Page 116 - White Lives The Interplay of 'Race', Class, and Gender in Everyday Life

In search of a ‘good mix’ 109
involving great personal and practical adjustment in their lives. At a practical
level, having children had changed the pattern of their lives. All the women
in the Clapham group had worked full time before having children. None
was working full time at the time of the interviews, but several were working
part time, often from home. Others had worked when their children were
first born, but subsequently left work. Clearly, becoming mothers produced
a major change in the ways they lived their lives and the activities they were
involved in. Many, such as Rosalind, remarked on the way in which this
changed their interaction with their local areas:

I think you suddenly start to talk to people, so I think until we had Anna,
we probably didn’t even look up when we went out to work and see the
neighbours, but once we had her, we started to meet all the neighbours.
And I know the people in the shops and all sorts of things. [. . .] I think
perhaps you want to be part of it.
(Interview 20)

More significantly, however, it changed their sense of self. Having chil-
dren involved taking on a new identity as a mother. This in turn involved
negotiating various different models and discourses of motherhood – shaped
by their own mothers, those around them and wider public discourses.
Jennifer explained how her mothering self was different from her self at
other moments in her life:

And I think it’s with a lot of things . . . like when you know people
from school and when you know them from university, you are almost
a different person to all those people, aren’t you. And it’s the same I
think when you’ve had a child. You’re then somebody’s mother. Initially,
I think. And I think it’s very easy to become . . . to allow yourself to
become somebody’s mother, and forget that you’re actually, you know,
a thinking, talking human underneath.
(Interview 25)

Teresa also described how she felt that motherhood had changed her sense
of self and her relationship to others:

Teresa: You start to question whether you have an identity outside of it
after a while. But yes, absolutely, everything, your whole per-
spective, everything you see, your whole attitude to things is
entirely as a parent. Like it is quite different – it’s much more
sensitive.
BB: Sensitive to . . .?
Teresa: Whatever’s around you. I mean, social issues, environmental
issues, anything really. I mean, anything that comes nearer to
home, you know. Dinner party conversations, National Health