped at around £100 per month. Man, I love those tall blonde bastards.
Childcare costs in the UK are some of the most expensive in the world for a variety of reasons, including lack of government funding and also the legal specifications around adult to children ratios. In the UK, one nursery worker must be present for every four children aged two to three, whereas in France that ratio is one adult to eight kids, who are presumably so often left to their own devices they can usually be found smoking skinny cigarettes and reading Proust.
Regardless of the reasons why parents in the UK face such a hefty monthly bill, quite simply, these prices mean that formal childcare is not an option for some families and arguably barely sustainable for many others. I remember my sister telling me about a period when both her kids were in nursery; after paying fees and her travel she was taking home around £70 a month. £70 for a month of wrangling a baby, a toddler, a commute and a ‘part-time’ role that inevitably spilled over into her days off.
Like many returning mothers she felt this is what she had to do in order to keep a seat at the table, scared that if she left, that seat would be whipped away as the game of ‘career progression musical chairs’ proceeded without her. For solo parents without a second wage to rely on, childcare costs can be even more devastating, with these fees eating up an average 67% of a single parent’s income.
Before I had my daughter, I was told by some local parents that if I wanted to secure a spot at one of the neighbourhood’s good nurseries and not one of the places that was essentially a primary-colour painted gulag, I should really have started putting my name on waiting lists shortly before I sat my GCSEs. Trying to make up for lost time, I began to look at places for my unborn child when I was seven months pregnant.
Just as my neighbours foretold, one of the nurseries I visited – a fancy hippy place which boasted an organic plant-based menu prepared by an ex-Ottolenghi chef – told me during a tour of the facility that, in all honesty, I was unlikely to ever get a space for this child, but if I went on to have a second one then I could transfer our place on the waiting list to that hypothetical baby instead. It’s now nearly three years since I registered at that place and I still am yet to hear from them. What a great day that will be when my daughter graduates from university in 2040 and I finally get a call to say that a spot is available in the Sunshine Room at Tiny Tidily Tots.
In the end we settled on a brand-new childcare centre that was big, bright and had cameras in every room, meaning I’d be able to watch Ratbag steal maracas from the mouths of other kids from the comfort of my own home.
The settling-in period was, I would say, pretty heartbreaking for everyone involved. All the parenting my husband and I had done up until that point was about making our daughter feel loved and safe. Nursery felt like the undoing of that.
Her little face when I would come and collect her was a snapshot of anguish as if I’d left her with a pack of hyenas as opposed to some nice ladies with childcare qualifications and exceptional Goosey Goosey Gander skills. She’d see me at the window of her room, her lip would quiver, tears streaming down her face with a look that said, ‘. . . What the FUCK, man?! Where have you BEEN? Are you insane? I am your BABY?? You can’t just leave me! I thought you were my person! Who even are these people? Why are they trying to make me eat cauliflower? What is cauliflower? And where’s the TV? Thank god I never have to come here ever again . . .’ Day in, day out.
In the end it took around six weeks to settle/break her in. I spent a lot of that time Googling variations of the words ‘nursery’ ‘baby’ and ‘trauma’. I knew her going to childcare was necessary for us as a family, but it certainly didn’t sit well. Friends would say, ‘Mine didn’t like it at the beginning either Ellie, it’s really normal for them to be upset.’
Yes, millions of people like me around the world put their small kids in daycare because we have no other choice but to any of us, do their tears of separation feel normal? From an evolutionary point of view, humans leaving vulnerable infants in strange locations with strange people is surely anything but normal? Aren’t we basically meant to be like monkeys, carrying our babies on our backs as we swing together through the jungle until they are old enough to go it alone? But how could I? My jungle was one of meetings and late-night gigs – my baby monkey was far too noisy and sticky to survive here. So then did I need to change my jungle? Abandon work and hang out at kiddy gymnastics and the M&S café lamenting the career I gave up for the sake of the little chimp? What was I doing all this for? What did I really want from life? And why have I dragged out this jungle metaphor so painfully?
