On a Wednesday night, my son has basketball practice at the same time as my daughter’s netball practice, two miles apart, with half an hour’s grace for delivery and collection. To nail this scheduling nightmare, I feed them an early supper before we leave (in a lightning efficient 45 minute window after school) and take a toasted bagel with me to pick them up, having already run a bath of only hot water that will be cool enough for them to dunk in before they get into bed, where I will then read to them in a bid to encourage healthy sleep to avoid a slow morning tomorrow which could risk creating obstacles to my getting to my desk on time. It’s a meticulously timed production line of a system, and when it works I’m superwoman. When it doesn’t, it’s because I missed a step.
Remember the gorgeous Mummy Pig in 2016’s Sing? (no relation to Peppa – she’s altogether less aspirational). This is Rosita, voiced by Reese Witherspoon, who rigs up a futuristic machine throughout her house to ensure her 25 piglets are fed and watered in her absence, to enable her to attend an audition which results in a Taylor Swift-level performance later in the film. The absolute precision of her complicated construction – which, in a wry but accurate detail, goes unnoticed by all 25 piglets as well as Rosita’s work-addled husband (until her performance thoroughly wakes up the hairs on his chinny-chin-chin) - is a perfect animated representation of the working-parent experience, and how easily things can topple down thanks to one, apparently innocuous, slip.
If, for example, I forget that toasted bagel, the children need topping up with a bowl of cereal when we get home which delays bedtime as I repress an urge to enforce eating in silence like a Miss Trunchbull fun-sponge because an extra half hour at this point means that by the time they’re in bed I’m too tired to do the work I want to get done before tomorrow. My latent stress is most apparent when I occasionally delegate to my husband without successfully communicating the impact of each element, thereby subjecting him to my hot rage at his bewilderment about what is, quite reasonably, to him, ‘just a fucking bagel’.
To me, that little circle of bread has become my symbol of success for our family; a cog in the wheel of our collective happiness, the mechanics of our harmony - which depends upon the ability to exist in two places at once, always mentally and sometimes physically, that constitutes much of the finely tuned set up that is the working mother’s existence.
When a woman’s professional and parenting careers co-exist successfully there is no better feeling – a unique ecstasy that fuels knowing looks across the street from one working mother to another; a golden thread of empathy that transcends professional experience or personal background and acknowledges the magnificence of the undertaking. Working parenthood is often not talked about by parents who feel it might be 'unprofessional' or 'mumsy' to mention their multifaceted existence, when the truth is that we should applaud and be applauded for it because it takes tenacity, emotional resilience and stamina like no other job does.
But there is no one way to do it: one person’s bagel in another’s guaranteed route to meltdown. A publisher friend told me recently that her arrival to collect her son from nursery carrying an unexpected flavour of oatcake meant that ‘all hell broke loose’, so incensed was he at her deviation from routine. Successful parenting strategies are unearthed only by way of previous failure; experimentation is the only known route to discovering your unique ‘bagel’, and no two look the same – which is why ‘having it all’ is a nonsense because one person’s ‘all’ is, to someone else, nothing but a cheesy oatcake.
Dolly Jones is a former Vogue editor and author of Leaving the Ladder Down