Are We Maybe All 3 Hour Mums?

I was in the shower the other night, calling out for my daughter to get ready for her turn, reflecting on how the day had played out – when a thought crossed my mind that went something like… “I don’t really know why Emma Grede copped so much shit for being a “three-hour mum” when many dads are exactly that…”

I stopped myself immediately with an “Eeeeek, that’s dangerous thinking! A slippery slope! Pull back!” when my daughter appeared struggling to take her shirt off, and my train of thought was cut off.

A few hours later, my daughter was sleeping, and my mind was winding down for the day, when I started thinking again about this whole “three-hour mum” concept.

If you’re unfamiliar with the term, it became a whole thing a few months ago when Emma Grede, the East-London-working-class-born turned multimillion-dollar business and brand guru, announced while promoting her book that she’s a “max-three-hour-mum” – specifically around being with her kids on the weekend. As re-quoted here, ““Cutting sandwiches into star shapes? That was never it for me,” she says, acknowledging her style is made possible by her family's team – which includes nannies, cleaners, a chef, and chief of staff.”

The internet was divided and outraged! One side was all, “Finally someone is being honest and sharing my truth,” and the other side was “You’re completely undervaluing motherhood and the importance of being present for your children”, etc. Nothing new really, just the apparent paid working mother vs unpaid working mother “war” dressed up in new words.

This statement – along with many others that she made around presenteeism and “career suicides” – has been well and truly discussed on many platforms. And yet in somewhat typical Kiya fashion (except for the strangely early obsession with Off Campus), it’s taken me a minute to digest what I think about it all. Thank god I never tried to be a journalist because my take would have always been three months late.

Anyway, I was lying in bed thinking about this concept, and about how my daughter’s time is spent at the moment – something that becomes very clear when you’re a few months into separation and figuring out co-parenting.

With the exception of part-time nannies from around ~22 months old, my daughter has always been with me. It was my ex’s and my deal – he prioritises his career as he enters his late 40s and I prioritise our child because I’m changing careers and I frankly have more time to “catch up” on my career given I had an early start at it. This set-up isn’t for everyone – but in many ways, having a decent age gap meant that it worked for us.

It was also something I really wanted to do. Sure, at one point, I was trying not to throw up in the office toilet, pregnant, while still wanting to be on a “partner track” – until my daughter arrived and, near instantly, nothing mattered more to me than being with her as much as I could for as long as I could.

These days, she’s still with me the majority of the time, in that she lives with me, but has times with a part-time nanny (where I mostly work from home) and times with her dad. Suffice to say, I have, and continue to, spend a lot of time with my daughter. On paper, I am the opposite of a “three-hour-mum” and somewhere closer to being an “18-hour-mum.”

But, BUT, BUTTTTT when I think about how I spend my time with my daughter, along with how others spend time with her, I’m actually starting to wonder… Aren’t we all sort-of “three-hour-mums?”

Now, before you roast me, hear me out.

I think there is a huge societal misunderstanding around what the work of mothering involves. Lol, wait, what am I saying – I don’t think, I know there is a misunderstanding about what it means when someone says they work as a mother.

Exhibit A: “Don’t you just play with your kid all day? How is that work?’ or Exhibit B: “Going to parks and stuff sounds really tiring (sarcasm).” etc etc etc

What people often don’t realise is that there is actually very little, in the scheme of the whole day, direct play with your kid. You are always with your kid, but that doesn’t mean you’re spending eight straight hours playing dress up. What is more realistic, is that you are spending 15-20 minutes (sometimes more, sometimes less) of each hour (sometimes more, sometimes less) in direct play – I’m talking on the ground, next to them, doing the thing that they’re doing – and the other part of each hour cleaning up, cooking, preparing snacks, attacking the endless pile of laundy, organising stuff, general house admin or doing whatever (typically screen free) thing that needs to be done. This is often also out of the house – buying your next kilo of berries and other sustenance, or going to an appointment or the post office or, if you’re crazy like me, taking your child with you to buy the next size of the shirt they grew out of within a month.

