I Don't Know How She Does It

by Allison Pearson

  Observing that I am the only colleague not to join in the cooing approbation, Andrew shrugs helplessly and says, “You know how it is, Kate.” Slips into his jacket and out of the room.

  Indeed, I do know how it is. Man annnounces he has to leave the office to be with his child for short recreational burst and is hailed as selfless doting paternal role model. Woman announces she has to leave the office to be with child who is on sickbed and is damned as disorganized, irresponsible, and Showing Insufficient Commitment. For father to parade himself as a Father is a sign of strength; for mother to out herself as a Mother is a sign of appalling vulnerability. Don’t you just love equal opportunities?

  To: Debra Richardson

  From: Kate Reddy

  Just chaired meeting where fellow manager announced he had to leave to attend daughter’s swimming gala. Practically knighted on the spot for services to parenthood. If I tried that, Rod would have me executed and my dripping bloody head stuck on the ramparts of Bank of England as a warning to other women slackers.

  It’s sooooo unfair. Am coming to conclusion that career-girl bollocks is one-generation-only trick. We are living proof that it can’t work, aren’t we?

  Forget higher education. Think we should send our girls to catering college where they can learn to make decorative floral centerpieces and a delicious supper for two. Then they can marry a man who will pay for them to stay at home and have pedicures.

  URGENT: Pls remind me what was drawback to that way of life again???

  * * *

  To: Kate Reddy

  From: Debra Richardson

  Once upon a time, in a land far away,

  a beautiful, independent, self-assured princess

  happened upon a frog as she sat contemplating ecological issues

  on the shores of an unpolluted pond

  in a verdant meadow near her castle.

  The frog hopped into the princess’s lap and said:

  Sweet lady, I was once a handsome prince,

  until an evil witch cast a spell on me.

  One kiss from you, however,

  and I will turn back into the dapper young prince that I am.

  Then, my sweet, we can marry

  and set up house in yon castle

  where you can prepare my meals,

  clean my clothes, bear my children,

  and forever feel grateful and happy doing so.

  That night, dining on a repast of lightly sauteed frogs’ legs,

  The princess chuckled to herself and thought:

  I don’t fucking think so.

  * * *

  Men today can only be better fathers than their fathers. Simply by knowing how to change a nappy or figuring out which hole you stick the bottle in—these things mark them out as more capable parents than any previous generation. But women can only be worse mothers than our mothers, and this rankles because we are working so very very hard and we are doomed to fail.

  At Edwin Morgan Forster, the desks of men with children are dense with photographs of their offspring. Before you get to the computer and the blotter, you have to negotiate a three-day-event course of family portraits: leather frames, mottled crocodile frames, double steel frames with a copper hinge, witty Perspex cubes. A missing tooth here, a soccer goal there; that skiing trip in February where Sophie wrapped her red scarf around Dad’s neck and they both turned to face the camera with Steinway smiles. A man is allowed to advertise the fact that he is a father; it’s a sign of strength, a sign he is a good provider. The women in the offices of EMF don’t tend to display pictures of their kids. The higher they go up the ladder, the fewer the photographs. If a man has pictures of kids on his desk, it enhances his humanity; if a woman has them it decreases hers. Why? Because he’s not supposed to be home with the children; she is.

  I used to have a photo of Ben and Emily on my desk. Rich snapped it just after the baby had learned to sit up. Em was sitting behind, clutching him round the middle with fierce pride. He was bubbling up as though life was one big joke and he’d just heard the punch line for the first time. I kept the photo on my desk for a few weeks, but each time I caught the children looking at me I had the same thought: you are providing for them, but you are not bringing them up. So the picture’s in the drawer now.

  Last year, I went to this lecture by an American chief executive at the London Business School. She said she was going to train her daughters up as geishas; the real future for women was as nurturers and men-pleasers. There was nervous laughter in the room: she was joking, wasn’t she? She was beautiful and she was incredibly smart and I don’t think she was joking.

