Baby, what shall I do?
Finding the right balance between work and home life is one of the toughest issues facing us all. Gaby Hinsliff asks: do we dare to care?
Sunday May 9, 2004 The Observer
When teacher Lorna MacCormac arrived at school one morning to find she was wearing her bedroom slippers, she knew something had to give. With two children under three, her day had become a frantic struggle to feed, dress and deposit youngsters with their carers and still reach work on time. Shoes had gone by the wayside.
'I was aware that the wheels were coming off,' she says now. 'I was in a full-time, full-on job and torn between maintaining that, and my children, and my house, and my relationship with my husband. Everything was giving way.'
It is a dilemma many frazzled working mothers will recognise. But now a much wider question is opening up across Britain: when it comes to time off for family responsibilities, how much is enough - and what if 'enough' for parents is too much for employers?
Do working fathers, or people caring for elderly relatives, deserve the same treatment as mothers? And aren't childless people entitled to a life outside work too?
MacCormac resolved it the only way she felt was possible: pregnant with her third baby, she resigned to become a stay-at-home mother.
Initially, she felt furious and cheated at being unable to have it all, resenting the 'very physical, boring, repetitive work' of childcare. But two years later MacCormac, a member of the pressure group Full Time Mothers, is positively evangelical about the influence she has over her children's life: 'Perhaps I don't want to have it all. Perhaps this is enough.'
Enough for some, but far from all. When the heavily pregnant actress Gwyneth Paltrow last week announced she could not understand actresses who worked after having children, she touched a national sore spot.
Radio 4 Woman's Hour presenter Jenni Murray accused her of 'criticising another woman's often hard-made choices from a position of ignorance and privilege', arguing that, unlike most, Paltrow can afford to stay at home without worrying about the mortgage. Others pointed out that many mothers work not from necessity, but because they want to.
The spat reflects wider questions being debated over Britain's breakfast - and boardroom - tables. 'The reality is that men want to work less and women want to have more time with their children,' says Julie Mellor, head of the Equal Opportunities Commission. 'Rethinking the problems facing parents and carers is the most important task we face.'
Mindful of the working mother vote, politicians are catching on: the Prime Minister recently promised free nursery places for all two-year-olds, plus rights for 'elder carers' to request reduced hours at work. Future ideas could include giving women a full year's paid maternity leave.
'Some will want to take a year off, others won't: but if you want genuine choice, you need the maternity provision,' says Liz Kendall of the Maternity Alliance charity.
Even the Tories are now swotting up on Scandinavian daycare: Eleanor Laing, shadow women's minister and a single mother, says more flexible working is 'a mark of a civilised society'. And it is not just women's votes she is chasing. Up to a third of all home childcare is now done by men.
Neil Walkingshaw, a mechanic from East Lothian, and his partner Tracey decided they could no longer juggle full-time work with raising their two-year-old son, so he asked to work part-time.
His boss refused, but Walkingshaw successfully sued, arguing that his female colleagues were given time off.
For such men, caring roles are becoming second nature. Ian Cash's career as a nurse ended when he came home to find his wife Susan, who has multiple sclerosis, lying stranded on the bathroom floor. She had fallen shortly after he left for work, 12 hours before: when she failed to open the door to her home helps, they simply walked away without checking.
He missed the next day at work to resolve the crisis, and says: 'Eventually I was given an ultimatum: choose between work and my wife. So I chose my wife.'
Cash wants to work, but employers are wary of his commitments: a trained nurse and lecturer with a degree, he now claims benefits and volunteers for the charity Carers UK: 'It's daft - I could be paying taxes.'
Britain has around six million carers, around half of them men, and Mellor argues that they get a raw deal.
On Wednesday, the government will launch plans for a super-commission on equality, a single body to root out discrimination on the grounds of sex, race, disability, sexuality, religion and age.
Mellor wants 'caring status' added to the list, arguing that the new dividing line in 21st-century offices is not gender but family ties - to children or elderly relatives: 'Given that men are doing more caring and more adults have responsibility for their parents, caring could become the new fault line where people are facing discrimination in the workplace.'
And that fault line could yet rupture, if childless Britons begin revolting against covering for what they regard as colleagues' 'lifestyle' choice to procreate.
'I have work life balance to think about too, even though I don't have children,' says Jonathan McCalmont of Kidding Aside, which campaigns for the child-free. 'What I dislike is that some people's lives are considered worthy of preferential treatment where others aren't.'
Such tensions have helped employers warm to Blair's 'elder care' plans. The Federation of Small Businesses says reserving flexible working only for parents 'leaves employers to pick up the resentment' from other, excluded staff: extending it could mollify them.
Some senior Labour figures now argue that all workers should eventually have the chance to negotiate shorter hours: if the job can still get done, why not take Fridays off to enjoy a longer weekend?
The CBI, however, argues that a line must be drawn somewhere. 'The more people who have these rights, the harder it is to balance up the choices,' says deputy director-general John Cridland. 'Not everybody can be off all the time.'
The pattern of the future may increasingly be for men and women to dip in and out of formal work throughout life, taking 'career breaks' for family or other reasons, then resuming their jobs.
But what will not be predictable is when people will choose to go: pregnant in their twenties, for maternity leave? Burnt out at 40, demanding a sabbatical? Exhausted in their fifties, to nurse a parent? And what happens when they want to come back?
Coca-Cola's top British female executive, Penny Hughes, quit to spend more time with her children - and promptly became a pin-up for the stay-at-home movement.
But Hughes has not simply been baking cookies: she promptly accepted four non-executive directorships with well-known companies. Women like Hughes are not rejecting work, but redefining it.
Debbie Garrett, a mother-of-four from Edinburgh, is typical of the new breed. Over the decade since her first son Jack was born, she has tried most combinations: a demanding full-time job for the Scottish National Blood Transfusion Service; part-time work after the birth of her third child, Finn; then quitting to run her own part-time consultancy from home. Now she is a full-time mother.
When the elder two were small, juggling was manageable: but as they grew older, needing her help with homework, evenings became increasingly fraught, she says. 'I had no quality time with them. I felt I was not meeting my standards at work or at home - I felt I was failing at all fronts.'
Garrett found part-time work unsatisfying and, although she enjoyed working a day a week on her consultancy, when her fourth baby arrived she stopped altogether. 'It wasn't a sacrifice, it was a positive choice. I wanted to be the carer and the nurturer,' she says.
'But never in a million years did I envisage doing this. I saw myself as the modern woman who could balance and do everything, like those people you would talk about in terms of Superwoman.'
The advantages, she says, are living 'according to my values': the downside, the humdrum reality of domestic life. She is already considering a return to work.
How widespread is the trend to redefining corporate life? Last year, a third of new business start-ups were led by women: almost half the new female entrepreneurs are part-time, suggesting self-employment has become one way of fitting work around busy lives.
And even MacCormac - who wants her daughter to aspire to motherhood - confesses to 'a little bit of work' lately. Her husband began farming after being made redundant, and she is helping out.
'I'm now trying to figure out what I do want to do: I think it's to maintain a balance,' she says. Perhaps the stay-at-home mafia and their working sisters have more in common than they think.
Lucky for some: how UK compares
Almost one in three fathers routinely works more than 48 hours a week. One in 10 would take a pay cut for shorter hours, says the TUC.
No time to eat your sandwiches? The average British lunch break now lasts only 27 minutes.
Working mums are in the majority: 52.2 per cent of women with children under five worked in 2003, and 78.7 per cent of those with kids under 18.
The average Londoner does £6,052 of unpaid overtime every year.
Americans have fewer maternity rights than some in the Third World. The US offers 12 weeks' unpaid leave, compared with eight weeks' paid in Kenya and six months' paid in Britain.
Around six million Britons care for elderly or sick relatives, and half also have jobs. Between them they save the state £57bn that would otherwise have to be spent on professional care.
Last year, 6.8 per cent of women were self-employed, up from 6.1 per cent in 2001.