The beautiful mind of motherhood

After yesterday’s bomb atrocities in London, I tried to lose myself in a film, and finally watched A Beautiful Mind, which has been sitting on my shelf for many months waiting to be returned to its owner and as yet unwatched.

It’s based on the true-life story of Nobel Prize winner John Nash, a Mathematician who gets entangled in a mysterious conspiracy. I don’t want to ruin the end of it for you, but I thought it was rather telling that I believed the characters were all real, and Bill was convinced they weren’t.

Watch the film and see what you think that says about my current state of mind! And then, please let me know…

I’m not a huge Russell Crowe fan, he’s just a bit too ‘all man’ for me – but in this one he’s good and I thoroughly recommend it for anyone who feels like they’re close to losing the plot. It is reassuring in an odd kind of way.

But it isn’t just people like me, who have had a complete meltdown and six months off work who feel like they’re somehow on the edge of everybody else’s reality. I was talking to a friend last night who is on the verge of returning to work after six years of fulltime motherhood, and she is feel understandably apprehensive and nervous about how she will be received in a workplace that she used to know so well, yet now seems strangely alien. And she has all her marbles!!

So it got me thinking that perhaps this is all just about motherhood (although obviously not in John Nash’s case!), not post-natal depression. When I first returned to work after maternity leave - when I was still standing securely on two feet and managing to look the world in the eye - even then I felt like an outsider in the workplace. I sort of had a perception that everyone else was looking at me differently now I was a mother. As if I was somehow less capable, certainly less intelligent, and unlikely to be trusted to perform as well as my non-parent colleagues. Perhaps it was the bottles of expressed breast milk I was seen carrying from my office to the fridge every lunchtime, or maybe the pushchair parked in the corner of my room. Apart from that I was doing everything else as I always had done. But something told me that my status had gone down.

And talking to other mothers yesterday just made me think it doesn’t matter what path we choose, whether we stay at home to bring up our kids, carry on working through their infancy or return to work after a slightly extended maternity break – whatever we do, we are going to end up feeling inferior in the workplace. Because modern day work and modern day motherhood just don’t fit neatly together. It’s messy and emotional and splits you in two.

But you know what? I don’t care. For me, my status in the workplace is far less important than my status as a mother…it’s just a shame that it is the former rather than the latter that pays the bills!

(Have you noticed I haven’t mentioned my little ones today? I’m tired of seeing adverts for nothing but flowers on my blog!!)