Page 125 - White Lives The Interplay of 'Race', Class, and Gender in Everyday Life

118 In search of a ‘good mix’
glad when it was all sorted. Because all the schools have sibling
policies, so you wouldn’t have to face this discussion every 2
years.
(Interview 30)

Other interviewees stressed how friendships made in this context of local
mothering were not of the same calibre as those made in other contexts.
Friendships were described as not being of the same ‘depth’ as those made
before children or ‘BC’. As Teresa described:

You embark on a friendship with another mother and generally it’s on
a very different level. If you really, really click, then I think that’s quite
unusual. You know, if you could really close your eyes and imagine there
were no children there, would you really make an effort?
(Interview 18)

Teresa put this down partly to the context of building relationships where
conversations are disjointed as they are interrupted by young children and
also to the potential political differences that parenting can draw atten-
tion to. Here, both the social and the moral dimensions of mothering were
brought to the fore:

The politics of parenting is quite acute, I think. You know, how you
bring up your child, your approach to discipline, your approach to this
as against another person’s style of parenting, and it’s a minefield.
(Interview 18)

Again, much here went unsaid. What was involved in developing or iden-
tifying a different ‘style’ of parenting and in the clashes between different
styles? How much did class and ‘race’ play into these concepts? Teresa went
on to give the example of someone’s child who might be ‘a bit of a bruiser,
a bit antisocial’ and parents who had ‘very different discipline styles’. But
Teresa also had a discourse of those middle classes who were very different
from her and ‘never the twain shall meet’. These she characterised as ‘the
Alice band and Volvo set’. Stephanie, in a similar conversation, described
how talking about children can expose differences between herself and other
middle-class white people who have a more ‘traditional approach and out-
look’:

If for example, you know, I was explaining what, I mean I had wanted
my child to go to a particular nursery and someone was saying you
know, they wanted their child to go to a particular nursery because it
was completely different to that, you know, you might then start stray-
ing into more sort of political territory and getting an understanding