I Don't Know How She Does It

by Alison Pearson

This is a review of the novel I Don't Know How She Does It that I wrote when the book first came out. I think I scored a review copy and everything, which was very exciting to me. Looking at the larger points I made, it seems an appropriate Mother's Day offering, even if the book is a few years old now.

A mother-friend and I are sitting in the park talking about, of course, motherhood. Specifically, my friend is telling me about her sister-in-law. An actress, a writer of books. Glam life, glam career. And a mother. "A good one," my friend hastens to add. "Very committed, very there. But she does have this other life. And loves it, of course. Well, who can blame her?"

I shake my head, watching my five-year-old jump into the sand pile yet again. Not me, certainly.

"The only thing that bothers me," my friend continues, glancing quickly to see if her little girl is whole and upright, "is that here's this woman with a career and a nanny and a secretary and all that, and she calls herself a full-time mother." I smile disbelievingly. "It's true," my friend insists. "And the thing is, that's just not right. There's nothing wrong with what she's doing. Her kids are great, they're doing great. I'd trade places with her in a minute. Well, some days, anyway. But what I mean is, I'm a full time mother. I'm at home all the time. This is what I do. This is all I do. That's what full-time means, in this job. And I just don't think you should call yourself something you're not."

When I was young, I had a tendency to believe that every main character in every book I read was like me simply by virtue of the fact that I was the reader. That wasn't a difficult illusion to keep when all my heroines were other little girls, or even boys or grownups I felt an affinity for. But it didn't stand me in very good stead when I branched out and began reading British novels, which being a romantic young American I did early on. I had no notions of inherited wealth or station. I was the one reading Pride and Prejudice and waiting for the Bennet girls to go out and get jobs, maybe meet Jane Eyre while they were out there.

I know a little better now, of course.  I don't assume that the person on the page is me, or anyone remotely like me, unless and until I have good reason. Which I think I did when I was handed my copy of Alison Pearson's very British novel I Don't Know How She Does It: The Life of Kate Reddy, Working Mother. On the cover of the American edition is a silhouette illustration of a woman in a suit juggling a briefcase, a pacifier, and a stuffed animal. And in case I didn't take the hint (yes, I have been a little slow in the uptake for the past five years or so; what's your point?), just before Part One I was treated to the Concise Oxford Dictionary definition of "juggle."

So, yes, I figured I was safely into I-can-relate territory. Granted, I am not your stereotypical working mum. I do juggle, but not in a suit; even when my gainful employment took me outside the home, I never wore pantyhose on anything like a regular basis, and at this point I'm not even sure I own a pair. I am more one of those shift about/make do working mothers: only taking the kind of work I can set my own hours for (proofreading, ebay sales for a small publisher, managing a building, extremely freelance writing) and then squeezing it in around the demands of home and child. I'm not what would be considered a career woman, as it's obvious from the get-go that Kate is.

And yet.

And yet the novel begins with Kate bludgeoning store-bought pies into domestic submission, desperate for them to look homemade because her daughter's class is having a party and all the parents (read: mothers) have to bring refreshments. It's after one in the morning and Kate has just returned from a business trip out of country, but she'll be damned if she'll expose either herself or her daughter to the behind-hands snickering generated by mothers who "don't make the effort."

All I could think of was my famous cupcakes, star of every party that my son's little YMCA art class threw. Everyone loved them. Adored them. Begged for the recipe. Which I couldn't give, because of course they were from a mix. I managed to pass them off as my own (take notes -- you may need this someday) by making my own frosting. That butter-and-powdered-sugar dealie you can find in any general basic cookbook. Takes about as long to whip up a batch of this as it would to weather a pie. And you can't goof up, the way you can attempting actual homemade cake. Don't get all fancy with it, though. Screw Martha Stewart and just slather that stuff on. The homier it looks, the more points you get. No one will notice how improbably perfect what lies beneath is.

If I were a little more secure in my status as semi-domestic goddess, I would have laughingly admitted my secret when pressed. But I couldn't. Not when I was one of the lucky ones who got to work at home and therefore had zero excuse to cut corners.

So I could relate to Kate. Oh, achingly.

Until.

