“I thought this parenting lark was supposed to get easier.” Thus gripes Kate Reddy to a friend after finding out that her daughter’s “belfie”—that’s a selfie of your behind, for those not up on the terminology—has gone viral. Kate, the protagonist of British novelist Allison Pearson’s new book How Hard Can It Be?, keenly feels the paradox of high-tech parenthood: “I want to murder the little idiot and I want to protect her so badly.”
Kate was also the protagonist of Pearson’s bestselling debut novel in 2002, I Don’t Know How She Does It. Like many working mothers, Kate expected that the hardest part of raising kids—and trying to find time to work in an office as well—would be when the kids were 2 or 3 years old. A lot of women (including yours truly) have made the same mistake. As the kids get older and more adaptable, they are supposed to need our presence less. We can leave them with a babysitter or send them off to school without worrying that they won’t remember us when we come home or that we will have missed some major developmental milestone. With older kids we needn’t be so concerned that they won’t understand why mommies go to offices or that each sniffle portends a medical emergency.
But in the years since the events of the first book, Kate has come to realize that raising teenagers brings with it a whole new set of demands on parents’ time. The teen years, formerly seen as a stage for kids to rebel and start to set off on their own, have now become a stage requiring even more intense parental monitoring and support. Kate is trying to go back to work full-time after taking off several years to raise her children while her husband supported the family. But between her 14-year-old son’s video-game addiction and lack of interest in studying—“Seriously, Mum,” he tells her, “no one works hard at my age. Except the Asian kids”—and her 16-year-old daughter Emily’s anxiety-inducing social-media problems, Kate feels she is needed at home more than ever. Still, as she and her mommy friends are starting to realize, more involvement at home doesn’t necessarily mean they’ll be able to protect their kids from harm.
A party that the Reddys host for Emily so that she can be more popular backfires, but it is an occasion for Kate to witness what’s expected of girls these days. When Kate asks her husband why it is that girls are always bringing and drinking vodka, he answers: “Right now, Kate, their sole purpose in life, their only reason for being, is to get drunk, and vodka gets you there the quickest, with no taste or flavor to get in the way. Drowning their sorrows and all that.” This comes as a shock to Kate. She didn’t live the life of a nun growing up, so it’s not the risky behavior and promiscuity that shock Kate—it’s the deep unhappiness of these girls, the notion that 16-year-old girls get drunk to drown their sorrows.
In I Don’t Know How She Does It, Kate and her cohort worried about things like whether their cookies for the school bake sale looked homemade or whether their children would like the nanny better than them. Now she and her friends worry about whether their children will do well enough in school to get into a good university; at one point, she stays up half the night writing an English paper for Emily. Kate’s older friend and mentor, Sally, has a 31-year-old son who “is still wandering around thinking he has a future as a war reporter, or maybe a professional cricketer,” a 29-year-old son who is doing postgraduate work in international relations and “smoking far too much weed,” and a daughter who is on antidepressants and recently announced on Facebook that she is bisexual, “which Sally is fine about, except there’s no sign she’s having sex of any kind with anyone, male or female.” “Honestly, Kate,” Sally confesses, “I sometimes think I’ve produced a trio of wimps.”
There was a time when middle-aged women were mostly done with the hard work of raising children. Their kids were grown earlier, and once they were adults were expected to act like it. But modern norms have changed all that. As Sally explains to Kate, “Because we have careers, we start our families later, so we find ourselves going through what they used to call The Change when we still have kids at home. And our parents are old and starting to get ill or need help. . . . See, if we’d had our babies when Mother Nature intended . . .”
The struggles Kate faces are those of the “sandwich generation.” She is trying to manage the care of her aging in-laws, her own mother’s demands on her time, home repairs, Christmas presents, the family budget, the various diets of her family members, her dog, and her marriage. She frets over all this in the same stream-of-consciousness way that was a hallmark of the previous book, as problems big and small keep her up at night even as her husband snores away.
Since the publication of I Don’t Know How She Does It, the character Kate Reddy has generally been taken to be a kind of feminist icon, a woman who could achieve victory in a male-dominated workplace while also being a loving mother. (This impression was reinforced when Sarah Jessica Parker—former star of the you-can-have-it-all show Sex and the City—was cast as Kate for the 2011 movie version, which flopped at the box office.) But Kate has some pretty conservative views about men and women. These are most obvious as they relate to her own marriage.
The decline of Kate’s relationship with her husband Richard is both a cause and an effect of Kate’s insane life. After a number of years of supporting his family through his work as an architect, Richard has a midlife crisis. But these days it’s not enough for a fiftysomething man to buy an impractical car; instead Richard “morphed into one of those MAMILs you read about in the lifestyle section of the paper, a Middle-Aged Man in Lycra, who did a minimum of ten hours in the saddle every week.” Richard’s obsessive bicycle habit is only part of the problem. He has also quit his job to become a therapist and that has meant he has gone into therapy, costing the family a significant amount of money.
The problems with the Reddy marriage start to mount, but they ultimately arise from the fact that gender is not just a social construct but is rooted in biological reality. The role reversal as Kate goes back to work at an investment bank and her husband gets in touch with his feelings is not going to end well. When Kate learns that Richard has been using her razor to shave his legs so he can achieve faster times in his bike races—“my husband’s legs look like chicken drumsticks—deathly, almost bluish, pale skin with dark dots where the hairs used to be”—there’s no turning back.
Kate’s surprising conservatism isn’t confined to her own marriage. At one point, she delivers an extended lecture to her office assistant Alice about her noncommittal boyfriend. Alice ought to stick up for her (eventual) desire to have children: “I tell my young colleague that I’ve seen the pattern too often for comfort. Girl goes out with same guy till their late twenties, hangs in there waiting for him to take it to the next stage. The guy doesn’t bother because he’s getting regular sex and free food.” Eventually, the unmarried couple breaks up and the guy finds someone else. “The girl now needs to find a new guy to have a baby with”—but her biological clock is ticking. Better to force the matter with the noncommittal boyfriend than to keep waiting indefinitely.
American readers are unlikely to know that Pearson was a relatively conservative opinion writer for the Daily Mail—the author of such columns as “It’s Liberal Mothers Who Are the Real Dopes” and “Morality: The Real Victim of Our Text Message Age.” Her journalism clearly helped her keep tabs on some of the most destructive trends of our society. With How Hard Can It Be?, she has found a way to explore pressing questions—the delaying of marriage and childbearing, the dangers of social media, the growing anxiety of teenagers and their trouble gaining independence as young adults, the crushing pressures on people caring for both their kids and their parents—without sacrificing story for sermon.
