...is quite rewarding. Family life is made up of modest duties we've learned to despise. HARRIET LANEwas forced to give up work and took great pleasure in doing them properly
NOT LONG ago, I learned something curious about myself and my prejudices. It was a Friday, and because my four-year-old son had a playdate after his two-hour session at nursery, I had no obligations until the early afternoon when I’d retrieve him from his friend’s house and then collect his seven-year-old sister from school.
It was a rare chance to spend hours alone in an empty house. I had a stack of domestic tasks lined up but I was in a good mood and my husband was about to run out of ironed shirts so I thought: why not?
Ordinarily, I don’t iron my husband’s shirts. I don’t iron anything. I snap the creases out of damp laundry before pegging it out, and the wrinkles that remain are mostly eliminated through gravity and my cunning folding and weighting techniques. I know people who iron sheets and pillowcases, their children’s vests, and even the tea towels, and I’ve always thought this was deranged, suspect behaviour. But I was feeling cheerful, and the Desert Island Discs repeat was on the radio, so I plugged in the iron, wrestled the ironing board out of the cupboard, and set to work.
Time passed: sighs of steam, the transformative nudge of hot metal through dimpled cotton, the pleasant scent of scorch filling the kitchen. I did five shirts in a sort of absorbed trance, running the point of the iron under collars, tracing around buttons, sweeping generously over the yoke and down the sleeves, and then I went upstairs to find some more. I was enjoying myself so much I even wondered about the tea towels.
Glancing up to admire the spectacle of the children’s shorts and T-shirts dancing on the washing line, I had one of those wonderful illuminated moments when everything seems right and good, and you are aware of your happiness, not taking anything for granted, just thankful for it.
The ironing, somehow, was key to the happiness: there was satisfaction in the sense that I was doing a chore, unbidden, for someone else; but there was also the startling meditative pleasure of this small domestic alchemy. Why had I never realised that, given enough time, ironing could be enjoyable?
It took me by surprise, but then I’ve had lots of surprises over the last year: a year during which the poles and boundaries of my life (as a mother, a wife and a journalist) have shifted. A year ago, after three months during which my sight, hitherto perfect, suddenly went a bit strange, then crashed repeatedly, and at one point temporarily packed up, I was diagnosed with a relapsing form of optic neuritis, inflammation of the optic nerve.
Optic neuritis can be a harbinger of some scary conditions but the sort I have does not seem to have the same associations, though it can have severe implications for vision (I’ve lost some sight in my left eye) and may require long-term management with steroids and immunosuppressants.
The diagnosis came as a relief, not least because I finally had a sense of how things might pan out in the end. But because it was impossible to anticipate the next relapse, I had little choice but to put my career on hold until I was established on the right combination of drugs.
At the same time, our much-loved nanny of six years was heading home to Hungary for good. We had planned to find a replacement, someone who would work four days a week, as she had; but this was no longer necessary. Instead, her friend agreed to help out for two half-days, which would cover me for blood tests and appointments with my neurologist.
Overnight life started to look appallingly simple. My diary abruptly emptied out. Now the only entries (apart from medical fixtures) were cake sales, class assemblies, playdates, Little Kickers soccer training, parent/ teacher meetings and ballet lessons. These things had been in the diary before, pencilled in around work obligations, but I had never focused on them – and sometimes, in my determination to do my job properly, had let them slide or forgotten them.
I had never contemplated giving up work when we had children. We needed the money. In any case, I was lucky enough to do a job I loved. Plus, I knew I would make a rubbish stay-at-home mother. I didn’t have the patience and the inner resources. But within a few weeks I found – almost to my horror – I was enjoying myself.
There were limits. I still invented excuses to get out of any activity involving sewing or papier maché and still felt like screaming when the painting water went flying yet again, but the compensations were generous.
I liked the sameness of the days: the unhurried time I spent with the children, the chance to accommodate their social lives and to peer into their interior worlds, the space to plan, shop for and prepare meals, and other frightfully retro activities. What was going on? Surely I should be pining for my work and the waves of adrenaline and satisfaction that came with commissions, rather than getting my kicks from taking my son for his vaccinations, freed from the worry I might miss an urgent email?
The oddest things felt like a blast: picking up the dry-cleaning before it was required, stitching the pink elastic straps into my daughter’s new ballet slippers as soon as we’d bought them (rather than making a pig’s ear of it during the breakfast rush). In the old days, you might have mistaken me for someone who had it all; now, I wondered whether that wasn’t a euphemism for someone who did it all, and not necessarily well.
I had never realised how I prioritised my career at the expense of other parts of my life. With work obligations out of the picture, life was suddenly delightfully manageable. Staying on top of family stuff – nitcombing when another of those dread circulars came around; remembering that reading books always went back to school on Tuesdays; and being woken up in the night by a sick child without feeling as if the world was crashing down around my ears – was turning out to be a bit of a thrill.
I had spent all my earlier years as a mother cutting corners and was beginning to see that rather than escaping the dull bits, I’d been missing out on the pleasure of Doing Things Properly.
Partly because I was for the first time in my adult life not making money, partly because of the economic climate, I became obsessed with belt-tightening. I started reserving books from the local library online and found that waiting a few weeks for something you were desperate to read enhanced the experience. I abandoned the gigantic bi-monthly internet order and started shopping for groceries as my grandmothers had done: little, often and locally. I cut out money-off vouchers and cruised the aisles looking for bogofs (buy one get one free).
And I set myself a series of cheapskate culinary challenges.In a tatty old recipe book I found a step-by-step guide to jointing a chicken. I picked up an enamel pie dish in a junk shop and conquered pastry. I made my own pizza dough, bagels and hot-cross buns.
My children were, naturally, oblivious to all the effort I was making. They just accepted it as an agreeable new normality. When I worked, I was always conscious during my days off of having to make the most of the children, and perhaps they felt the same about me; either way, it was an added pressure. Nowadays, we take each other more for granted, and I like the ease of that.
Still, if I’m honest, I know that if I’d had an enforced year off during the purée-and-buggy years, I’d have gone nuts. Who am I kidding? I’ve gone nuts plenty of times this year, for every kind of reason: boredom, frustration, boredom, or because people suddenly announce they don’t like macaroni cheese, or insist on taking novelty umbrellas out in high winds, or are found to have posted the tiniest bits of Playmobil between the floorboards.
But as things stand, I’m glad that I’ve had this time at home, running the house, running the family. It has been fun. I wouldn’t have missed it for anything.
– GuardianService