Page 117 - White Lives The Interplay of 'Race', Class, and Gender in Everyday Life

110 In search of a ‘good mix’
Service and education, suddenly become far more relevant to
you, once you’re a parent.
BB: And how about your kind of sense of who you are? Does it have
an impact on that?
Teresa: I think on a personal level, I’m absolutely certain it’s my greatest
achievement to date, and I don’t imagine I’ll surpass it. I mean,
I’m not suggesting it’s a wonderful bed of roses, or anything like
that, but I know that I always felt that before I had children that
I’d like children. One always assumes that. In another way, you
sort of think ‘oh, one day, this will happen’, but it was never sort
of a burning urge, or anything like that. [. . .] I know now that
if I was unable to have children I would feel this huge gaping
hole.
(Interview 18)

This account of change in perspective and priorities was common to
many of the respondents. Priorities were generally changed in favour of
what might conventionally be understood as the feminine. We see this in
Teresa’s description of how she has become more ‘sensitive’. Others stressed
how the world of work no longer seemed so significant to them, often after
years spent developing a career. However, as Teresa’s reference to questions
around the National Health Service and education suggest, it would be wrong
to characterise this simply as a shift to the private world of mothering, even
though, as the following quote suggests, it might feel like that:

I was privileged to enjoy a very good job and doing things that men are
doing easily. And when I got married and had children, I was suddenly
relegated to a different model [. . .] One is invisible because one is doing
it quietly behind closed doors and you might be in despair and nobody
else would know. Or the other people who know are other women on
the whole and they’re all doing the same thing.
(Philippa, Interview 24)

While the experience might be isolating, mothering involves not only ne-
gotiating many public discourses, but also interaction with public fora and
institutions, as will be explored later in this chapter in the case of schools.
The women saw their practices as mothers as providing a supportive envi-
ronment for their children. Part of their perception of what motherhood en-
tailed was formed in response to the mothering they had received as children
from their own mothers. This was sometimes expressed as a reaction against
their mother’s approach . Teresa described her own mother as: ‘a wonderful
mother and there was a very strong sense of security through our childhood,
and I guess I would want to replicate that’ (Interview 18). Philippa described
what she saw as her role as a mother in similar language: