Australians at work: Charlie Gillingham, stay-at-home mum
Endless tasks, waves of guilt and and never enough time. That’s the deal for stay-at-home mums like Charlie Gillingham.
If she could only silence that critic inside her head then she could slow down and see it all for what it is — perfectly imperfect — and she’d know that the holier-than-thou, Little Miss Timekeeper inner voice will never say, “Nailed it, Charlie Gillingham!” at the end of any day because “nailed it” is a term used by back-slapping city workers. Mum work is something that can’t be nailed because it’s a kind of work that is always moving, flowing some days like a river, falling apart some other days. To nail mum work is to drive a spike through something viscous. To nail mum work is to fix in place something that won’t ever stay fixed. To nail the job is to assume the job is done. Voila! Finito! Done. And. Dusted. What next? But this job is never done. This job ends in only one place. The grave.
A word on the irrepressible wonder of Tylah RoseGillingham, aged eight. She’s barefoot with blonde hair and a smile that belongs on every postcard mailed from her home town, Coolum, on the Sunshine Coast. She sneaks up behind her mum, seated at the kitchen table. From behind her back, Tylah Rose reveals a piece of cardboard the size of a pizza box and rests it gently on the head of her 49-year-old mum Charlie. A simple game. How long can mum balance it on her head? Charlie plays along largely because Tylah Rose is her greatest reason for being but also, in a more complex phenomenon, she’s taking the place for the next minute or so of the sibling Tylah Rose never got to have. Charlie carries on talking to her mid-morning house guest as though it’s perfectly normal to sit with a piece of cardboard on one’s head. Tylah Rose howls with laughter. Mission accomplished. Nailed it, Charlie Gillingham.
She beats herself up some days for leaving her run to motherhood so late. She feels it’s her fault that Tylah Rose looks over the fence so longingly at the three siblings next door who always have a playmate to wrestle, sidestep, tag and swordfight.
Tylah Rose holds a painting in her hands. It’s a turtle with a shell of multiple colours, like a technicolour dreamcoat. The turtle wears a shimmering necklace with a ruby red love heart pendant. That’s how Tylah Rose sees the world, wrapped in a love heart necklace.
“I thought I didn’t want children,” Charlie says.
“You didn’t want me?” asks Tylah Rose.
“Noooo, sweetie, I just thought I was too busy.” She pauses, tries that again with the honesty of a mum who rarely has time to beat around the bush. “I think I was too selfish,” she confesses. “At that point in my life I just didn’t want the responsibility. I was happy having that freedom to do what we wanted.”
Then she was 37 years old, lying in bed beside her husband, Lee. A day of deep thinking was condensed into one life-changing sentence. “I think I want to have a child,” Charlie said.
In the kitchen, Tylah Rose puts a Milo tin on the bench, wedges the lid open with a dessert spoon. The Milo has hardened inside the tin and she stabs at the brown mountain of chocolate and malt with the spoon handle.
Her dad, Lee, is the workplace health and safety manager on the $4.9 billion Woolgoolga to Ballina Pacific Highway upgrade. Lee spends Monday to Friday away from home, living out of apartments and hotel rooms along the NSW north coast.
Tylah Rose carries the Milo tin to Charlie at the kitchen table. “It’s gone hard,” she says. Charlie grips the spoon, hacks away at the Milo.
It took two years for Tylah Rose to be conceived. Charlie knew her age would be a factor. “I had some other medical issues and it was a case of trying and seeing what happened,” she says. “We are actually very lucky to have her.”
“Me?” Tylah Rose says, eyes blinking.
“Yes, you,” Charlie says, a hand cupping her daughter’s cheek. “We are really, really lucky to have you.”
Tylah Rose got herself twisted and stuck on her miracle entry into life. She wasn’t breathing and her tongue was tied at birth. All Charlie remembers was too many doctors in the hospital room. Too many doctors, too much urgency.
Charlie and Lee later tried to give Tylah Rose a sibling. They explored IVF but specialists said Charlie’s age and compounding medical issues meant their chances were low. “I do feel bad in that respect,” she says. “But we really did try hard.” If she was to do the numbers, Charlie would feel a sense of motherly guilt about something at least five times each day; that’s just the second time she’s felt guilty this morning and she hasn’t even turned on the television yet for Tylah Rose.