Until I found out that the bitch worked at the London equivalent of a high-power Wall Street job and if she wasn't pulling in six figures, it was surely a pretty hefty five.

Now, look. I have nothing against the rich. I have nothing against books about the rich. And I certainly have nothing against a book about a rich working mother.

But damn it, that cover and that epigraph said that this book was about the working mother. How many working anythings get to land a job like that? One in a hundred, maybe? Let's be generous and say that. But shift that to working mother and you're talking more like one in a thousand. We are rather abruptly talking about a working mother -- a very specific, very privileged one.

Which is still fine. I don't want to read Life Among the Lowly every loving minute. Give me a peek at the glamorous life. Tell me about how to fight for respect, equality, and, yes, a good chunk of cash, in the last fort that ever tried to hang a "boys only" sign over the door. I'll be interested. I'll even cheer you on.

But don't try to pass that work off as the novel of the working mother. Just don't. It's inaccurate and insulting. Because then you're getting just a little too close to Douglas Adams' perfect sci-fi society, the place where "no one was really poor -- at least no one worth speaking of." Or a place where everyone is rich -- at least all the normal people.

Guys, I don't want to be the one to have to tell you this, but if it were the norm, you wouldn't be calling it rich.

Kate is rich. The only argument we ever see her having about money with her husband, who's an architect, is when she wants to give the nanny a raise because she's afraid of losing her.

Oh, the nanny thing. Don't get me started. I'm too American. I used to be a nanny myself. Yes, even I, and here I am writing for a big glossy electronic publication. It's that whole social mobility thing that's just ruining this country, and also ruining my ability to read the words of a woman complaining with a straight face about the servant problem.

"People say the trouble with professional women of my generation is that we don't know how to behave with servants. Wrong. The trouble with professional women of my generation is that we are the servants -- forelock-tuggingly grateful to any domestic help, for which we pay through the nose, while struggling to hold down the master's job ourselves."

They may write and read like that in London, but it ain't gonna play in Peoria. You are the servant? You give that one a real try, lady. I worked for a professional woman of your generation once. I stuck it out for two months. I give you two days before you run screaming into the night, forelock-tuggingly grateful that you get to work in a nice clean office instead of for some woman who's going to hate you if you're not nice enough to her kids and hate you more if they actually like you.

The whole servant-problem thing typifies the unreality of Kate's money situation. This is not someone who ever has to do that perfectly normal middle-class working mom thing of spending the household clothing budget entirely on the kids three years running, or trying to figure out which extra-curricular activities you just plain can't afford and how you're going to break it to the kids, or saving up slowly and patiently for a night out and a babysitter the way you used to squirrel money away for a vacation trip or a new car.

I'll say it again: good for her. Cheers for working her ass off and really getting ahead, the way we all want to.

But as I was saying way back in that little anecdotal introduction, you don't get to be exceptional and be a member of the group at the same time. Pick one and stick with it.

The thing is, it's really unfair to everybody to present this as a novel about the trials and tribulations of working mothers everywhere when Kate has so many options. It's not just that her own job is better than most; so is her husband's, even though, yes, he makes less than she does (yeah, another typical working mother's lament). And so this novel quickly strikes out across are-my-reasons-for-pursuing-my-career-really-valid territory, a place that most working mothers have only ever heard about and have no chance of visiting, let alone taking up residence. They're not using the money they make for extravagant vacations and birthday parties for the kids and lots of guilt-induced presents to make up for not being home most of the time. They're paying the damned rent. They're my friend Suzanne, single mom, ex-model, wickedly funny, thrilled that thanks to a miniscule raise she can now afford to buy the occasional CD for her older son. Or Tina, wondering if having that second child is going to demolish her teaching career or just make a serious dent in it, and where and how they'll all get by if she takes too much time off work and loses her seniority, and how she'll cope with two kids if she does go back to work in an allegedly timely fashion. Or my sister-in-law, who keeps her job or loses her house -- it's that simple.

Those are the working mothers, ladies and gents. Those are the financial and emotional issues they face. Giving it all up and retiring to full-time motherhood and a house in the country isn't an option for them the way it is for Kate.

The thing is, as soon as I realized that this book had just been mispackaged, even by its own author, I stopped snarling and started enjoying myself. Because it's really a very good book. I know I haven't made it sound like it, but it's true. The plot really held me, and I don't say that often about something written less than a hundred years ago. I laughed when I read about how Kate and her husband first met and moaned when the nanny had to read his Dear Joan letter to Kate over the phone because she was off on yet another business trip and contemplating adultery besides. An engrossing read, for which every reviewer is forelock-tuggingly grateful.

And the writing itself is fine and sharp and funny. Pearson says some of the things the rest of barely allow ourselves to think. She admits that going to work is so much easier in many ways than being at home. "I love the work: the synapse-snapping satisfaction of being good at it, of being in control when the rest of life seems such an awful mess. I love the fact that the numbers do what I say and never ask why." One night her daughter wakes up sick and Kate is as frantic for her own sake as for her child's: "How can she do this to me tonight of all nights? I have to leave for the airport in three hours." And then, of course, "Immediate stab of guilt for even thinking such a thought."

No, Kate, don't feel guilty. We may not all get to take trans-Atlantic flights all by ourselves to first-class hotels "with room service that appears like a genie and the prairies of white cotton that give me the sleep I crave," but we've all felt personally assaulted by the illnesses and injuries our children sustain. Oh, it had to be now, didn't it? I just cleaned that rug. I stayed up all last night with your brother. Your daddy and I had an actual date planned, physical contact and everything. And now look. Oh, God, I'm the worst mother in the world.

We all are. We're all members of the "BAD Mommy Club," as an online buddy of mine dubbed it to make me laugh and stop acting like such a self-castigating idiot. And that's another thing wrong with this book being marketed as the working mother's life. If it had been presented, accurately, as an exceptional woman's story, it would have been all the sweeter and more startling to see how much remains the same no matter how high up the corporate ladder you go. Kate never has to choose, as I do in certain lean months, between paying the music class tuition and hitting the book store; but she knows all about the terror of motherhood.

You love so much and they drive you so nuts.

You miss them so badly when you're not there and then twenty minutes into the reunion you're screaming for escape.

Sometimes you have to sit on your hands to keep from doing something you know you'll regret (you already regret and you didn't even get to do it), but the thought of anything happening to your son, your daughter, is worse than all the labor pain in the world.

Is there anything more contradictory than the most basic act of reproduction and its lifelong aftermath?

Ask Kate.

"I know a woman who is so afraid of her children's need for her that, rather than go home after work, she sits in the wine bar to wait until they're asleep.

I know a woman who wakes her baby at 5:30 every morning so she can have some time with him.

I know a woman who went on a TV discussion program and talked about doing the school run. Her nanny told me she barely knew where her kids' school was.

I know a woman who heard down the phone from a baby-sitter that her baby took his first steps."

By this point in the book, I was completely absorbed, completely lost. I was grappling with all the questions I can barely stand to think about four days out of five.

Like: does it have to be this hard? Is it always going to be this hard? Can I honestly imagine a time when women who want to be mothers and wage earners aren't going to have to make choices and compromises that men don't even have to consider?

No easy answers. I worried for a bit that this book was going to try for one. Kate does drop it all and move to the country, letting her husband (who is, thank God, not the least bit macho -- unrealistic, perhaps, but I think I'd rather have a character I liked than one I could more easily believe existed) support them all though he makes less than she did. I thought Pearson was going to pull some bogus happily-ever-after thing, until I read about how Kate spent a great deal of her time at home with the kids "bored to the point of manslaughter." Now, that's motherhood.

The very end of the book is clearly a beginning of sorts -- Kate's going to start work at something independent and worthwhile that will, it's to be hoped, take her away (mentally if not physically) from her kids just long and often enough to keep everybody sane. And then she'll feel guilty when her daughter asks her to read to her, please, right now, and she has to say no; and then she'll feel annoyed at having to feel guilty at needing a bit of a life for herself, just a bit; and then she'll feel remorse for being irritated at a child too young to understand the bigger issues involved sometimes in a simple request for a story; and then she'll blow a gasket because the book her daughter is waving at her is one that was due back at the library weeks ago, they'd scoured the house for it and the fees are going to be enormous and plus apparently her baby son chewed a lovely ragged hole right in the front cover when nobody was looking. Ah, the joys of motherhood.

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