I have come to realise that I’m a better mother when I don’t have to mother all the time.
But, as always, for all of us it was ‘just a phase’. Ratbag acclimatised, and so did I. Partly because time passed and partly because, essentially, we were out of options. I had to work, I wanted to work and for that to happen she needed to be somewhere I wasn’t.
The first day I left my daughter at nursery and she didn’t cry gave me a sense of elation that I imagine football fans experience when their team wins and they push over a tram to celebrate. I was beside myself. I couldn’t believe what I’d just witnessed – she had waved goodbye and then just walked in. Just walked in. That was it. Where was the quivering chin? Where were the wails of torment? Where were the pangs of guilt deep within my shattered soul? I rang my husband, ‘Darling! She didn’t cry! She must have forgiven us! She must like it!’ I shrieked, euphorically. ‘Great news!’ he said, ‘She’s finally learnt to internalise her unhappiness like the rest of us!’
I bloody love nursery now. I am a dirty convert. Trauma? WHAT TRAUMA? Nursery means I can sit in a café or go for a run or go to a meeting or do some writing or record something silly or do anything I bloody well want because I DON’T HAVE TO LOOK AFTER MY OWN CHILD. What’s she having for lunch? DON’T KNOW, DON’T CARE, NOT MY RESPONSIBILITY. Oh no she’s weed through her tights, has she? NOT MY ISSUE, WHACK HER IN SOME TROUSERS FISHED OUT FROM THE BIN OF SHAME.
I genuinely can’t think of many other things in my entire life that have lifted my spirits in the way nursery has, aside perhaps for the Paris filter on Instagram. My daughter trots in every day as happy as Larry (Larry is a notorious early years education lover). The place is colourful and chaotic, full of lefty parents keen to sign permission slips for their child to partake in activities like yoga and Mandarin classes. And just to be clear, they are not lazy punchlines I have just plopped in. Yoga and Mandarin are genuinely some of the weekly activities undertaken by my tiny daughter. She is apparently a natural in her Mandarin sessions – according to her daily record sheet she has learnt how to say the Chinese for ‘coconut’ and ‘pineapple’ which will really help the next time me and her pop to Beijing to get shitfaced on pina coladas.
My delight when I leave her at nursery and walk away humming George Michael’s ‘Freedom’ as I cross the road without having to wait for the green man, is only bettered by the delight I experience when I pick her up again at the end of the day. She belts towards me smelling of another woman’s perfume, excited to tell me how she’s been to the park or made a snowman or ‘done Baby Shark’ as if it’s a verb. (90% of the time she will have done none of these things, but, like many pathological liars, she’s extremely charismatic.)
Even at the worst of my initial nursery anxiety, I have always tried to bat away the temptation to be drawn into the ‘mum guilt’ narrative that I despise. It’s either un-gendered ‘parental guilt’ or it can sod off. It is not for mothers alone to navigate the burden of a work/child balance. If you, like me, ever feel a sneak of self-reproach edge in, I urge you to try and tough-love yourself out of it. Remind your brain, as utilitarian as it sounds, that each of us has a role to play in a family, even our children. For my husband and l, our job is to work and pay bills, and for Ratbag, her job is to go to nursery and bloody well do Baby Shark.
Women should not feel bad about having time apart from their children and having the audacity to enjoy it. When my child is at nursery, I end the day knowing I have worked hard, and she has done 20 activities she would never get to do at home. I don’t spend our time away from one another in lovelorn misery but rather I end the day with a bubbly Christmas Eve sense of excitement as I go to collect her. Sometimes I think I love her the most when I’m not with her. I have come to realise that I’m a better mother when I don’t have to mother all the time.
When I do see my daughter again, and she runs towards me with a beaming gappy smile yelling, ‘Mama’s here! It’s Mama!’ knocking me backwards with a hurricane of happiness, I think she understands that even though Mummy sometimes goes away, Mummy always comes back.
This is an extract, taken from Ellie's book, My Child and Other Mistakes: How to ruin your life in the best way possible