  All I knew was that I didn’t want my mother’s life. I didn’t need a role model to teach me that being dependent on some man was debilitating, maybe even dangerous. But will Emily really want my life? When she looks at her Mummy, who does she see? (If she ever sees her Mummy.) Back in the seventies, when they were fighting for women’s rights, what did they think equal opportunities meant: that women would be entitled to spend as little time with their kids as men do?

  * * *

  12:46 P.M. Chowzat! is the hi-tech cafeteria installed by EMF last year in the basement as part of its attempt to look less like a bank and more like a nightclub. The café is meant to have a funky postindustrial ambience, but the effect is a lot like an airport coffee lounge. I am still lightly stoned after the joint accepted in a moment of madness this morning. What could I be thinking of? As I was getting out of the car, Winston invited me to join him at a concert a fortnight on Sunday. Might find it not totally my scene, he said, the music was a bit overwhelming, but he thinks it would do me good. As the proud-fortress fund manager composed her polite but frosty refusal, I opened my mouth and out fell the word yes. Presumably, I now have a date at a rave with my new drug dealer. What the hell am I going to tell Richard?

  As the weed wears off, I feel both nauseous and ravenous. Weigh up the rival merits of the Jumbo Blueberry Muffin and its dainty lo-cal sister, Lemon and Sesame Seed. Buy both. Am stuffing alternate fistfuls into my mouth when I look up and see familar brick-red features glowering down at me.

  “Jesus, Katie. You’re not eating for two, are you? Got enough trouble in that department with Candy.”

  Rod Task.

  “Ygno.” I splutter, shooting blueberry bullets across the table.

  Rod tells me he needs me to go to New York to do a pitch to some brokers on Wednesday. Wants me to give them “a little TLC.” This information followed by a grotesque wink.

  “Next Wednesday?”

  “Sure. As in the day after tomorrow.”

  “Actually, Rod, my nanny is off sick and I have to find a temporary to—”

  He cuts me off with a karate slice of the hand. “Are you telling me you can’t make it, Kate? If you can’t, I’m sure Guy can handle it.”

  “Nyes. Of course I can, it’s just that—”

  “Great. And can you take a look at this for me, sweetie? Thanks.”

  I study the photocopy in the lift on the way back to the thirteenth floor. It’s an article from Investment Manager International under the headline THE GENDER EQUALITY PENNY IS FINALLY DROPPING!

  Investment management firms are increasingly jumping on the bandwagon of gender equality as they realize that a more welcoming attitude towards women employees makes good business sense. Herbert George and Berryman Lowell have recently won laurels for their efforts in this area. Julia Brooking, a vice-president at Herbert George, says: “The City offers fabulous opportunities for women. More are being promoted every year. Most firms have now appointed diversity coordinators.”

  Many institutions lament, however, that while they offer great careers for women, preconceptions of antisocial working hours and macho culture are still deterrents to female applicants.

  “Puncturing the stereotype of old-boy cronyism associated with the Square Mile is not easy,” admits Celia Harmsworth, Head of Human Resources at Edwin Morgan Forster.

  Well, she should
know. Seeing Celia’s name in an article on gender equality is like finding Heinrich Himmler conducting a guided tour of a synagogue.

  Harmsworth announced that EMF, formerly considered to be one of the City’s more old-fashioned outfits, has recently appointed a diversity coordinator, Katharine Reddy.

  What?

  Thirty-five-year-old Reddy, the youngest senior director at EMF, has been tasked with identifying gender-issue obstacles in the business culture.

  I notice that Rod has circled the phrase “gender-issue obstacles.” Next to it he has scrawled, What the fuck is this?

  To: Debra Richardson

  From: Kate Reddy

  hello hello from yr borderline psychotic friend. Do you think postnatal depression can last up to 18 months after the birth? If so, when does it go away?

