Ideal mum and high-achieving worker: Can a woman be both?

Olive is a young girl with questions. Questions that are not always convenient for adults around her but they’re important. One such question leads her to wonder where her mummy vanishes during the day. It also becomes a pressing question because while kids her age are familiar with the idea of daddies being absent during daytime, not all mothers are missing, are they?

Underneath this seemingly simple premise of Helen Farmer’s debut children’s novel My Mummy’s Secret Adventures (illustrated by Pavithra Suresh and published by The Dreamwork Collective) are complex questions: of normalising dreams and ambitions of a working mother, that of making space for all individuals in a family to thrive without demanding sacrifice.

Helen, one of the most popular radio personalities in the UAE, is also a mumfluencer. But she is not the one who’s all about the dazzle of parenting. As her followers know, her insights into the messy side of parenting are often delivered with wit and humour, which makes her all too identifiable to women who may have embraced motherhood but are silently coping with it.

“When my older daughter was about six months old, I was having a really tough time,” she recalls. “And when I looked around to see who else was talking about the motherhood experience, no one resonated. At that time, parenting was very aspirational. We were talking about Baby Dior and children’s dresses worth Dh5,000. That wasn’t my experience.”

So, what was her experience? “Juggling between the new baby and a job I loved.” That’s when Helen began to talk about the messy aspects of motherhood in her blog and eventually took that conversation to her social media channels. It helped that she had been a writer and magazine editor, it ensured that she articulated her vulnerabilities in a way that resonated en masse. “I think the only real way for connection is vulnerability, and that doesn’t mean oversharing. I don’t mind being the first person to say, ‘I got it wrong’ because it can be empowering for other people to respond saying, ‘Yeah, me too.’”

In the age of achievement, even women aren’t exempt from judgement. They are judged when they sit at home to raise children. They are judged when they step out to realise their dreams. In the midst of this is a mind at conflict with itself, trying to find balance between passion and responsibility. “Sometimes, all you need to do is ask for help. I found it very hard to go from a job I was very competent at and really enjoyed to coming home and not knowing what exactly to do with my baby. People say that every woman has a maternal instinct and that she naturally knows what to do with a child. And sometimes you don’t. Moreover, the identity shift from being a successful professional to a ‘failing’ mom can be really, really difficult.”

Where Helen’s voice has truly resonated is in making her children, family and nanny not just passive onlookers but active participants in her journey as a successful professional and mumfluencer. She says she has never hesitated to ask for help, even if it’s from her partner, or mum or nanny. “I talk to my children about what I do. I want them to understand that I have another side to my life,” she says.

My Mummy’s Secret Adventures is born out of this desire to demystify this haze around the choices a working mother has to make. “I have worked all through my children’s lives and it has brought forth some questions — why do I work, where do mums go during the day? So many children think about where their parents go when they are not around. It does not occur to them that they could have jobs, friends or other hobbies,” she says. “My job is quite an easy one to explain, but if you have a job that’s harder for a young mind to conceptualise, it gets even more difficult for the parent. This book is meant to be a conversation starter between parents and children. It’s about a young girl who asks thousands of questions every day.”

Most of Olive’s questions are actually queries Helen’s own daughters have had as young children. “And then there were some questions that could not have been added,” she jokes.