To me, success in the work of full-time mothering is not actually about how long you spend painting together (which, don’t get me wrong, I absolutely adore) but how well you integrate into day-to-day life together – for everyone’s mental health. It’s about knowing the dance between genuine connection and doing things together at their level, and then moving into tasks and other time-filling things where you are both independently doing stuff while in the same space. I’ve actually recently started to be quite deliberate about a list of what needs to be done independently and what can be done together so that when I am paying for her external care, I am using that time as efficiently as possible (ie for my paid work on a screen).

Success in the work of mothering requires self-leadership and governance, and an irrepressible ability to make your day into a life that feels whole – and to keep trying different approaches with every change in your child’s needs, along with your own.

Much to society’s shock, the work of mothering is not about mastering finger painting.

Some days, this “direct/indirect time together” doesn’t work well. Some days, my daughter, who is generally pretty good at self-play (she’s 2 and 10 months), needs long, extended attention because, well, she’s a human? And when this happens, we spend long extended time doing things she likes that I like too. Like going for a walk around the block twice with no plans to be anywhere. Or reading, or building blocks together or a sticker book. Or, heavens forbid, watching a Julia Donaldson book adaptation on TV. And yes, fine, Peppa Pig sometimes, too.

You might argue that what I am describing is also very age-dependent, and yes – it is. It’s the age where your kid is old enough to engage, but not old enough to be in school yet. It’s the age where you’re not coming up with ideas for each wake window and recovering in each nap. It’s where self-play is more existent, and you have a whole full day to figure out how to be together.

Because how you work as a mother also changes with each age stage. “God, this sounds unnecessarily complex!” I hear someone exclaim, as if we don’t also expect carers and teachers to occupy and engage and educate our children differently at each age…

What I can appreciate wholeheartedly, though, is how much this type of “direct/indirect time together” is not the case when you’re either in paid work and can’t spend this sort of time together, or when you do, in fact, have school-aged children, and they are away most of the day. Because in either of these cases, there is an understandable pressure to spend direct time with your kids when you are together. It’s wanting to squeeze in as much of the “let’s paint together” as possible. This is also true for the parent who, like in my situation, is at work all day or isn’t the one the child lives with full-time.

I have a lot of empathy for my ex, who now has to figure out how to get the most out of his time, all the while trying to navigate how you can, with ease, spend long chunks of time with a toddler. It’s a muscle you build – or one you’re paid to have – like my daughter’s nanny, who has a mind-bending ability to actually enjoy playing dress-ups for five hours.

So what am I trying to say here?

I think all mothers are more alike than social media wants us to think.

The three-hour-mum label is yet again another example of divisive rhetoric that throws guilt and shame and other shitty things into a structurally flawed colosseum of crap that all mothers have to navigate.

If we tally up direct engagement play time vs the broader work of unpaid mothering and what happens when you’re engaged in paid work with paid care support, I suspect you’d find that we’re all more likely than not, averaging out at a similar number of hours.

What’s letting us down here is the misconception about what mothers do if they’re not out there girl-bossin’– or whatever is expected of them – when they drop their kid off in care because of whatever choice they’ve had to make to go to paid work.

Now I’m no early-child expert (obviously), but I think most kids are pretty bloody happy when they get to co-exist with their loved ones and have intermittent, deeply engaged contact – kinda sorta not dissimilar to what happens when two adults who love one another live together and find a rhythm to move through their days, doing their own thing, and coming in and out for a chat and a hug.

And to pull this metaphor along for a moment longer, I also see a lot of kids get kinda annoyed when you’re in their face trying to engage when they simply want some space – kinda sorta not dissimilar to when you’re feeling super-dooper needy, and your BF needs a beat to recover.

There is so much pressure put on unpaid-working mothers to ENGAGE their kids every second of the day, and so much pressure put on paid-working-mothers to RECLAIM every second of the day missed.

I don’t know about you but I think we’re doing nobody favours with any sort of time tallying – because there is something I remind myself of often; humans are excellent at measuring length over depth, and what I mean by that, is that we can easily say how long we’ve done something, but very poorly explain how deeply it was done, learnt or felt. Which is sad, because often, isn’t it depth that matters most?

So maybe no one is a “max-three-hour” mum, and maybe everyone is a “max-three-hour” mum. Maybe the heart of the issue here really is about how we communicate, educate, and appropriately value the unpaid work of mothering, so that we can drop the divisive misconception that you’re just “hanging with your kid all day.”

We’re all just trying our best, right?

With care,
Kiya

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