That’s the headline emblazoned across the front page of Times 2 today, trailing a piece by Hugo
Rifkind that sticks up for working fathers.
His gist is that society isn’t treating fathers equally. “…
when she gets up many hours before going to work to deal with our children’s
poos and pees and frankly unreasonable moonlit demands for Cheerios, she is a
brave and selfless warrior for feminism,” he writes of his wife. “Whereas when I do, I’m
just somebody who if he didn’t would be an a***hole.”
The most striking thing to me is that the parenting debate
hasn't moved on at all over the last few decades. The trouble is,
as each generation discovers in turn, if you’re a parent (whether you're a mum or a dad) you really can’t have it all.
Whatever anyone says, you can’t have a superstar career and be there 24/7 for your children. It’s just impossible.
In our house we never sat
down and discussed how we would share the parenting. When my two were little my
husband worked as a company turnaround expert, which meant being catapulted into
businesses all over the place that were in trouble and needed sorting out. It
sounds glamorous but it wasn’t. It was gruelling, tough and completely
unpredictable. But he was self-employed and earned more than me, so no way could I
say: “Hang on. You can’t go tomorrow. You’re looking after the children.”
If I’m honest, it irritated the hell out of me at the time.
But then again, I knew that if he didn’t drop everything and go, then the
mortgage wouldn’t get paid. OK, I could have found a live-in nanny and gone
back to my old job as a news reporter but then I would have been away all the
time too – which would have been terrible for the children.
So, we muddled through. I did the childcare and
freelanced from home (a plus side of journalism), while my husband paid the
bulk of the bills.
But suddenly everything changed. First my daughter went to
university, followed this September by my son. And after all these years of
wondering whether I did the right thing, I’ve stopped worrying.
My children’s childhoods went by in a flash and I’m glad I didn’t miss any of it.
