There are times in every parent’s life when, however much they try to avoid it, the professional and the domestic messily collide. It happened to me a few years ago when, during a teachers’ training day, I took my seven-year-old with me to interview Joan Collins over lunch. Collins was delighted at her presence and ordered her a giant bowl of ice-cream. However, halfway through the conversation, she suddenly looked startled, fumbled under the table for a bit, and then pulled out a sticky, pink-spattered Chanel shoe. “I do believe dear Lily has dropped ice-cream in my shoe,” she announced, looking a little pained.
For the singer Sophie Ellis-Bextor, this clash of the personal and professional has become a regular ritual as she fields questions about the practicalities of child rearing and how she makes it work. It was with palpable exasperation that she tweeted this week: “I love making music. I love promoting a new record. I do not love talking over and over about how I sort my childcare. I am a singer. I am a mum. I will sort the childcare.”
It’s not hard to imagine the scenario in which interviewers, having exhausted the subject of Ellis-Bextor’s latest masterwork, try to get a sense of her life outside music. After all, there’s only so much we need to know about the nuts and bolts of the creative process. But interrogations about children and motherhood invariably bring with them an undercurrent of criticism: who is looking after the kids? Are they being raised properly? Are you a selfish mother?
This, of course, is rarely the experience of men. While there are plenty of male writers, musicians and actors who will loudly and proudly tell us that fatherhood has changed their outlook, and renewed their respect for women, few will be asked about the minutiae of bum wiping and school runs. On the rare occasions they are, uncomfortable truths about division of labour can be exposed – a case in point being the comedian and insurrectionist-in-chief Russell Brand, who, on being asked about the care of his two small children recently, replied that his wife, Laura, “does all of it”.
And so, while interviewers perhaps need to mind their own business about specific childcare arrangements, to sweep the entire subject of working mothers under the carpet brings its own set of problems. To pretend that balancing motherhood against a demanding career isn’t often an exhausting, guilt-inducing nightmare is to suggest that it isn’t a problem at all. It also allows us to draw a veil over what is a depressing truth – that one of the biggest barriers to female creativity is the pram in the hallway.
There are, of course, exceptions. JK Rowling was a single parent living on benefits when she wrote the early Harry Potter books. The author and poet Edith Nesbit reared both her own children and those birthed by her husband’s mistress while churning out scores of books, including The Railway Children. For most of us, however, looking after children is at once all-consuming and unbelievably dull. While parenthood, specifically the reduced time available to work, can go a long way in dealing with procrastination, the mind itself is often dulled by exhaustion. There is also the fact that women in the creative industries are generally self-employed, which means there is little access to the creches or flexible working programmes offered by some employers.
For me, being a freelance writer with a child has brought its own challenges, and that’s with a partner who does his fair share. I have heard astonishing stories of other women barricading themselves in bathrooms so they can hold a conference call without disturbance, of phone interviews conducted while smothered in their child’s vomit, and of working into the early hours night after night as it’s the only time they can get stuff done.
This is not what we tell those who pay us, however; the professional veneer must remain at all times. Whatever their reproductive choices, women are constantly pummelled with the notion of “having it all”, an idiotic concept peddled by self-help manuals and glossy magazines that serves only to dent our confidence and make us feel like we are failing.
I sympathise with Ellis-Bextor and her desire to not let her status as a mother become the narrative that is wrapped around her professional life. But not to acknowledge the practical difficulties perpetuates a status quo in which men get to blather on about the life-changing properties of fatherhood while rarely getting their hands dirty, and in which women are assumed to be the ones mutely keeping the home fires burning. The more these injustices are discussed, the more likely it is that they can be resolved.
• Fiona Sturges is an arts writer specialising in books, music, podcasting and TV