  Did I mention we have RATS. One ran across the floor when the in-laws were staying. OH, AND MY CLEANER HAS FIRED ME. Came in to work to discover 61 e-mails, pitch to do in NYC, nanny “sick,” only available temp is close relative of Slobodan Milosevic. Plus I am EMF’s new “Diversity Coordinator.” Have to take urgent steps to redress the firm’s gender imbalance. Any idea where I can purchase some kind of automatic weapon?

  Can we PLS do that lunch? name a day xxxx

  * * *

  To: Kate Reddy

  From: Debra Richardson

  Believe that postnatal depression can last up to 18 YEARS after the birth and then we have a hysterectomy and start watching old episodes of Friends from red rubber old-lady chairs in gated retirement community.

  Don’t worry, rats now v. middle class. No stylish home dare be seen without one. Felix has been diagnosed with Attention Deficit Disorder. Think that’s what his dad suffers from too, but that could be because he’s having an affair???

  Too knackered to care. Read in Good Housekeeping that half of all working mothers are worried relationship with husband is suffering because of a terrible “time famine.” What are the other half doing, 30-second blow jobs?

  What news of the gorgeous unsuitable Abelhammer? You do realize that, as my oldest friend, your sole role is to give me reasons to envy and disapprove of you.

  Lunch nxt Tues or Thurs? xxxxx

  * * *

  6:35 P.M. I collect Emily and Ben from Alice’s house. They fall on me like famished things. Alice’s nanny, Jo, is incredibly nice and says what great kids they are. How thoughtful and imaginative Emily is. Feel a burst of pride and pang of shame simultaneously as I realize how often I see them as a problem to be dealt with rather than something to be enjoyed.

  Must appoint a temporary nanny tonight, unless I can persuade Richard to work from home or Paula makes miracle recovery. I have a total horror of asking favors on my own or my children’s behalf—reminds me of when Dad pushed me towards a woman at the bus station in Leeds one Christmas and told me to ask if she could let us have a fiver to get home because we’d run out of petrol. We didn’t even have a car. But the lady was so nice about it; she gave me the money and a packet of Jelly Tots for myself. The sweets stuck inside my hot cheeks like ulcers.

  Jo says Ben has been clingy all day and she thinks he has some kind of rash on his chest. Has he had chicken pox? No, he hasn’t. But he can’t have it now. Am booked on 8:30 a.m. flight to New York.

  10:43 P.M. I can’t believe it. I stand on the landing outside the bathroom draped in a tiny towel screaming for Richard.

  “There’s no hot water.”

  “What?” He stands halfway up the stairs from the hall, his face in shadow. “Oh, they turned the water off today when the rat guy was checking the pipes. Must have flicked the switch.”

  “I have to have my bath.”

  “Darling, be reasonable.” His voice is parched with weariness. “I’ll put it on now and it’ll be hot in twenty minutes.”

  “Now. I need a bath now.”

  “Kate—” He stops, looks at me as if about to say something, but then just tightens his lips and stares at me, shaking his head.

  “What? What is it?” I snap.

  “Kate. We...can’t go on like this.”

  “Too right we can’t. I have no hot water. I have rats. I have a house that is a complete tip and no one to clean it. I needed to be asleep an hour ago and I really really really would like there to be some hot water, Richard. I work all the hours God sends and I live in conditions of medieval squalor. Is a bath too much to ask for?”

  Rich reaches out an arm, but I bat it away. My tears are alarmingly hot—the temperature of the bath I’m not going to have. Must try to calm down. My husband looks wild-eyed. Why hasn’t he shaved?

  Just now, from over our heads, comes a voice. “Roo,” it whimpers. “Roo.”

  32

  I Went Back Too Soon

  1:05 A.M. Have you ever thought how much time you waste falling asleep? Falling sounds satisfactorily fast, but you don’t fall, do you? I find I have to sort of sidle up on sleep and ask if it could please let me in, like someone in the queue for a club trying to catch the eye of a doorman who is always looking the other way. Seven minutes of pillow-plumping and hollowing, the obligatory tussle with the duvet (Richard likes one leg hooked outside, which pins it down like a groundsheet and leaves me barely covered), I take a herbal sleeping tablet to summon instant shut-eye.