Of the 14 days Lee took off work when Tylah Rose was born, nine were spent in hospital with doctors and nurses monitoring the baby’s progress. After the final five days at home, Lee went back to work and Charlie was standing alone over a cot holding a crying baby girl. The job she’d hold for the next eight years and beyond had begun. There wasn’t much discussion about who would take the role of chief long-term carer for Tylah Rose. Lee earned a higher wage. Mortgages don’t pay themselves. And that was that.
Three weeks into the job, Charlie was on the phone to a woman at Centrelink who was running through the multiple registrations and family tax benefit forms and immunisation schedules that Charlie had to attend to. The woman wanted her to visit the nearest Centrelink office in person. Charlie took all the information in, ran it through the processor of her tired mind and wept uncontrollably down the phone line.
An important note on finding time to shave your legs and the seductive qualities of a large glass of chilled mid-week wine. One of life’s more profound and rarely observed scientific anomalies is the fact the hands on living room wall clocks tick one full hour faster for stay-at-home parents. Time, of course, and the merciless march of it is what causes all the complications.
Tylah Rose is an early riser. Six o’clock is a sleep-in. Charlie likes Tylah Rose to finish her homework before school in the morning because her brain turns to mush in the afternoon. Tylah Rose receives $10 a week for completing her morning chores: emptying the dishwasher, feeding the cat, making breakfast. Breakfast is cereal or toast. Charlie will rinse out the Weet-Bix bowl because Weet-Bix turns to concrete by the afternoon. Then she’ll feed the chocolate-coated family labradoodle, Cadbury, iron the clothes, fix Tylah Rose’s lunch, do the washing, walk Tylah Rose to school, walk back home and walk Cadbury to the beach while it’s still morning and the air is cooler.
Charlie runs her day from three separate to-do lists. House things to do. Computer and email things to do. Out and about things to do. Her day is going to the shops to replace an empty gas bottle for the barbecue. This task should take 15 minutes, but on the way she drops into her favourite health food shop to purchase a particular body wash that doesn’t irritate Tylah Rose’s skin, ducks into the post office to collect a parcel and grabs a few things for dinner from the supermarket.
Her day is another mum in the grocery store wrangling a full-tantrum toddler who sprints down the grocery aisle and bumps into Charlie. “I’m soooo sorry,” the young mum says, in hot pursuit of her child on the lam. Charlie gives the mum an understanding look. “No worries at all,” she says, but she wants to say more. I get it. I soooo get it. But just remember it gets better with time. They get older. Their ears for listening get bigger, their hearts for caring grow fatter.
Her day is returning home and unloading the groceries, hanging out the washing, vacuuming the house, lugging the gas bottle to the barbecue, taking a call from a girlfriend, phoning her mother who’s been battling some health issues, searching her cupboard for something to wear; something not tired and dated because she never finds time for clothes shopping. Her day is fixing her hair and ducking back to the school to be a parent helper in the classroom because she feels it’s important to see Tylah Rose’s schooling up close, to help the teacher help Tylah Rose to learn.
Back home in the afternoon and Tylah Rose has a half-hour of iPad screen time left in her strictly monitored allowance. Ballet in the afternoon. Piano the afternoon after that. Acrobatics and aerials the afternoon after that. Then Charlie can breathe and look at the hairs on her legs. She can measure the successful management of any given week by the length of the hairs on her legs.
I haven’t read a novel in eight years, she tells herself. I haven’t watched a single midday movie in eight years at home, she tells herself. I just want to sit down and sew Tylah Rose a dance outfit, she tells herself. I just want to shave my legs!
Before Charlie was a mum she had a vision in her head of the mum she wanted to be. This imaginary woman was fit and wise and calm. She was well-read and possessed a keen knowledge of modern alternative music acts. She made nutritious dinners from quaint recipe books lit by warm light and while these dinners baked in the oven she would slip off her apron and do arts and crafts with her loving daughter whose endless laughter filled every corner of her spotless home.
“I started suffering with anxiety,” she says. “I was getting pains in my chest and I couldn’t figure out what it was. I went to the doctor and he diagnosed heartburn and all this stuff, but I figured it out myself and it was the fact that I was trying to get something done, let’s say cooking dinner, and I’d constantly have to stop and do something else, fix something, clean something, or Tylah Rose would be colouring in and she’d say, ‘Come look at this, Mum’, and I’d say, ‘Oh, that’s beautiful’, and then as soon as I got back to the kitchen bench: ‘Oh, come and look at this, Mum.’ Just trying to achieve something, even if it’s just cooking the dinner, I found sooooo difficult. I didn’t want to say, ‘No, I can’t look at the picture, I’m trying to cook dinner’. I wanted to see the picture. To look at the picture once or twice while I was cooking would have been nice, but not 20 times, you know.”
