Society hasn't caught up with modern motherhood - Siobhan O’Connell on the contradictions, confusion and guilt facing mothers today

When I see Madonna in the glossies, with her happy marriage to Guy Ritchie, and her perfect pigeon pair, I feel jealous. I keep imagining life in that huge house in London with chefs, cleaners, personal trainers, and nannies to take the sweat out of family life.

Madonna appears to be a mother in control of her world. Whether she’s a good mum, I can’t say. Nor do I have any idea how much time she spends with her children. But, as an icon to modern motherhood, she seems pretty cool - epitomising the idea that you can manage it all – if you have the guts and - crucially - the money.

It’s a hard virtual reality to live up to, of course. I doubt Madonna has spent the last two weeks sleep-training a toddler and coping with a sick child as I have. No doubt she has night nannies to ensure that she gets her beauty sleep, and day nannies to mop up and entertain. And Madonna’s ego is probably too big to struggle with my biggest problem to do with leaving my children – guilt.

When I had my first child I didn’t expect to be swamped with this emotion. I assumed I’d go back to my exciting full-time job and relinquish the care of my son to a nursery. I was blissfully naive about the precarious world of childcare, and shocked by the physical and emotional drain that shift work and motherhood had on me. My partner and I tried to juggle demanding hours and international travel assignments, but I ended up taking responsibility for domestic arrangements while at the same time trying to hold my position in the pecking order at work.

I felt very alone. We considered paying someone to be a surrogate parent (not an option: house too small, too costly, why have children?) At the end of the day, I felt torn in so many directions that, after the birth of my second child, we decided one of us had to stay at home. And that one was me.

My feelings of guilt and confusion haven’t gone away. Now I feel bad I’m not at work and can’t contribute to the family coffers. To compound that feeling, many former work colleagues (mostly women) clearly think I’m nuts to stay at home. Wouldn’t I be a better role model for my children, they ask, as a working mother? Perhaps they think I’m a wimp who can’t handle the extra pressure.

Some thrive on stressful situations, but most women I know are stretched to the limit juggling home and work. Unhelpful surveys tell us that children suffer at school if their mothers go out to work, yet we’re encouraged to have a job so we don’t sponge off the state.

The situation is fraught with contradictions and I’m caught up in them. Have I ended up in this state because I’ve been led to believe that being a woman is more than being a mother or am I in turmoil because being a mother turned out to be more than being a woman?

In the end, our decision about work and family was based on practical reality. My profession was more flexible than my partner’s. He earns more than I do. So I stayed at home to be mother. After ten years working in an office, it’s been quite a change. Goodbye lunch hours and window-shopping, hello school run and playground. Of course, some days are dull and I particularly loathe the drudgery of washing, but other days are fantastic; I get to spend sunny afternoons outdoors and, best of all, have lots of time with my kids and meet all sorts of people I would never have encountered through work.

I fully acknowledge that compared with previous generations, mothers today have plenty of advantages. Today, many women have a career behind them by the time they decide to have children and they’re pretty sure of being able to return to work when they want to. Back in the fifties and sixties, my mother’s generation didn’t have that luxury of choice.

Most women gave up work to stay at home when they had children and society expected them to stay there. They had no status and little opportunity. Radical feminists like Germaine Greer made significant claims for the rights of women; but the reality meant that most were still stuck with the fifties notion of apple pie and motherhood. If women had to work out of financial necessity, they ended up having to do everything at home as well.

Fifty years on the reality still lags behind the rhetoric. Society hasn’t kept pace with the notion of ‘modern motherhood’. In an ideal world, work and family is about ‘co-parenting’. The word may sound horribly PC but it takes two to tango – in partnership, not battle formation. We shouldn’t be forcing mothers to give up their careers, nor should we be forcing fathers to stay at home. What parents need is support in the early stages of family life, with adequate post-natal leave, more flexible working hours and better-regulated childcare. The father’s profile needs to be raised and those men who courageously put family before career, need our wholehearted backing.

This isn’t the fantasy world portrayed by Madonna, Posh and Becks and friends, where women apparently have it all. It is a world where the needs of children are put at the centre of life and the lives and careers of mothers and fathers are not ignored.

For me, 21st-century motherhood should aim to free women from feelings of guilt and divided loyalty. Essentially, being a mother will never change, but in the future that must not preclude being a woman too.