  3:01 A.M. Can’t sleep for worrying that the sleeping tablet is so strong I will sleep through my alarm and miss the flight from Heathrow. I switch on the bedside light and read the paper. Next to me, Rich grunts and turns over. The foreign pages have more on the story of the American chief executive who went back to work four days after her twins were born. She chaired a meeting via speaker phone from her hospital bed. Her name is Elizabeth Quick. No, seriously. Sister to Hannah Haste and Isabel Imperative, presumably. “Liz Quick has become a poster woman for working mothers,” the article says, “but opponents say motherhood will distract her from her job.”

  I can feel my whole body crumple. Do people like Ms. Quick have any idea how their valiant effort to act as though nothing has changed can be used as a stick to beat other women?

  God knows, I can’t talk. I went back to work too soon after Emily. I didn’t know—how can you?—that this new life will be almost as strange to you as it is to them. Mother and baby: newborns both. Before Children—a woman’s existence is divided into BC and AC—when I still had time to go to the National Gallery on Sunday afternoons, I used to like to sit in front of that Bellini Madonna, the one where she’s in the foreground of a kind of farm, baked by the sun, gazing down at the lovely infant in her lap. I’d always thought it was serenity in her eyes. Now I see only exhaustion and mild puzzlement. “Christ, what have I done?” Mary asks the son of God. But he’s sleeping, full of milk, one plump arm flung in abandon over his mother’s blue dress.

  I was the first woman on the investment floor at Edwin Morgan Forster to get pregnant: six months gone when James Entwhistle, Rod Task’s predecessor, called me into his office and said he couldn’t guarantee there would be a job for me when I got back from maternity leave. “You know how fast things move on with clients, Kate. It’s nothing personal.”

  Civilized, decent, erudite James. I suppose I could have quoted the legislation at him, but there’s nothing they hate more than being reminded of their family-friendly policy. (EMF’s family-friendly policy exists so they can say they have a policy, not so people with families can invoke it. No man would ever use it anyway, so neither can any woman who wants to be taken seriously.) “Of course, the baby won’t make any difference, James,” I heard myself saying. He made a note on the jotter with his gold Cartier pen. Commitment? he wrote and underlined it twice.

  “Would I be wanting to scale back my foreign clients?” Of course not.

  I didn’t know.

  At thirty-two weeks, I went to see the consultant at University College Hospital. Routine appointment. I’d missed the last one (Geneva, conference, fog). The consultant steepled his long white fingers like a cardinal and told me
he was signing me off work because I was under too much pressure during the crucial weeks of fetal brain development. I said that was out of the question; I planned to work up to my due date so I could have some time at home with the baby afterwards.

  “I’m not really worried about you, Mrs. Shattock,” he said coolly. “I worry about the child you’re carrying and the damage you could cause it.” I was crying so hard that when I stepped out onto Gower Street I was nearly run over by a milk cart.

  So I took it easy. I took it easier. Technically, I had to stop flying at seven months, but a taupe shift dress saw me through till eight. Bump got so damned big by the end I had to do a three-point turn to get out of the lift. When jokes were made in meetings about needing to reinforce the office floor to support Kate’s weight, I laughed louder than anyone. Every time I walked past the dealing desk, Chris Bunce used to sing the Elephant March from Jungle Book under his breath—“Hup two three four, Keep-it-up two three four!” Bastard.

  Sitting at the computer one afternoon, stomach so stretched my skin felt it was crawling with ants, I felt a few Braxton-Hickses, those practice contractions that sound like a retired colonel living in Nether Wallop. By the end, I used to dream of Colonel Hicks coming to my aid. He would carry my briefcase and, when I was standing at the bus stop on City Road nearly keeling over with exhaustion, he would hold out a hand and say, “Will you step aboard, madam?”