Talk about stating the obvious. Oscar-winning actress Emma Thompson has declared that no woman can have a high-flying career and be the perfect mother at the same time.
“The only way you can have it all is by delegating the running of the home to other people – which I don’t ever want to do,” she says in an interview with the US edition of Good Housekeeping magazine.
I adore Emma Thompson – she’s witty, self-deprecating and a brilliant writer and actress – but it baffles me why we should take the slightest bit of notice of her views on how to combine parenting and working.
Today’s newspaper headlines claim she’s “struggled to manage career and family” but it doesn’t sound much of a struggle to me. Her life just isn’t typical of most working women. For a start, Emma and her husband Greg Wise are both actors. When one of them is away making a film, the other is able to stay at home and take charge of looking after their ten-year-old daughter without jeopardising their careers.
Most of us don’t have that luxury. Unlike Emma, we can’t work for three months, then enjoy a bit of time at home before embarking on the next assignment. Employers would laugh their heads off if we dared to suggest that as a working pattern.
Like lots of women, my career has been more a case of muddling along than soaring through the glass ceiling. When my children were little my husband worked in France and Germany so I couldn’t rely on him to help with childcare at all. If I’d gone back to work as a full-time newspaper reporter (as I did before my two were born) our son and daughter would barely have seen either of us.
So in the end I decided to work from home as a freelance (impossible in many professions) and caught up with deadlines at night when they were asleep. The notion of “having it all” just wasn’t an option – as most women know perfectly well.
