When resigning is radical

Helen Skelton is right about the parenting juggle - so why does her honesty feel so revolutionary?

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There’s a saying among numbers geeks that maths gives us hope that every solution has a problem.

It’s a nice idea, but every rule has an exception - and in the case of maths, I’ve long wondered if motherhood isn’t it.

The numbers, as almost any woman can tell you whether she has kids or not, simply don’t add up. And yet, too often it feels as though we’re not allowed to say so.

So while I’m far from delighted for her as a human, I reckon BBC presenter Helen Skelton did us all a huge favour this week with her radically honest resignation.

The mum-of-three, who stepped down from duty hosting her Sunday morning show on Five Live to spend more time with her kids, was unusually frank about the decision, telling listeners: “I'm not all right about it but you know, needs must. The juggle is real.”

“I don't want to,” she added, heartbreakingly. “But an eight-year-old will be happy about it.”

Since hearing Skelton’s speech on Monday, I’ve spent quite a bit of time mulling over why it felt so radical. In truth, I think there were a number of reasons, but critical among them has be the way it spotlights an often unspoken reality – that the decisions we make around parenting are very rarely without compromise.

Skelton is a single mum of three kids, aged between one and eight. That’s a lot of parenting in the trenches going on right there, a lot of bum wiping, childcare costs and Calpol at 7am so nursery will let them through the door without noticing their third cold of the month. Sure, live radio is an adrenaline sport - more on that later - but I’d be willing to bet that, some days, the studio would have felt like a sanctuary of calm in comparison to life at home surrounded by pop-its, squishmallows and kinetic sodding sand.

And yet, we all know beyond a shadow of a doubt that there will be those who will have messaged her telling her how ungrateful she sounds. How she should be thrilled to get to spend time with her kids, as though she shouldn’t be allowed to voice her frustration at having to choose. As if she needs to explain that she can love her kids and love her job, and hate that there simply aren’t always enough hours in the day to do both, let alone to do both well.

But perhaps, if I’m honest, the reason I felt Skelton’s words so deeply in my bones is that I’ve had a break from the juggle this summer, and it’s been a hell of an eye opener.

Project crafts at 6am anyone?

These days, I’m the senior producer of a three-hour daily radio news show, working largely behind the scenes with colleagues who inherently get it. When we’re not on air, we work whenever and wherever we need to. Many a work call is taken in the middle of a supermarket dash, and we’ve discovered that the acoustics of a car parked outside school are pretty good for interviewing purposes. This freedom, and a very hands-on husband, have allowed me to do my job and parent my child and get through the last year of chaos without dropping any more balls than necessary.

Yet like so many families, the summer threatened to derail us. Eight weeks of school holidays are hard at the best of times. But throw in a lack of childcare options that don’t require a mortgage, a foreign country without family handy, a dearth of leave days and a climate that simply doesn’t allow for outside play from June to September and you have a perfect storm for madness. The solution, such as it was, was for my kid to go on ‘holiday’ to his grandparents in Scotland for a month - though I suspect at this point in proceedings, my parents would use a different word for it.

And the brutally honest truth? It’s been horrid and guilt-inducing and utter bliss all at once. Of course, I’ve missed him like I would miss a limb. I’ve had a million tiny moments of panic, wondering where he’s gone, and I’ve felt like the world’s worst parent at least five times a day when I’ve seen other parents playing with their kids. But I’ve also rediscovered what it feels like to work without being torn in two and, after a decade in the parenting trenches, its been revelatory.

With my colleague on holiday, I’ve spent a month covering as presenter on the show - a challenge that has pushed me totally out of my comfort zone, necessitated many more hours of prep than usual, created no small number of moments of terror and left me utterly shattered at the end of every day. I have absolutely loved every minute of it. And I also know beyond doubt that it all would have been infinitely harder, if not impossible, with a bored kid climbing the walls at home.

Safe in the knowledge that he’s having the time of his life getting spoilt rotten by his grandparents though, we’ve eaten granola for tea on days when we’ve been too tired to cook, snacked at 9pm on days when work needed more of us, or skipped dinner altogether and gone to bed at 7.30pm when we really just needed to be the very opposite of rock n roll. We’ve moved house, taken long overdue doctor and dentist appointments, gotten haircuts, and remembered who we are as humans, rather than as parents guided metronomically through every day by the constant ticking of the term time clock - drop off, desk, pick up, desk, dinner, bath, teeth, bed, more desk, bed, repeat.

And at the end of it all, while I’ve loved being able to focus on my work, I’m also counting down the minutes to being able to hand back the hotseat and board a plane to collect my boy. Because I love my work and I love my child, and while both are easier without the other in the mix, I don’t actually want to choose.

Which brings me back to Skelton - because what her statement demonstrated so well was how binary our notions of motherhood are. Natural or C-section, breast or bottle fed, working or stay-at-home, it starts when they’re in the womb and it never bloody lets up, as though two lines on the pregnancy test mean you’ve got two choices forever more. Black or red, mum? Pick now and by god, you’d better stick with it.

It makes me wonder whether the reason we become so entrenched in our motherhood camps isn’t because we believe, with every fibre of our beings, that we’ve made the only right choice, but rather that we’re so scared we’ve made the wrong one - or that the right one doesn’t exist - that we have to keep arguing our corner in order to convince ourselves it was ever a choice to begin with. “Needs must”, after all.

For Skelton though, there were two more words in that statement that were perhaps the most illuminating - her declaration that she was stepping back “for now”. And isn’t that the truest bit of all?

Because sometimes life throws lemons. Sometimes, the last choice we made no longer fits. Sometimes, we need to make the least worst choice for now in order to find a way forward, to set ourselves up to go again. Because for 99 per cent of the population, motherhood isn’t about putting it all on black or red. It’s ok to want it all - but it’s also ok to say I can’t right now, I’ll try again tomorrow. Needs must. The juggle is real.

Did you hear Helen Skelton’s statement? Did it resonate? Do you think it’s time we changed the way we talk about motherhood? I’d love to hear your thoughts.

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