Regrets? Show me the working mother who has none

How is one supposed to react to the finding of a new survey that spending too
much time at work is the biggest regret parents have about their children’s
early years? Beat our breasts and rent our clothing? Fling our BlackBerries
out the window? Cancel the meeting in Frankfurt and upcycle those annual
reports into a life-size papier-mâché model of Mr Tumble?

Regret, like joy and frustration, pride, love and anger is part and parcel of
parenthood. But so is safeguarding the family’s financial security,
squirrelling money away for holidays and their new shoes. We might feel
regret, but that doesn’t automatically equate with guilt.

Today’s working mothers aren’t all elegantly shod high-flying finance
directors à la Sarah Jessica Parker’s demented breadwinner in the film I
Don’t Know How She Does It.

Most of us work to pay the insanely high mortgage on our unremarkable home,
not to buy this season’s Lanvin suits. Similarly, most of us would prefer
part-time work, but when it’s not available, will choose – however
reluctantly – a full-time job.

Figures from 2010 show that a record 2.2 million mothers with children as
young as six months were working full-time as family budgets were coming
under strain – up 30 per cent from 1997.

When millions of middle-income families are stripped of child benefit, worth
£1,752 for a mother of two, that total will invariably rise higher.

But it’s not unalloyed bad news; research from US universities last month,
revealed that women who return to work shortly after starting a family have
better mental and physical health than those who opt to stay at home.

A recent Gallup study found 28 per cent of unemployed mothers described
themselves as depressed, compared with 17 per cent of employed mothers – and
the British Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health reported that
mothers who stayed at home were more likely to be overweight (38 per cent)
than those who juggled family and career (23 per cent).

Do a great many of us regret going to the office every day instead of dandling
the toddler on our knee a little longer? You may as well pin us to a wall
and demand to know if we regret eating that second slice of cake.

Of course we do, it’s bleedin’ obvious we do, but under the prevailing
circumstances we felt compelled to do it, so we did. And we’d probably do it
again, because modern motherhood is not a simplistic choice between the
freedoms of a sun-dappled teddy bear’s picnic and the strictures of a
corporate leg-iron.

I know women who couldn’t wait to slip into their old identity and the luxury
of (paid) lunchbreaks and the opportunity to slope off to the gym. I also
know women for whom going back to work was a painful, physical wrench.

The majority of us probably hover in the middle, and while we may have
regrets, we would make the same difficult choice again.

Some regrets in life are bitter, others are a form of nostalgia, a way of
acknowledging the sweet pleasures that small children gift us in such
unself‑conscious abundance.

We work for their sake, and our own sake, and, sometimes, for the sake of new
bedroom curtains.

Nothing so naturally beautiful as a sweet 16

Put the Per Una collection on lockdown! Throw a cordon sanitaire round the
Dine In For £10 offers! Twiggy, Rosie – to the manager’s office now!

Someone has let a normal woman into the new MS lingerie advert and it just
won’t do. Not only is she a true reflection of how the average customer
looks in her undies – once we’ve pulled our tummies in for the cameras – but
more scandalous still, she looks really happy.

Maybe it’s because she ate all the (mini steak-and-Dorset-ale) pies. Or
because she’s recently escaped from a Dove advert. Or could it be because
she’s far more attractive than her cadaverous counterparts, particularly the
one with the disturbing death-skull face, wearing the damson bandeau
knickers?

Whatever the reason, she glows with well being and confidence, easily
upstaging her pouty, doe-eyed peers. The strapline of the advert is “For
Every Woman You Are”. Given that Dragon’s Den investor Theo Paphitis this
week launches his Boux Avenue lingerie with size 16 supermodel Robyn Lawley,
the renaissance of natural beauty is in danger of resembling a trend.

Except the pictures of Lawley – stunning, voluptuous and sexy in red lipstick
and a sheer babydoll – are missing the crucial something. The something that
sets the new MS advert alight and is more unusual and more alluring than a
generous embonpoint or a curvaceous hip? A broad smile.

The sacred and the profane

The revelation (sic) by EastEnders producer Jenny Robins that scriptwriters
routinely plunder the Bible for “amazing” source material has left me
“amazed”.

Can Dirty Den’s return from the dead really be traced back to the
Resurrection? I mean, really?

Without wishing to hurl stones at Broadcasting House or set fire to the Queen
Vic, I do feel a mite miffed about the casual misappropriation of the Bible.
Presumably they steer clear of filleting the Koran because they couldn’t
find 72 virgins in Walford?

As Kat Moon might say, gazing mistily into a vodka bottle: “Wherefore is light
given to him that is in misery, and life unto the bitter in soul? Job 3:20,
innit.”

Without wishing to preach, may I suggest we all convert to Coronation Street
and its patron saints, Newton and Ridley.

It’s time we talked fish, dear

In the olden days, a child’s destiny would be sealed at birth. Girl or boy,
their high or indeed lowly estate was ordered if not by God, then by Mrs
Bennet or her ilk.

Having brought into the world two daughters, and being too slender of means to
marry them off, I therefore decreed the elder would be a UN lawyer
specialising in maritime law and the younger a plumber who also does
electrics. Or indeed the other way round, I’m not fussy. But having noted
the wind whistling through the empty lecture halls of our £9,000-a-year
elite universities, I’m thinking John Lewis.

No, not for a winter coat, but as a Never Knowingly Undersold career option.
Having just posted a whopping 60 per cent rise in profits, it’s a sound
professional investment, especially as all employees in John Lewis and its
sister company Waitrose are partners. So selling sofas may not be as
glamorous as doing battle with pirates in a courtroom, but there are always
the bright lights of the fish counter at Waitrose. And who better to keep it
all shipshape than a plumber who also does electrics?

Pro-Life and defiling the dead

Last week, on a visit to Belfast, I was strolling through the main pedestrian
precinct with my sister and her family when she froze.

“Don’t look,” she hissed at me, but I followed her gaze to some women who were
handing out leaflets and passing round a Pro-Life petition.

Then one of them moved aside to reveal a sandwich board on which were
photographs: gory, graphic, nausea-inducing images of aborted foetuses.

A red mist descended on me. I strode over and demanded they be removed.

Of course, my instinctive revulsion at these babies’ broken bodies being
displayed for propaganda purposes was dismissed as pro-abortionist cant. It
wasn’t.

The Crown Prosecution Service is to decide whether such posters can be
allowed, after campaigners displayed them outside an abortion clinic in
Brighton.

Such desecration of the dead must be banned – everywhere.

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