Wednesday's Child, Full of Woe

We were out and about by nine o'clock this morning, heading across the city to meet Jan and Saul at Camperdown Oval, their local park.

There are loads of ovals in Australia; Sydney seems to have one for every suburb. It's where they play rugby in the winter and cricket in the summer, though the one at Camperdown has tennis and basketball courts as well as a children's playground. And there's usually some sort of bakery or cafe within spitting distance as well, though Camperdown oval is particularly well served because it has both; a cafe called Canteen (where all of the staff have unusually severe haircuts) and a swanky new bakery serving really good coffee alongside fresh baked blueberry muffins and raspberry friands.

Jan and her mothers' group used to meet under the fig trees at Camperdown oval after they'd had their babies and take it in turns to nip over to Canteen for their skinny flat whites. The babies are all coming up for their second birthdays now and the mums have gone back to work, but Jan still meets up with Kathy, who joined us today.

Unlike Jan and I, Kathy has produced a second child since her first, though it's not really been a happy experience and talking with her this morning made me reflect on the way things have changed for women since my grandmother's generation were having their kids, and how the changes don't seem to have done us many favours.

Kathy's forty now and she used to have a successful career in marketing, just like Jan, who used to have a successful career as a lawyer before she had Saul. Kathy studied for an MBA when she was in her late twenties, which really bumped up her earning potential and eventually allowed her a comfortable lifestyle including owning a house in the trendy inner west of Sydney.

Like loads of women of her generation, she concentrated on having a career because, well, it was the done thing, it was sort of expected that girls with half a brain would climb the career ladder just like men did, the problem was, she was so busy climbing the ladder she had no time for a social life outside work. The company she worked for offered a number of benefits to its employees, including someone to sort out her dry cleaning and someone else to deliver take-out food to her desk at 8pm. They might well have been paying her megabucks, but little by little, they began to own all of her time, from waking in the morning until going to bed at night, and sometimes she'd work the weekend too.

By the time she was thirty-seven, she found herself with neither a husband nor children and felt time was running out for either, so she cut back the hours at work and set about finding a bloke, which is a hard enough task in any city but twice as hard in Sydney because women in their thirties significantly outnumber the men. Anyway, she met Luke and they got married and that's when she had her first baby, Jake.

At first, she struggled to find a balance. Her employers didn't offer maternity pay, which meant she had to go back to work earlier than planned in order to pay the mortgage. Still, they did agree to her request to work part-time, which meant she could follow her instinct against placing a young baby in full-time daycare. Working three days a week was hard but manageable and there was just enough money to go around. There was the guilt of course, the guilt you place on yourself for leaving the child and the guilt others place on you for the same reason. Oh and the guilt her full-time colleagues made her feel when she left the office on time, but hey, it goes with the patch.

Then she spoke to her doctor, who raised the issue of having more children. Time wasn't on her side; she could delay things for practical reasons but knew she might regret it later, so, not wishing Jake to be an only child, she had Alfie when Jake was fifteen months old, and that was when it all started to go wrong. When I met her today, it was hard to imagine she'd ever been the young city slicker, hard to see past the track suit bottoms and hair scraped back off her face in a red bobble. She wasn't coping at all.

"It's shit" she began. "and I can't see any way out"

"Is Luke still studying every evening?" asked Jan

"Yeah, it's the last year of his MBA and they've ramped up the workoad so not only does he come straight home from work and into the study, he takes off on these intensive week-long courses leaving me at home with the kids, and that's when I lose it"

"Could he postpone the final year?" I asked

"He could, but he'd never build up the momentum to get back into it, that's the problem, so I'm grinning and bearing it, but it's so incredibly hard. For a start, my family are all in Brisbane, except Luke's parents. His parents offer no end of help, but it comes at a price and it's not worth the trouble"

"What do you mean?" asked Jan

"Well they'll look after Jake for me, overnight if I need it, but they spoil him rotten and let him get away with murder. It's okay for them because they've got him in short bursts but when they bring him back, he's really naughty, thinks he can get away with anything at home as well, and I just don't have the same time or patience his grandma has, so it makes my life much harder, in the long run, if I accept their help"

"You need cake" said Jan. "I'm getting you cake". And with that she climbed over the fence at the back of the oval and disappeared into the cafe while I listened to the rest of Kathy's story.

"What about your friends?" I asked

"Well the ones with kids are caught up in their own dramas and the ones without kids smile vacantly when I try to explain how I'm feeling. I mean, you don't understand any of this until you have a child do you? You think you understand, but you can't possibly"

"No, that's true. You can tell them, but I reckon mother nature deliberately cushions the edges of your words because otherwise nobody would ever have kids. I used to work with a girl who spent the nine months of her pregnancy stroking her tummy on a swivel chair and talking wistfully about how motherhood was going to be. She came back after the baby was born and just looked at me, and the only thing she said was Oh my God. Oh my God. And I understood immediately everything that lay behind it"

"But it's the financial side of it as much as anything. When I had Jake I took an enormous paycut to go part-time, and then I had to pay $100 a day for childcare out of what I had left. I hadn't put the two together when we were thnking about it, I mean, I knew I'd take a drop in pay and I also knew about paying for daycare, but somehow I didn't marry the two together, stupid really"

"So you're going back to work again now?" I asked

"Yeah, but with two kids in daycare, I'll have to go back full-time. So much for my principles; the second child's going into full-time daycare, something I said I'd never do. We've considered selling the house but if we get out of the housing market, we'll never get back in. We're trapped"

"Well they say it's the hardest time of your life when you have small kids" I said, though I couldn't think of a single other thing that might make her feel better.

"I just need a day off" she continued. "Just one day. Alfie wakes for a feed at 4.30am and by the time he's finished, Jake's awake for the day. I joke my life's like that film, Groundhog Day, but it's not even as funny as Groundhog Day because I end up in tears every afternoon"

"And no Bill Murray to wipe them up"

"No. I don't know, I should be grateful, it was what I wanted and some people never have kids, but God, I don't know how much longer I can cope"

"So what will you do then" I asked, "When you get this day off?"

"Oh I can dream. I'd like to go shopping for some clothes because the ones I had before don't fit me now, but there's no money for clothes, not even new underwear, you should see the knickers I'm wearing.

No, I'll just sleep and maybe just nip to the shop for teabeags or something else that seems completely impossible now. My next move is internet shopping; home grocery delivery, that would make a difference. Last week there was one afternoon I tried to make Jake some dinner and realised there wasn't a single bit of food in the house, nothing, just stale bread. I completely lost it, sat on the floor in floods of tears and eventually I resorted to phoning the in-laws and they came round with some stuff, but the trade off was like I said, Jake was a monster for the rest of the evening"

Jan returned form the cafe with banana bread. "Sorry it took me so long" she said, "I got them to toast it for you, twice as yummy. Now, where's that baby of yours, let's have a cuddle, I'm broody".

Broody? The sight of Kathy dealing with two small children is enough to make you run for the hills, and the story of her financial position makes you wonder why we bothered with the careers and the nice houses. I'm beginning to think we ought to have stuck to the washboard and mangle like our grannies did, and pop them out much earlier as well, before you know what it's really like to have a life.