Seemliness. It was the bane of girlhood, in the bad old days. Or it was in my day. At the age of 14, still happily rough round the edges, I remember moving from an all girls' to a mixed school. It was like being dropped into a cold bath. With boys looking on, the rules of peer engagement suddenly changed. Girls were self-conscious and simpering. They spent hours in front of the mirror and counted calories, didn't run or shout any more – and pretended to be stupider than they really were. The choice was to be a lonely weirdo outsider – or to play along.
So obviously, I played along. Thirty years later, I look at my teenage daughters' girlfriends: they don't simper. They certainly don't pretend to be stupid. They are at ease with their equality in a way that we never were. Modern, western women have come a long way. These days a girl can be as clever and as unseemly as she wants.
Until the day she slips quietly into the bathroom, carrying a small white plastic stick. She might be a writer, or a marine biologist, a flight attendant or a PE teacher. Whatever she may be, she is an individual with hopes and dreams, desires, requirements, insecurities and a bad temper: a multi-layered human being, who has probably strived, at least in some degree, to become the woman she is. But then she pees on her plastic stick. A blue line appears. From the moment she emerges from the bathroom and goes public with the news, she is no longer quite an individual – more the vessel for a new one: officially happy, officially fulfilled: almost-but-not-quite public property. Ta-da! She is a mum-to-be.
Cue: tinkly music, clean skin, sparkly hair … lots of secret blubbing (no matter how happy she is) and public smiling (no matter how sad). And a world full of well-meaning people who don't know her very well, talking a little louder, touching her belly, smiling broadly and telling her how she is feeling. "You must be thrilled!" they say.
Indeed, she may well be thrilled. Among the great wash of other, more complicated emotions. But "being thrilled" is the seemly emotion, and the only one a mother-to-be ought really to acknowledge. It would seem ungrateful and tactless, unmaternal and frankly unnatural to hint at feeling anything more nuanced. And although the mix of pride and joy – and fear and guilt and claustrophobia – must vary from one woman to the next (because we are not all the same), every future mother in the western world is duty-bound to emerge from her bathroom and respond to her pregnancy with identical teeth-tinkly thrilledness.
And so begins the modern mother's journey: a relentless quest for respectability, seemliness, conformity and one-dimensional perfection. It's a journey that leads us, tinkly teethed, through ghastly antenatal group-breathing exercises, through pointlessly agonising "natural" births, through headache-inducing, toddler-tambourine classes, through a million hours of grindingly dull and unnecessary breastfeeding to the position in which we find ourselves today: reduced to home-baking cakes at midnight, for fear that by failing to do so, we will somehow be seen to have "failed" our children.
No matter which preposterously pointless and time-consuming mummy task is required of us (separating the nursery school's colour-themed, home-made playdough, as a friend of mine found herself doing at the end of every school week for a term), it seems that we modern mothers, in our quest to be perfect, have lost the gumption to say no. We dare not turn the tables on the passive-aggressive nursery school staff or the bossy, underoccupied mothers and say to them: "This playdough-separation gig is not a barometer of my mother love. It has no impact whatsoever on the welfare of my child. And I don't care if the playdough is sludge coloured. If it's so important to you, – and is it, really? – separate the playdough yourself. I have more compelling fish to fry and better things to do with this short life of mine. I love my child but I am – always was and always will be – more than simply my child's mother."
I was in the middle of a long and ambitious work project when I became pregnant with the first baby (I have three children, aged 15, 12 and six). The project required research and it fairly obsessed me. But I lost count of the people who gazed approvingly at my swollen belly,and said: "Hmmm, well, I don't suppose you'll be worrying too much about that any longer!" or, "This time next year, I'll ask you about it and you'll be asking me, 'What project?'" Instead of replying as I would have pre-pregnancy had someone presumed to undermine me in such a way – "Fuck off, you patronising git" – I smiled politely and said nothing. Like those first few terms at the mixed-sex school, the first months (years?) of motherhood felt as if all previous rules of engagement had been suspended. In place of the teenage dumb act and dinky blow dry, there was a beatific mummy grin.
Women talk to each other differently when they are "being mums". I developed a special voice, a special face – an entire lexicon. "Super", "ever so nice", and (yep) "awwww!!!" popped out of my gob with shaming regularity. It bore no relation to who I was or what I really thought about anything. It was just an act that – up to a point – I think we all put on for each other. We apologise for things we aren't really sorry about, enthuse over things we cannot care about and we smile until our faces crack at the mummies' sports day egg-and-spoon race. Because that's what "good" mummies do! Awwww!
This kind of super-duper robo-mothering is creepy: repressive – not just to our children, who become soft, spoilt and entitled – but, no less importantly, to ourselves? Does the fact that I don't care much about breastfeeding and natural births or possible germs at the playground water fountain make me a lousy mother? Does the fact that I care more about work than about attending a meeting to discuss food choices in the school canteen make me a lousy mother? Or am I simply a woman with a sense of proportion – who is not ashamed to want a life beyond her maternity?
I think most mothers know – deep down, beneath the guilt and the guff, the mummy tasks left undone and the maddening charade of simpering respectability – that we are, most of us, excellent mothers. We know – as no one else can – that we love our children boundlessly and we know that they know it too. And we know, and they know, that we will always be there for them when they need us, no matter what or where, and that we are for ever their unconditional supporter and loyal friend.
Once again, I found myself apologising for something to one of the more organised mothers at the school gate and the sound of it – sorry, sorry, sorry – was so familiar to her that she started laughing. She said: "You should write a book on how to be a mother." And it was not meant to be spiteful – actually, I think it was quite affectionate. But it was definitely intended as a joke. Me, tell anyone how to be a mother?! Me? A woman so wrapped up in her work that she can't be bothered to stick around at sports day or bake for the cake stand or remember which morning her children are supposed to be wearing Easter bonnets! What a preposterous idea!
I said, slightly stung: "Hmm. Well. Do you know – I might just do that."
"Oh, Daisy," she chortled. "You are a one!"
Indeed, yes I am. We all are. That's the point.
These days, the film Stepford Wives might feel a little dated. But Stepford Mothers? It's what we are all in danger of becoming. All this simpering, soppy mothering, this hopeless quest for a kind of homogeneous perfection, is bad for our health. It's bad for our happiness. And it's bad for our children too.
It's time to call time on this spineless mummy niceness. What the hell happened to mummy feminism?
