IN ALL other ways, it was an ordinary to-do list. Written on my phone, in the middle of the night, working-mother style. Except that this one prompted a revelation. When I read over its five mistyped action points the next day — pay after-care fees, arrange play date, spray tan, call UK boss — I realised none of them would ever have appeared on my mother’s to-do list. They didn’t exist, and I’m not even sure she had a to-do list.

My mother had her children in the 1970s. Her parents gave her a Kenwood mixer as a wedding present and a year later, a sewing machine — for her 21st. She worked as a teacher for 18 months before stopping at age 23 to give birth to my brother and, as the joke in our family goes, has been on maternity leave ever since.

Like most women of my generation, our default position when it comes to The Way Our Mothers Did Things is somewhere between that sort of joking condescension and genuine judgment. They have no idea! They were just housewives.

We want options, opportunities, we talk about work-life balance. Even though, privately, we’re starting to realise there can be no balance between two things that are both fulltime and all-consuming. And broadly speaking, we’re stressed and sleep-deprived. We do everything, and nothing properly. We shout at our children to hurry up in the morning, then look at pictures of them on our phones at work. As columnist India Knight wrote in 2009, despite so many “advances”, ask a working mother if she’d like her daughter to have a life like hers when she’s older and, “For an increasing number of women, the answer now seems to be a resolute: ‘Absolutely not’.”

I’m starting to wonder if, because she didn’t have it all, my mother had it better. No one ever peered at the newborn in her pram and asked when she was going back to work, as though laundering 50 tiny singlets between feeds is a form of me-time that can only be justified for so long. She never used the word “mumpreneur” or spent $200 on ready-made party bags because she was too busy to make them. She never “arranged a play date” and, as long as she kept turning out meatloaves and ironed shirts, the world left her to it.

Since “Ring Mum” happened to be point five on my list, I picked up the phone, needing suddenly to know whether she actually did feel oppressed, bored and restricted, as I’ve always — lazily — assumed.

Or was it … quite fun … to do the gardening in a bikini and a layer of SPF4 Hawaiian Tropic while your children played down the road? Did she think to worry when my brother and I went down to the river behind our house to catch eels, which we dragged to the corner shop in a pillowcase because the owner made pies with them and paid in lollies, or did that just mean a nice bit of quiet for her?

What did she actually do all day, I wanted to know, and was she happy? Which is to say, happier than me?

“Ah …” she says, trying to think. “Well, we didn’t do playgroup or anything because it hadn’t really been invented. So … I cleaned, and I always had a big garden, and I made all your clothes until you asked me to stop. I read recipe books until it was too late to make anything, so I just did meat and three veg … and I read quite a lot. I don’t know, the day just seemed to go, really.”

But wasn’t she, as an intelligent, university-educated, well-read and unusually well-travelled twenty-something, bored out of her very capable mind?

Well, she did learn French by correspondence and write for the town paper but, more importantly, she says, “I didn’t know anyone who ‘worked’, so I was happy at home. It sounds odd now. You’re making me feel like a Victorian, darling.”

That sewing machine and mixer — “two items you’ll never own, I realise” — didn’t feel like tiny handcuffs, if only because “my generation actually were questioning things; we were just excited not to be our mothers.”

Now, though, seeing their daughters go about life apparently on the cusp of permanent adrenal failure is, for my mother and her cohorts, exhausting to watch: “Even all the snacks you have to do,” she says. “The tiny packets and containers of everything. We were trying to think if we ever did that and we realised no, because we were home for every meal and if we went out, you just got hungry.”

Although, she concedes, “On long car trips, I did put oranges in the glove box.” She did. I remember the knife wrapped in the tea towel. “But dad was driving, so it wasn’t dangerous, if that’s what you mean.” Unlike reading work emails at the traffic lights while trying to tear open a packet of organic muesli bites with your teeth.

“The main difference I see is that my life was lived entirely in-house, and yours is entirely out,” says my mother. “We were the last generation of career mothers, and it was all the domestic things we did that gave meaning to being at home. Once you take those away, you have to go outside the house to gain any sense of purpose.” And outsource all the things she spent her days doing: the dinners, the cleaning, the parties and sometimes, even, the parenting.

There can’t even be a question of whether I’d rather live and mother as she did, since the world that allowed it doesn’t exist anymore. I work because I have to and can and want to, and like all mothers, do the best I can at that, most of the time.

But is there anything she envies me for? Anything she wishes she’d had access to, something she thinks we’re doing better?

After a considerable pause: “Well, children seem to drink more water now, instead of cordial.” Right then. That’s all? “If I think of anything, I’ll make a note and text you.” So my mother does have a to-do list now, at least. Although, it’s been a week and I’m still waiting for her reply.

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