Mother of all inventions

Rachel Johnson reveals how to work at home with your children: get someone else to look after the kids

am sometimes asked how on earth women can manage to avoid Alastair Campbell-style feelings of pointlessness after they've sprogged, i.e., how can they continue to earn money and achieve what shrinks call 'self-actualisation', when they've chucked in the exciting, fulfilling day job to devote their people skills not to advising the PM but to potty-training, and their analytical skills to mastering not the latest report on the economics of Internet retailing but the rain-hood of the new double-buggy, etc.

Well, it's easy-peasy — so here's my exclusive guide to staying home and having it all, which will enable you to swap the long-hoursculture grind of your office job for the creature comforts of Schedule E at home. It will also enable you to notch up a credit as earth mother and win kudos for having done something for yourself, as we say, despite having a bunch of kids to look after. Obviously, this works best for female journalists in pig who leave full-time office jobs, but don't let that put you off having a go!

The only equipment you will need in your toolkit at this stage are a working husband, a home computer and a room well soundproofed against the hellcat screeches of your children fighting, ideally lockable (so your offspring can't interrupt the flow of your creative juices by coming in, standing by your desk and telling you the entire plot of the new Lord of the Rings movie). Then all you need to do is start tap-tap-tapping away, contributing columns for online newspaper sites, parenting websites, actual newspapers, or writing thinly fictionalised novels about your own astonishing experience of becoming a mother. So you write about an executive who leaves her job to stay at home and look after her family (I'm afraid the family circle is as yet limited to small, cutesy children on the grounds that lumpen teenagers and ageing parents are not such big box-office and do not say the funniest things).

You write wry, unsentimental columns about the day your daughter's pet bunny died and how this enabled the whole family to discuss bereavement in a healthy yet compassionate way. You write knowingly about slob husbands and girlie nights ('why go to a strip club when I can get a man taking off his clothes and throwing them on to the floor in front of me for free at home, heh bele?).

You write a searingly honest piece dealing with the self-esteem issues that loom when men ask, And what do you do? Or are you just a mum?' halfway through a dinner party, after you've interrogated them over two courses about their golf handicap and City job, and you start idly imagining whether they would look more attractive with an axe buried in their skull. Or you write handbooks (or run websites) for mothers just like you.

You become, in effect, a poster-mom for all the professional women in the world who have 'chucked it in' and made the sacrifice of career for children. But what you never, ever write is that you actually spend as much time looking after your kids as you did when you had an office job. Maybe less, because all this new technology and having a home office and email and broadband and whatnot also means that you never get to close the door on work (and, if you follow my infallible guide, you will soon find yourself so tied up talking about your 'choice' and advocating it — a mission that takes you into TV studios and guest spots on Woman's Hour — that you are, heartbreakingly, unavailable for duty at bathtime).

So you want to know who these women are who seem to be having it all, but not walking the walk, only talking the talk? After all, we are peddling a cosy fiction, an apple-pie lie, that our columns and books somehow get written between the morning school-run and an afternoon spent chiselling mashed banana off a high chair; for as we hymn the delights of home-made Play-Doh from our panicroom-style workstations in attics, our column-fodder kids are more often than not sit ting in front of the DVD under the care of a Croatian au pair or Filipina Gastarbeiter who is working her socks off to send money to her seven children back home in Manila.

At this point, I should raise my hand. I plead guilty to writing, over the last seven years, three columns whose titles alone (My Stepford Life, Home Truths, and The Mummy Diaries) suggest that I might be the sort of person who would make smileyface cookies with my children or while away a rainy afternoon with some lovely fingerpainting. As I find such activities considerably more stressful than sitting quietly at a computer writing to a deadline, I talked the talk instead, and paid a series of other women to mind my three children, at least some of the time, while I wrote about the depressing longueurs and tiny, everyday miracles of being a stay-home mum. In honest fact I was, of course, what the Americans call a 'work-at-home' mom, which is a very different creature indeed.

I can trace my pedigree as far back as the late Lady Longford, the illustrious beauty and historian. As I tap away, I can comfort myself by thinking of her, because she once told me that she only managed to write her home-life column for the Daily Mail all about what it was like as a mother (and she had eight children) while closeted away in a corner of the drawing-room, calling out, `Go away, darling, I'm working!' to any child who hovered at the door, But I feel we must include in the line-up Washington DC's resident brainy blonde mom, Danielle Crittenden, columnist author of Amanda Bright @ Home and Things Our Mothers Didn't Tell Us; my lovely friend Meghan Cox Gurdon (another brainy blonde) who has parlayed her experience as a national radio reporter and feature writer into a popular home-life column for the National Review Online; Alison Craig, the Scottish television presenter, radio-show host and newspaper columnist who recently published her account of when she swapped greenrooms for baby poo in her book called Alison's Diary, The Nappy Years. I could go on but. trust me, there are plenty of us out there, including loads of women who just sit right down and write (without being scary, Alpha-type moms like Danielle) in the same cheery, can-do way they run Brownie packs.

