MOTHERHOOD:Has the current generation of Irish mothers succeeded in having it all, or has motherhood become another arena for competition, where the pressure to be perfect brings its own tyranny? In her new memoir, Alison Walsh explores the options for women in 21st-century Ireland. It climbed straight to number one in the bestseller list last week, writes CATHERINE CLEARY
WHEN ALISON WALSH says I can come to her house to interview her about her book, but not to expect anything "glamorous", I hear the voice of a sister-in-arms. It is one of many chords that resonate in her motherhood memoir In My Mother's Shoes, which looks at our generation's attempts to have it all compared to our mothers' and grandmothers' expectations of life.
It is a sunny morning and we are in her lovely cottage “where the extension is bigger than the house”. There is the blessed calm that settles over a household when its younger members are all at school. A tell-tale lone trainer sits in the hall, a small bike, another bike with a back seat, and the regulation people-carrier are parked outside.
Over cups of tea at the kitchen table, the mother-of-three explains how it took her a year to get two sample chapters and a synopsis together to pitch to a publisher; how the book started out light-hearted but ended up going to darker territory; how at the heart of the book a question looms – why was she choosing to step into the same role as her mother and grandmother, leaving the educated, career-driven path for a world without status or support?; and how she believes motherhood has never been so idealised and, in the same breath, so dismissed as it is now.
The book grew out of a weekly column about family life that Walsh wrote after leaving her office job in a publishing house for the life of a freelance writer and editor.
“I was trying to be honest about my feelings about motherhood and family life. I’d always wanted to write and this just seemed to be a subject that I couldn’t let go of. And yet I started to write the book in a breezy style. And then I realised that would last about 10 pages, because the truth of it is not zippity-da. The truth of it is really much more complex than that. At the same time I’d always had this idea of writing something initially about my Nana. She was a very strong influence on the family. My mother was her only child. So Nana and my Mum were always this double act when we were kids.”
Walsh’s grandmother was a leading light in the Irish Countrywomen’s Association and Walsh spent hours poring over the archives of the formidable association as well as women’s magazines from the era.
“The patterns that connect us are quite strong. There is that notion of strong women going through the family and I can feel it myself.”
Walsh says she is relieved that her only daughter does not seem to have inherited their particular brand of maternal strength. But why? “I would worry that I’d be too strong for them and too overpowering and the memories they might have of me when they get older would be of this dragon. I think it’s part of being a mother, that feeling of being too powerful. I think it could be that the dark side of it is anger.”
That anger in the isolated world of modern motherhood “will make you say the most awful things”, she says, as I relate a recent shouting episode from my own household.
“Those ‘I used to be somebody before I had you’ feelings are typical. There is something about motherhood that does provoke dark feelings as well as some of the most surprisingly strong and inspirational ones. You find that you’re actually sometimes a better person than you thought you were.”
But is the modern obsession with being the perfect mother just another symptom of the tyranny of happiness applied to all walks of life? “I keep coming back to this, to how motherhood has become a competition in some ways because everything is something that we must achieve to the very highest degree. You can’t cycle down the road any more, you have to be doing a triathlon or iron man when really you just want to cycle to the shops. Motherhood, too, has become almost like an assault course.
“There’s that idea that only perfection is appropriate. Nana and my mother would never have even thought that. My mother had a different life with my brother, who’s autistic. Any normal expectations of motherhood were completely derailed. Certainly perfection would never even have occurred to Nana or Mum.”
As well as being about motherhood, the book is a lyrical memoir of childhood in Ireland in the 1970s. There is a description of Walsh’s mother teaching her to fold sheets, the two walking towards each other and away again with the folded rectangles, an age-old mother-daughter dance ritual.
How did our mothers’ lives differ from ours? “They had a status and also there was quite a lot of sense that you handed your child over at certain key points in life to the nuns, to the priests. Nowadays, the responsibility for parenting and family lies exclusively with the parents. We are expected to be everything, playmates and carers and spiritual guides and psychologists and, while we’re at it, we have to cook beautifully because it’s not enough just to shove fish fingers and baked beans at them.”
Walsh’s husband, Colm, stayed at home for the first six years, allowing her to continue office-based work. When the youngest of her three children was a baby, she had an epiphany on a trip to London and decided to work from home.
“The word ‘sacrifice’ is not one I would chose to use at all. Yes, there are losses in giving up what is, after all, a large part of your identity and as women, to get and establish a career nowadays is still a struggle and so to give it up when you become a mother, or at some point down the line, does bring a certain amount of soul-searching.
“My mother had no choice. She was handed the voucher, some golden handshake, from Aer Lingus the minute she got married. And it was never on Nana’s radar that she would have a career. And yet I would have been to university, established a career and I think my mother was quite surprised by that. Because I think she thought that all the women who have the advantages that I do would stick with it. And many women do.
“It’s not a decision you arrive at overnight. It’s a decision that grows with your children. It gets to a certain point when you feel their need of you is greater. I know what Mary Robinson was saying . But it’s just not as simple as that because it also assumes that the only thing in life worth having is the career. I think we seized hold of the idea that all that was necessary and good in life could be achieved through work.”
So where does feminism fit in and where’s the solution to the modern mother’s dilemma? “I do think that women have an important part to play. The over-arching structure of life is masculine so women are fitting into that and the patterns of the workplace are still masculine and women have to slot themselves into that or find something else to do, which is why a lot of women opt for the flexibility of working from home if they can.”
She was surprised to discover that it was more difficult to connect with other mothers when she returned to Ireland after living and working in London.
“I was very unkeen on people telling me how to do it but I was desperate to find out how other people did it.” She steered clear of asking her mother for advice, “although she’s brilliant with babies”. Instead, in London, she had a “great antenatal group. There were various things that we learned from each other and that’s the one huge thing that’s missing from our lives – that ability to connect. That happened to me in London but not here.”
Are the “Mommy bloggers” who write about the day-to-day world of family a good resource? “I do think one of the big things about motherhood nowadays is that it is very isolating. My mother had this great network of friends who would just appear on the doorstep. You didn’t need to make an appointment. They were always having lunch and bottling tomatoes and making marmalade. Nowadays, we all live in our bubbles so it’s very hard for us to share experiences.”
But as a self-confessed Luddite she does not read a motherhood blog. “It’s not real. I’d much prefer to talk to people. But having said that it’s so hard to make connections with people in the real world.”
The next project is to be a book about marriage, by which stage her husband will probably have jumped ship, she jokes, with a loud laugh. I tell her that the chapter in this book about the effect of a baby on relationships should be handed out at pre-marriage courses.
Did she ever worry about writing about her children and how they might view the book in adulthood? “I was very careful not to write too much about them. It’ll be interesting for them to read it when they’re older and think, ‘Oh is that what it was like for Mum?’ Most children maybe wouldn’t get that chance because motherhood is something that’s hidden from them.”
She has a “bright and gifted” daughter, who will be 10 in August. “A lot of girls really thrive in school and I wonder where will that take her and what choices will she have to face? She wants to be a psychotherapist. And I think, ‘Will you have children? Will you give it all up?’ I think about it in a way that I don’t think about it with the boys. I know that Niamh will be coming on and off that path throughout her life, if things don’t change in the next 20 years or so.”
In My Mother’s Shoes, by Alison Walsh, is published by Pan Macmillan (£7.99)