She once had a girlfriend — a mother of two boys — to stay at her house for two weeks. “Do you play with your boys?” Charlie asked her friend one night. “Oh, nooo!” reeled her pal, as though Charlie had suggested playing with a rod of plutonium.
“I wanted to live up to what I expected of myself to be a good mum — and being a good mum was looking at a picture every time she asked,” Charlie says. “But on the other hand, I was suffering because I was getting so anxious because I couldn’t complete whatever it was I was doing. Something that should take 15 minutes was taking an hour.”
And who to talk to about such things? There’s already something she senses about those words “stay-at-home-mum”; something charged in them. She braces herself for judgment when she says them out loud to someone. That bloody guilt again. She feels guilty some days walking along the beach with Cadbury when she thinks of the friends who are in paid employment and would lose an arm to be a full-time mum like her, and walking along the beach isn’t justifying the privilege but scrubbing the toilet is.
The internal critic returns at dinner time: “Lasagne again, Charlie?” Tylah Rose has about six guaranteed gobble-up meals. Charlie bulk cooks on some weekends and fills her freezer with containers of spag bol, lasagne and chilli con carne. “That child needs more kale,” whispers that high-nosed critic as that chilled bottle of white calls from the fridge.
“I’ve rung my mum at midday, upset: ‘Is it too early for a glass of wine, Mum? Am I a bad mum if I drink at midday?” Her wise mum, Leigh, answers correctly every time: “Have a drink!”
“My wine time is more four or five o’clock when I’m trying to get the dinner done,” Charlie says. “I don’t get the anxiety so much anymore but with the anxiety, the wine helps. I won’t have a glass of wine once Tylah Rose has gone to bed. I need it in the couple of hours leading up to bedtime. That’s when I enjoy the wine.”
She keeps the anxiety at bay by silencing the critic. “Once I figured out what was going on, it didn’t matter what it was I was trying to achieve, I just decided to stop. And I’d go and sit with Tylah Rose and see whatever it was that she was doing that was keeping me from achieving what I was doing. And I sat with her and we just did it and I calmed down. I was also trying real hard not to use the television as a babysitter so I could achieve what I was trying to do, and I learnt there has to be a balance and it’s OK to do that sometimes. I need to be easy on myself.”
The long road to bedtime begins at 7pm for Tylah Rose. “Because she needs her sleep,” Charlie says. “If she doesn’t get 10 hours she’s awful the next day. We start the process at 7pm which means she’s actually asleep by 8pm.”
It’s then that Charlie attends to the computer and email to-do lists. Emails to school teachers, emails to school parent organising committees, emails to friends, emails about play dates for Tylah Rose. Rates bills, utilities bills, insurance bills. By this time the whole house is quiet and she has time to look back on her day and, through the mental traffic of a hundred small events that added up to one child sleeping soundly in her bed, she sees herself.
She’s a traveller. She’s a trained commercial baker and agifted painter. She was born in England. Her parents divorced when she was eight. When she was 11, she moved with her mum to Perth. She felt guilty for leaving her dad in England and the tectonic emotional shifts of that period saw her school marks fall dramatically.
She didn’t like high school. She was bullied and those bullies made her become someone she didn’t want to be. She stayed low, rarely stuck her head up. She lost her adventurous spirit; lost a confidence that only returned fully at 21 when, on a whim, she drove alone from Perth to Brisbane in a Toyota HiLux. She had a tyre blowout outside Kalgoorlie and changed the tyre herself by the side of the road before heading on to Adelaide across the Nullarbor Plain. She drove through the day and slept on the tray of the HiLux every night, staring up at those bright outback stars with a growing suspicion that there was nothing in this world she could not see if she just chose to stick her head up. She travelled the world and found the love of her life, Lee, while pulling beers at her dad’s local in Kent, England.
She was so many things before she was Mum. And the greatest work she’ll do for Tylah Rose is the work she’s already done for herself. Learning from her mistakes; looking for the positives. She hopes her daughter grows up to be confident. She hopes her daughter grows up to be adventurous and kind and smart and herself. But, for now, she hopes her daughter gets 10 hours’ sleep.
Next week: the schoolteacher
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