I am taking a career break next year. Not from writing – that would be miserable – but from institutional life. I’ve been at one end or the other of full-time education for 45 years straight. I’m lucky to have had steady jobs all those years, especially in a field where most work is precarious, and I’m lucky to be able to take the break. I intend to make the most of it, not by working through a “bucket list” or ticking off achievements, but doing things I might have done around full-time work more slowly and with more attention.
Both the opportunity and the desire for the year’s pause come from choices I made decades ago. I had my kids in my mid-20s, which was unheard of among women of my class and generation in England. The friends I made as a mother are at least 10 years older than me. My contemporaries have kids 10 or 15 years younger than mine. Now, as I move back into the spaces occupied mostly by women who are not in the thick of parenthood, I’m making friends who are much younger and much older than me, because many women of my age are still ferociously juggling work and childcare and not free for coffee or a film. I knew there would be advantages and disadvantages to my early motherhood, but the intergenerational range of my friendships wasn’t among the joys I predicted.
I’d like to claim that my husband and I had some kind of cunning plan, but we didn’t give it much thought. I’d been told that my history of teenaged anorexia meant I might have difficulty conceiving. We wanted kids. I was lucky in this as many other ways; I did not have difficulty.
Like most highly mobile couples, we had no local family support and certainly struggled to find and pay for childcare. If we’d been older, we’d probably have thought further ahead and been more daunted, but we weren’t and we didn’t. Money was very tight for a few years, but we were in England under the last Labour government and there was a safety net; even if you don’t need or use it, knowing that the welfare state exists to catch everyone makes everything feel less desperate.
I had my kids in my mid-20s, which was unheard of among women of my class and generation
Men are deemed more masculine for taking up more space, women more feminine for taking up less
Only mothers who find recognition in professional life seem to be guilty of ‘having it all’
Some say you’re not a writer if you’re not willing to sacrifice your family to your art. Not me
It’s hard now to separate the effects of the era from the effects of our youth, but I think I’d have been more worried about having kids later. Climate change became more obvious and frightening, the cost of living – especially childcare – rose, the far-right surged across Europe and America. My older son is part of the post-9/11 baby-boom, but my contemporaries brought children into even more interesting times. We could have combined babies and adventures – people do – but our early parenthood directed us to prioritise security over novelty earlier than might otherwise have been the case.
I’m not yet 50 and my sons are men. I learn as much from them as they do from me
Maybe we had more stamina for broken nights and days lived at toddler speed than we would have done later. I loved my babies of course, but I’m a better parent of older children, better equipped for the discussion and guidance teenagers need than the patience and attention to detail that suit infants.
Having been resentfully parented, I had a rule for myself: do nothing resentfully. My husband stayed home with our boys and played board-games and watched their team sports. I took them to beaches, parks, museums, libraries, out in all weathers. I shared my own enthusiasms, he was better at following theirs. If we’d done it later, I think I’d have had more patience, tolerated more slow indoor time because I’d have had more experience of all things passing. I would, inevitably, do things differently now in the light of what I learned from doing them the way I did then, but that’s how maturity works.
It’s now, I think, that the differences between my life and those of my contemporaries who had kids 10 years later are stark. I’m not yet 50 and my sons are men. I learn as much from them as they do from me. We have new forms of companionship and bigger adventures, together and apart.