Let’s cheer the choice of kids over career

Gemma Tognini with a friend's baby named Cooper. Picture: Supplied

One of my dearest friends became a mother for the second time, shortly before her 40th birthday. Newborns being somewhat of a roadblock to wild festivities, we celebrated with a gorgeous afternoon tea instead.

Her little boy was just a few weeks old. She’d walked quite the road, my friend and her husband. Crippling infertility, many heartbreaking miscarriages. Becoming a mum not just to their eldest daughter but then also to a healthy baby boy was a miracle we all celebrated.

As the afternoon lingered, she handed me her little man for a cuddle with his Zia Gemma, the name her kids still use for me. I nursed him in my arms, chatting away, delighting in that newborn scent, the perfection of his tiny face and curious eyes.

It was a perfect moment, until it wasn’t. My eyes began to sting a little. My throat felt tight and my tummy made itself known. I passed the little man back to his mum and discreetly excused myself, went outside to my car and sobbed quietly and privately until the waves of grief receded.

I don’t want your pity. Pity is a bankrupt, meaningless currency. It can purchase nothing but emptiness. The fact I was robbed of the chance to be a mother will probably be a bruise on my heart this side of heaven, but it simply is what it is.

Plenty of you know what I’m talking about, but the weird thing is rarely does anyone talk about it. I may hate myself later for sharing such tender, painful and private memories, but I feel a sense of conviction to do so after reading a particular line in Janet Albrechtsen’s opus last weekend on the beauty of choosing motherhood over career.

“To demean any of these choices as false is obnoxious paternalism,” she wrote in response to comments that called choosing motherhood over career false and empty. And later: “It’s also deeply insulting to women who would have loved to have had children and would have loved to have stayed home to care for them.”

Janet Albrechtsen with her daughters Caitlin, 5, on the left and Sascha, 3, on the right, circa 1998.

For the first time, I think, I felt seen in this space – as a woman, as a woman in corporate life and as a woman who once pre-emptively wrestled with that choice, but it was not to be.

For what it’s worth, I have and will continue to cheer loudly for any woman who, if she’s fortunate enough to make the choice, chooses her kids over her career. Or any dad, for that matter. But with women it’s different because we’re told that choice is the lesser one and immediately makes us victims of something. The man? The system? More like victims of other women’s prejudice.

As an employer, I have encouraged so many of my team over the years that time with their little ones goes quickly. A career will always be there, I would say. And I’ve been right, every single time.

One year, about 10 years into the life of my firm, the three mums on my team (all part-time permanent) all had children starting school in the same year.

That week was hard on my heart, speaking transparently. There was so much excitement in our team, which I shared. Private pain, which stayed hidden. But I can tell you, not one of those women lamented their juggle.

They were doing their best and, as their boss, I did my best to be flexible. Not to tick a box, not to say, “look at our diversity quota”.

It was actually simple. I realised by then motherhood wouldn’t happen for me. I knew from being the (self-anointed) world’s best aunty that these first years are gone, seemingly in the space of a single breath, and the following years require different demands. I wanted to operate from a place of grace and richness of spirit rather than from my own sense of having been robbed. We always get to choose how we respond, even to the shittiest hands that are dealt.

Of course, not all women feel an instant rush of maternal connection. My own mother laughs at the memory of my birth. She was expecting another boy, but I arrived instead. And not just a little girl but one who looked so much like her father that Mum exclaimed: “Oh my god, she looks like Bruno!”

Do the women who say “Screw my career, I’m staying home with the kids, the job will always be there”, do they make the gender ideologues turned joyless stern headmistresses uncomfortable? Does my own vulnerability here challenge them in a different way? I hope it does. They don’t speak for me; I’d have given it all up, I said tearfully to my sister-in-law a few years ago in a moment of sadness.

The national conversation around a woman’s decision to work, or stay home, or to attempt to do both, is so one-sided. It is myopic and assumes every mother eventually sees her child as a speed bump or a barrier to other, more important things.

It cheapens motherhood, assuming that childcare is an equal substitute. Just whack up enough daycare centres and she’ll be right. Farm your kid out to strangers.

To be clear, I’m well aware that for some childcare is a literal necessity and for others the circumstances of life have not been kind. These are not the families I’m talking about.

The women with the loudest voices on these issues are, in my view, the least representative. I would also suggest they live in a bubble. Additionally, the broader government approach to this issue is betrayed by the language it uses.

The “burden” of childcare: what have we come to when this is the dominant lexicon? What about the privilege of childcare? What about the joy of childcare? What have we become when we frame one of life’s greatest privileges as a burdensome weight that needs to somehow be managed away?

If caring for a child, if being a parent, is such an unholy burden then why do Australians spend upwards of $750m on fertility treatment every year?

If caring for a child is such an unholy life sentence why do we mourn with and console women who miscarry? Why do we mourn the death of a child at all? Yes, two things can exist in tension, but we are so out of whack in this country when it comes to the values that matter, this is just another example.

Why do I care if I don’t have children? It’s because I don’t have children that I care. If my job is to cheer for women who stay home with their own, then you’ll find me in the front row with the loudest voice.