Lou Beckett: “You Can Love Your Children and Want to Be More Than Their Mum”

The blunt truth about being the default parent is that it costs you the time you didn’t realise you needed in order to be yourself. To still be you, as well as a parent and partner. We all love our children so much that acknowledging that being the default comes at a cost to ourselves feels wrong somehow, that insidious spiral of parental guilt, because there’s a little part of our brain that’s mourning our old lives at the same time as loving our new ones. You can love your children and want to be more than their mum. One doesn’t cancel out the other.

Women are pretty superhuman when you think about it, in just how long we can keep running on absolute fumes, and that hides just how much hard work it is being a mum sometimes. That’s not meant to be pessimistic, just realistic about what motherhood is: a messy, wonderful, fulfilling, frustrating, joyous, painful, flawed compromise of everything we want to be, everything that’s expected of us and everything we want for our families and want for ourselves.

Rob and I have completely mismatched workloads and hours so the parenting load was never going to be a 50/50 split because it just wouldn’t be practical, but we talk much more deliberately about what we’re doing and why now. A discussion and a decision feel completely different to an assumption. It’s not an equal split but it is an intentional one now, which makes a huge difference.

My eldest is in Year 6 so there’s a lot of chat happening on the parents’ groups about end-of-year prizes, SATs levels and who’s doing the 11-plus, but the thing I’m most proud of currently is how absolutely unbothered I am by what someone else’s kid can do or what level they’re at. I’m only concerned with my girls and whether they’re happy, the rest is just noise. Comparison is the thief of joy and all that, so take the small wins and don’t worry about anyone else’s bigger ones.

I assumed that sitting in a concert full of screeching tweens, queuing for unhinged fads or spending exorbitant amounts on activities that sound like a particularly imaginative form of torture was a parental rite of passage to be endured, but I LOVE IT. They’ve got their whole lives to be grown-ups, and I’m in no rush to hurry that along so I lean in wherever I can.

What have I had to actively unlearn? That there’s no such thing as ‘perfect’. Or even ‘good’ when it comes to parenting because it means different things to all of us. The only person your parenting needs to work for is you. Also, that there’ll never be a point where you feel like you know what you’re doing. Ever. You just get better at rolling with it.

A good day is a day when it feels balanced. It’s not prescriptive; our weeks flex and shift depending on what everyone’s got on, but a good day is one in a week where there’s been enough space for everyone to fill their cups, however that looks.

I miss the freedom I had, to go anywhere and do anything, without feeling torn in two. That’s one of the hardest things about being a mum, I think, the duality of feeling two completely opposing things at the same time: being caught between desperately needing the space to be something else beyond being a mum, at the same time as loving them so much that you don’t want to take any part of yourself away from them.

If my kids read my book in 20 years, I want them to understand that they’re the best thing that ever happened to me and that none of what I found hard about becoming a parent, or being the default, was about them. I hope that they feel more prepared for everything that they might feel or experience if they choose to become mums themselves one day too, and that they know I’ll be there to help them as much as they want me to.

Rob’s always shown up at home as much as he can, but when his career really took off just after we had our eldest, we both just did whatever we needed to do to make it work in the moment.

The little pushback the book had was mostly people saying that I didn’t understand what being a mum was and to stop moaning and get on with it, essentially. Our experiences of motherhood are such a spectrum, though, that acknowledging that everyone is having a different journey doesn’t lessen the value of the version you’ve chosen. There’s a balance between acknowledging that parenthood comes with an unavoidable degree of compromise and trying to mitigate that impact on the one hand and throwing ourselves down as martyrs to motherhood on the other. We’ve got to do what works for us and not take it personally when someone is making different choices.