Who leaves their partner and children every night for 100 nights in a row? No nice person. No one sensible. No one caring. You'd have to be selfish. You'd have to be weirdly focused. You'd have to be mad. Or in denial and with a drink or drug problem, maybe.
These are all the assumptions I, too, would have about someone who might embark on this mission. And yet I still did this thing. I performed 100 standup comedy gigs on consecutive nights when my youngest child had just turned one and the other two were five and seven. It was the biggest test you'd ever want to put a marriage through (we're still together), and I would not advise anyone else to do it. Yet it was a useful thing. I sort of became a fledgling comedian in three months. If I had done two gigs a week that would have taken me a year.
What my husband, Simon, came to call "the directionless comedy binge" was a compulsion and an experiment, fuelled by a mid-life crisis and a nagging fear that I had not done what I wanted to do with my life. It was conceived in a "seize the day" spirit and once I had the idea, it would not leave me alone. If you could give yourself three months to try the one thing you've always dreamed of, wouldn't you just do it – even if it messed up your life a bit?
I was aware that it was slightly crazed. But it also struck me as an important thing to do. If you have some extreme need or goal, why shouldn't you try to achieve it over a short amount of time, even if it does mean that your family life suffers temporarily? But this is the problem. To achieve anything long-term and meaningful, you have to keep at it. Or you have to find a way to incorporate that thing into your life without compromising your role as a parent too much.
The writer Zadie Smith said last week that motherhood doesn't have to dent your creativity: "I have two children. Dickens had 10. I think Tolstoy did too." (He actually had 13. Three died as infants.) This was a response to the novelist Lauren Sandler's observation in the Atlantic magazine that the secret to success as a writer was "just have one kid".
The Daily Mash, an online spoof site, immediately responded with a parody from the point of view of disillusioned babies sick of their parents' guilt trips: "Six-month-old Emma Bradford said: 'My parents are the sort of people who labour under the misapprehension that they would've done something really brilliant and clever had I not arrived and started shitting all over their CDs.'"
The reality is, you cannot do two things at once. True though Zadie Smith's observation is, there were no cultural expectations for Dickens or Tolstoy that they would raise their children or spend any time with them. They would not have felt bad about spending their time in their study or away from their family. If they did, they could say to themselves, "Well, it doesn't matter, I am going to go down in history as one of the greatest writers who ever lived." A lot of people (and, yes, I am talking mostly about women here) do not have the self-belief that these kinds of writers have. They cannot justify career decisions by saying, "Oh, it's OK because I am a Great One." Most people (yes, mothers) worry that they won't amount to much anyway, so why risk family time to go off and do something unpredictable and time-consuming?
This issue is becoming even more urgent now that we're in a recession and lots of people are having to reinvent their lives. (Do not become a standup comedian. There are too many already.) How do you justify spending time away from your family if you are either badly paid or not particularly successful or starting something new or trying to make some far-fetched but passionately held dream come true? Most people do not have the Tolstoy option.
They are the reason I set a time limit on my extreme attempt: I needed to gather the maximum amount of information and experience in the minimum amount of time in order to figure out if it was worth going on. I would love to say I came to some extraordinary conclusion that reveals the secret to everything. But all I found out, really, through travelling to dozens of pubs and comedy clubs and hellholes up and down the country, missing my children and spending £400 on Diet Coke, was that in order to achieve anything you have to keep going and keep going and keep going. You do not become a standup comedian by doing 100 gigs in three months. You become one by doing 10,000 gigs over years and years.
The right question to ask is not the one the novelists are asking themselves: "Does having more than one child make you a worse writer?" It's bigger than that. It's this: "How do you do the things you really want to do, the things that require you to be selfish and absent, and still live with yourself as a person?" I've seen lots of mothers answer this question very simply: "I won't be selfish. I won't do what I want. I will serve the needs of my family."
If it's not a question for you, by the way, and you're quite happy looking after your family and being a primary childcarer then that's great and you should consider yourself lucky that you've found your vocation.
But here's the point. I'm not sure it's becoming any more socially acceptable for women to be absent or be selfish, which is exactly why the debate between Sandler and Smith made headlines. Even if it is outwardly socially accceptable (and politically incorrect to suggest that women shouldn't overstretch themselves), in their hearts a lot of women feel differently. And so, increasingly, do men.
Tom Harris, MP for Glasgow South has just quit because he cannot be "an effective frontbencher as well as a good husband and father". Some people cannot live with themselves and be selfish. It's good to know where you stand.
This is really about whether you're OK with scaling back your ambitions. Family life is full of compromises, and rightly so. It depends, though, whether you can live with the compromise or whether it threatens to drive you mad. If you can live with it, that's fine. But if you are going to blame your children at some point (like the babies in the Daily Mash parody, accused of preventing their parents' greatness), then you need to swallow your anxiety and get out there and do the thing you feel you must do.
It was not an easy decision for me to take the 100 gigs experiment on. It's something most people would discount immediately as idiotic for someone with three children. I knew that. But I also kept thinking, it may seem idiotic – but what will it actually be like? There are so many assumptions about what is reasonable to do in life. You need to test them out for yourself and see how they feel to you. (Conclusion: seven gigs a week = unreasonable. Four gigs a week = bearable.)
When Sheryl Sandberg, Facebook's chief operating officer, talks about working mothers "leaning in" and not giving up, this is what she is talking about: working out for yourself where the boundaries are for you. A lot of us do not give ourselves permission to do that. I don't suggest for a second that anyone should do something as extreme as I did (it nearly broke me and my marriage and my mental health and I looked like a zombie by the end of it). But doing this crazed experiment did prove to me that short-term sacrifices are (just about) bearable and they teach you about what you really want. You do not need to become angry and resentful about children limiting your horizons. You do not need to have "just one kid". You just need to know yourself and take quite a lot on board. Oh, and you need a limitless supply of money, by the way. Did I forget to mention that?
