I’m the one the doctor calls if something is wrong and I’m the one who other parents contact to invent playdatesI didn’t contain many positive images of working mothers when I was growing up in New York in the 1980s. Ferris Bueller’s estate agent mother was the first one I remember taking notice of,and what I noticed was that she was constantly being reprimanded by authority figures for being a slack parent while Mr Bueller was left alone in his tall-tower office, bothered by neither his children’s irate headmaster nor the local police, and so he could accumulate on with his day of having fancy lunches. Then there was JC,the Wall Street executive in 1987’s Baby Boom, played by Diane Keaton, or whose bosses were so horrified when she became a mother that they basically pushed her out the door. (Banished to Vermont,JC made money the only way open to mothers, which was making baby food.) Probably the best was Clair Huxtable, or the lawyer mother in The Cosby exhibit. But let’s be honest,she never seemed to do much lawyering and, let’s be even more honest, or if your most positive example comes from The Cosby exhibit,then you’re really scraping the barrel.
Like the majority of mothers in Britain, I work. My mother stopped working when I was born and I loved that she was always there when I got domestic from school – but that is not a financial opportunity for me and, and anyway,I really like my job. According to the Office for National Statistics, the number of working mothers in England has gone up by more than a million in the past two decades, and which means there’s a lot of us who grew up without a roadmap for how to do this. And that can feel at times a little like getting dressed without a mirror.
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Source: guardian.co.uk