We are.

An insight into how motherhood, marriage, and sisterhood create a simultaneous sacrifice & realisation of self. By Claire Hall.

I am a mother, wife, sister, daughter, friend. I am a career woman: an accountant, an NHS employee.

I am also myself. A person in my own right. But it has been so long since I have viewed myself in those terms that I struggle to remember who I am.

I grew up in a large family surrounded by strong women. The men in my family tend to be mild and passive. They are clever, often exceptional and leading figures within their fields, but at home they rarely put up any resistance. The women are also clever, also exceptional, but at home they are the decision-makers, the organisers, the ones whose opinions must be heard. This can lead to fiery discussions. Put my mum and her three sisters in a room together, mention politics or some other hot-potato, and they will soon be arguing until they are blue in the face. It doesn’t matter that they all — always — have exactly the same opinions as each other: they argue against an imaginary opponent. My mum’s brothers and brothers-in-law, along with my dad, just raise their eyebrows and let them get on with it.

Am I the same? Do I fit the mould? To an extent. My husband is mild and passive. At home, I am the decision-maker, the organiser. But it doesn’t always come naturally to me: sometimes it’s a perfect fit, other times I take on this role reluctantly, with a sense of burden.

It is through the women in my family that I met my husband. He found himself in conversation with two strangers — two of my sisters — and it turns out they had a connection. “Where do you work?” they asked him. “Oh really? Our mother works there, you don’t by any chance know her do you?” Of course, he did: they work closely together. My sisters and my mum conspired to set us up, so we duly met. For a year before she retired, he was subjected to my mum taking charge of him during the working day and myself during the evenings. (I can only imagine to what extent his patience was tested during that year!)

Add eleven years to that scene and I fast-forward to the present. A present filled with joy, gratitude, contentment, but also a dose of internal conflict, maternal guilt, occasional martyrdom. My husband and I have three lovely children; we are lucky that they are all healthy and happy. I am also lucky that my career — an accountant in the private sector for many years and more recently in the NHS — is fulfilling, interesting and rewarding. We both work full time in fairly senior jobs and we are financially comfortable.

The thing I really lack — really miss from ‘my old life’ — is time, and my sense of myself.

My time is spent on school runs; rushing to work; back again and stories, baths, cooking tea, listening to their chatter from the day. Then I regret asking them, because each day I optimistically hope for conversations where they tell me about their experiences, their ups and downs, the things that make them happy or sad. Instead they witter inanely (barely stopping for breath and frequently talking in an American accent) about the exact powers wielded by Greninja (an extremely exciting Pokémon), or a second-by-second analysis of each Fortnite kill, or the fact that the latest LOL doll goes ‘poopy’ in their ‘diaper’, and they really really want to buy one, can we log onto eBay right now please?

Once they are in bed, it’s time for washing, fending off the descent into domestic bomb-site, sorting school letters and other admin, often logging into work and doing another hour or so because I regularly don’t squeeze in my full 9–5. Even on a good day I am effectively ‘busy’ from 7am until 9pm. I should say that my husband is similarly busy, but because of the nature of his job — it is more timetabled and he works further away — I do more of the week-day tasks.

It is easy as a woman — perhaps, dare I say it, much more so than as a man — to lose yourself. I am permanently conflicted between the demands of others. The call on my time by work, and children, and domestic arrangements. There are some demands I happily accept: if I do the school run every morning then I will have to work in the evenings; if I do my job to the standard I set for myself then it will take longer than if I were to take short-cuts. There are other demands which I resent: in the summer, while I am using all my holidays to spend time with the children and planning nice days out, but they spend the day whining. (I remember a particularly grating crazy-golf trip which was almost entirely filled by anguished wails of “I wanted the red golf club”, “it’s not fair, she’s gone first twice in a row”, “he coughed near me”, “this t-shirt is itchy”. At some point I snapped and told them they were ungrateful whingers and I was never taking them out again.)

I sometimes — heaven forbid — have a Sunday afternoon away playing in an orchestra, or go out for an evening with friends. On those occasions I am greeted with cries of abandonment from the children. “Oh mum, not again, why do you always go out?” they say, and I scuttle off with feelings of guilt.

Maternal guilt is a common experience among my friends. Guilt over working and having no time, or not physically being present to be a role-model; guilt over not working and having less money, or not being a role-model for empowerment. Another common experience is the sense of being judged by others who made a different choice, but I sense that this is more frequently “imagined judgement caused by projecting one’s own maternal guilt onto others” than genuine judgement by others.

In all of this, I both lose myself and gain myself. We have a Western concept (arguably also a male concept) of individuality and self-reliance; but within my lifetime, this has been a very small section of my life. My husband and children, my parents and sisters, my close friends, can all demand of me: but I gain so much from them. They are my safety-net, they formed my being and shaped my character (and continue to do so). I simultaneously crave time for myself whilst knowing that my true self is as a person surrounded by others. I opened by asking who “I am”, but it is possibly truer for me to explain who “we are”.