Issue 19: The big pregnancy announcement
Saturday October 20 2018
So, guys, not sure if you’ve heard, but Meghan is pregnant! Exciting, huh? Even I am excited, and I’m not a big royalist. But I loved her in Suits and Prince Harry is so naughty-normal, and the royal wedding was just beyond incredible. I watched it four times. So I’m really happy that the news we all suspected has finally been announced.
However, there’s a but, and it’s nothing to do with me feeling jealous of the Duchess of Sussex and her baby-making abilities (I am jealous, but it’s of her Givenchy wardrobe and her beautiful face). No. It’s the emails.
It’s the day of the announcement, my work inbox is jammed. Jammed! And as I skim the subjects, they are all variations of this: “Babymoons fit for a princess!” “Pregnancy Skin & Hair!” “Pregnant in your late thirties? This cream can help!”
I’m waiting for an email from my editor; I don’t need or want to wade through this opportunistic treacle. It’s presumptuous and predictable and, yes, touched a nerve, but more than that it highlights something that has been dawning on me for a little while. Motherhood has become a commodity, a huge commercial enterprise, and it is spilling into my workplace. I work in a largely female industry, I’m at childbearing age, all of a sudden it’s trendy to be a mother and, hang on a second, I’m not trendy!
Which brings me to the real issue here: the “them and us” of the thing. With the increasing growth of the “mum network”, there have developed two very distinct camps. I appreciate the difference, but otherwise we’re still the same people. I think most mothers would vehemently agree — they want to retain the person they were before. So why are we treated so differently?
Take work, for example. I’m a beauty editor, I move in the kind of female-orientated work circles that are driven by new product launches and testing and researching and events and canapés. Recently, though, there has been a wave of launches of products that have been sent only to mothers — that’s right, only mother journalists allowed. Us non-mother journalists were NFI’d (that’s a commonly used journalistic acronym).
We have a window into the “them” camp through Instagram, so I could see it becoming a regular occurrence. It came to a head for me when I scrolled across a mother journalist showing her recent delivery from a brand. A foot cream along with some monogrammed slippers with a note saying: “We know you’re a busy mum, you deserve some time to relax, please get off your feet and enjoy this soothing cream and cosy slippers.”
I fully agree, you in the “them” camp do bloody deserve to get off your feet. My goodness I can’t even imagine how exhausted you must be, and at times I dread how tired I’m going to feel when it’s my turn. I bet some cream and slippers would be a welcome treat. But then I think that I also just got off my second seven-hour red-eye this month and went straight to the office because I have 11 meetings in my diary today. They’re not all in the office, so I’m running in heels across London and I realise I haven’t had time to eat only when I get home and take a moment to wonder why I feel light-headed. I called my mum to ask her if baby-sleep deprivation feels like permanent jet lag. “Kind of, darling, but you get to sleep when they sleep, so it comes and goes,” she says.
After the fifth beauty-product launch event for mum journalists only, my (childless) friend Katy laments about it with me. “It’s oestracising,” she says. “We’re being ostracised because we haven’t made proper use of our oestrogen.” She’s exactly right, you know. This is a question of equality. That cream should absolutely have gone to those genuinely tired mums — they do deserve it. But there could also have been an “us” camp delivery that said: “We know you’re a busy person, you deserve some time to relax. Here, enjoy some cream and some slippers.”
I know I risk sounding bitter here and, let me clarify, that is not my stance. I just wish that we could all be together in this thing. I quite like wandering into the “them” camp at weekends: playing with my friends’ children and then giving them back so that I can go home to finish the work I couldn’t fit into my day. But I’d love it if, like a Venn diagram, we crossed over a lot more in the middle.
I suspect it is my industry evolving along with the rest of the commercially driven world. It’s #mumlife spilt into #worklife. I get it: the conversation around motherhood is getting louder and the support networks stronger, both of which I hugely embrace and admire. Mothers have suddenly become famous on Instagram; motherhood is a powerful selling tool. But as my PR friend says, you’re no less interested in the latest Dyson vacuum just because you don’t have a child. You have three cats, so if anything you have more reason for a fecking Dyson.
#Mumlife is my goal. I want so badly to join the ranks, but I am quietly confident that when I do I’ll find a neutral point between the two camps. I’ll settle in “Switzerland” camp, where we are wholly engrossed in our own miraculous children, but we’re also aware that #mumlife is just #life. For every Instagram post about having to get to soft play and get a flu jab and grab a coffee all before 9.15am, there is another not being posted about exercising and calling the financial adviser and buying new tights before work starts. Mum life is just life. We are all here because we had a mum. We are all struggling in some way, be it a much too heavy workload or a child who won’t sleep.
I suspect Meghan would be happy in Camp Switzerland. She’d bring Harry and some staff and be able to maintain her heavy workload while heavily engaging in #Mumlife because, well, I think you get extra help when you’re a royal. She probably has enough comfy slippers too, but with her new initials stitched on? She definitely deserves some of those.