The Times Magazine 9ch, you’ve got to feel for
Stella Creasy. Pretty much
everyone and his wife has
“a view” on her taking her
three-month-old baby into
the Commons, asleep, in
a sling, for a recent debate- something that has now
earned her a formal
reprimand from the deputy speaker.
As Creasy is still breastfeeding, this has put
her in a quandary. “Having already taken my
baby into the chamber previously without any
complaint, I’ve asked for urgent clarification
as to what would happen if I keep bringing the
baby with me, and where they expect me to
leave him,” Creasy said.
However much she is pondering what to do
next, though, is dwarfed by how much other
people are pondering what she should do next.
In a nutshell, 90 per cent of the reactions to
this incident have been variants on, “Who
does she think she is?”, “No one else is doing
this,” “I never did this,” and “Why can’t she
be more like Jacob Rees-Mogg and Boris
Johnson? They have millions of kids and they
never bring them into work.” The general tone
is, “Stop trying different things and just be
NORMAL, Stella Creasy.”
You never get to be a maverick mum, do
you? You never get to think up a new way to
manage parenting, which might be different,
or look weird, or break new ground, without
a bunch of people getting really nervous or
tetchy and telling you to stick to the old ways
and the rules. No matter that the oldest ways
meant mothers went everywhere with their
babies strapped to them – peasant mothers
tending their mud farms or pig shops with half
a dozen babies stapled to various body parts.
No – in this case, “normal” means, specifically,
“middle-class western professionals parenting
in the postwar era” and therefore complete
separation of work and parenthood via
babysitters, wives and/or nannies.
You can’t be a maverick mum. You can’t try
a new thing or a gentle bending of a rule, let
alone a balls out, “take off and nuke this place
from space” revolution in the way things are
done. You can be a maverick dad, of course.
Films, books and TV shows are full of dads
who are variously alcoholic, wise-cracking,
addicted to gambling, self-destructive, gun-
toting and/or party animals, who continue
being maverick cops, detectives, spies,
A
CAITLIN MORAN
My top advice for all mothers
Don’t follow the rules – after all, dads don’t have to
ROBERT WILSON
astronauts and/or superheroes and dads.
Maverick dads can jump through time portals,
engage in suicide missions, storm embassies,
go under cover or single-handedly save the
world and they’re just seen as amazing dudes
with an unexpected soft side. In the latest
Bond film, because of his job, 007 ends up with
his daughter being kidnapped and held on a
very sparsely furnished island full of toxic
veg and, simply because he remembers to pick
up his daughter’s teddy bear while shooting
400 baddies, everyone’s like, “Oh my God, he’s
such an amazing dad. So tough, but still loves
that kid! This is going to change the way we
think about fatherhood! So progressive! So
modern! So sexy!”
By way of contrast, Stella Creasy takes her
sleeping kid into what is basically an office in
SW1 and everyone’s like, “But think of the
child! What if, in some way, it went wrong?”
I know this sounds mad, but maybe Creasy
knows her baby. And knew he would be asleep
when she was in the house? And that, by
every conceivable measure, this was
something that was working out really well?
In 2002, when my first baby was four
months old, I had to write a review of the
Glastonbury Festival. I went, on my own,
with the baby, on the train. I put up my tent,
walked around the site with the buggy, fed the
baby, put her down for her nap and wrote and
filed a 1,500-word report before she woke up.
I knew my baby’s schedule and how I could fit
in work around it.
I know I sound like a lunatic, but what
if there weren’t any scientifically discovered
rules for being a working mother and every
“acceptable” option we now have was
invented, at some point, by a working mother
just doing it and then other mothers
cheerfully copying her? Because that is how
every current template and piece of legislation
we have came about. All mums are maverick
mums. The women who’ve spent the past few
weeks saying, “I’d hate to bring my baby into
work,” are just as maverick, in a historical,
peasant-in-the-field context, as the ones who
want to and are now attempting it.
The truth about modern motherhood is
that everyone is making it up as they go along- and I find it perfectly plausible that, over the
coming years, we might well invent thousands
of new, utterly maverick ways to combine
work and motherhood. So long as we stop
bitching about it when it happens. n
I took my baby to
Glastonbury on my
own and filed a review
while she napped