So there is a veritable smorgasbord of stay-at-home books by such mothers to choose from. There's The Stay at Home Parents' Survival Guide, The Stay-at-Home Handbook, Staying Home: From Full-Time Professional to Full-Time Parent, The Smart Woman's Guide to Staying at Home, or any number of recent titles written by women who left their jobs, came home, and reinvented themselves as spokeswomen for the at-home movement. I spoke to one, Melissa Hill (author of The Smart Woman's Guide), and I put to her my thesis that women who make motherhood a media-friendly product are just as careerist as their sisters in law firms, but she denied this, 'Promoting the book is part of the job,' she said, as I heard real live small children mewling in the background. 'You can't drag kids around the TV studios. I'd rather be home with them.' As she homeschools her two children, I have to concede that Melissa — even though her webs ite adver tises her availability to discuss homeworking at conferences and in the media — walks the walk too. But then I am also tempted to discount her because she is clearly one of those terrifyingly energetic American women.

But most of us, let's admit it, do it because we're vain and insecure and we cannot psychologically commit to domes ticity, so we outsource many of our domestic responsibilities and market them instead (and I am excited to tell you that my new column, racheljohnson@home, all about the joys of being a 'work-at-home mom' awaits your attention in the Telegraph Weekend section. Enjoy!) Nor can we kid ourselves we are doing this on our own. Very few of us have the exuberant literary talent and energy of women like Beryl Bainbridge and Monica Ali, who wrote their novels (which are as far from mummy-lit as possible) after they had put their children to bed; or the poet Alice Oswald, or the writer Rachel Cusk, who irritatingly has managed to produce a novel and the obligatory book on motherhood while living in a dank cottage on Exmoor—with no help.

But going back to my guide, as I said up top, a husband's an essential piece of kit if the plan's going to work. You can't have it all unless you've got 1. A family to provide copy and 2. The husband's pay cheque, same as 100 years ago, when the women who aligned themselves with the suffragette movement were educated, upper-middle-class women with wealthy husbands and the time on their soft hands to devote themselves to a worthy cause.

So we must acknowledge that it is mainly men at work who enable women to stay home, as Jill Kirby, the author of the Centre for Policy Studies pamphlet, 'Choosing to be Different', who also finds time to be spokeswoman for the Full Time Mothers lobby group, points out. A Eurostat survey revealed that just 28 per cent of 'partnered mothers' worked full time in 2002, and that only one third of us under 40 are in full-time work. 'For large numbers of women, the luxurious option of doing something interesting in between the school run is sadly not available,' Kirby still points out, making me feel terribly smug for having a breadwinner husband, a freelance career (or, as my friend Anatole puts it. a 'vanity job') and all the rest of it. 'In many households, one partner wants to stay home but cannot.'

But don't despair. Help for women who cannot afford to ditch their office jobs for home life is also at hand. Followers of my guide may want to check out a book called How to Help Your Husband Make More Money So You Can Be a Stay-At-Home Mom, available through Amazon.com. It has some very useful tips.

In chapter two, titled 'Assess Your Husband Through Rose-Colored Glasses', the author, Joanne Watson, writes, 'Never mind that your husband leaves his clothes out for you to put away (no matter how many times you remind him!), your husband has great attributes. Find them and unlock the door to more income.' (Her italics.) No, much as we may grumble about them in print, our husbands more often than not supply the infrastructure that underpins our public reinventions as selfless nurturers, unless, that is, you hit pay dirt like Allison Pearson did, clever girl. (And Ms Pearson has also written honestly of the irony of trying to finish her novel about a stressed-out working mother with two small children, sitting at her computer, while one of her two neglected children, six-year-old daughter Evie, would wail, 'Is the book finished yet, Mummy? I need you,' etc.) Very few of us, I warn you, will hit pay dirt. But it's still nice work, especially if you can keep the hubby's nose to the grindstone while you take the credit for articulating the position of women who 'choose to be different' while wafting past your cleaner, au pair and children en route to your desk upstairs, which is where you find me now.

So there we go. You're sorted! As for me, hold on, just wait a minute, will you? JUST GO AWAY AND WATCH TV OR SOMETHING! CAN'T YOU SEE I'M WORKING? OK, I'm back. Kids. huh? Sorry, ha ha!

Actually, I'm a bit busy right now, what with my parenting column, all about this professional woman who leaves her job to take care of her three kids in Notting Hill, which I'm hoping to develop into a novel called My Unprecedented Baby . . I SAID JUST SHUT UP WILL YOU, GUYS? GO PLAY IN THE TRAFFIC!