4 - A Return to Normal

Summary

This chapter explores the women’s experiences as their child approaches their first birthday and reflects on the changes and overlap between findings in the original motherhood study and these later contemporary accounts. By this point, a return to the workplace and working motherhood provides a dominant theme, but the language of ‘balancing’, ‘sharing’ and ‘50:50’ is much less evident in these interviews. Often complicated and precarious care arrangements are put in place in order for the women to be able to afford to work, as UK childcare costs are prohibitive. The chapter also traces how a backdrop of neoliberal expectations and digital amplification, together with the demands of more intensified parenting, patterns caring in couples. Taking this focus and using real-time narratives, the process of becoming more practised and the (relative) expert on your own child is also examined across this chapter, providing a contemporary view of maternal agency and selfhood. Are women ‘having it all’ as lazy assumptions about working motherhood have asserted, or just doing it all?