Ruth Walker: Combining work and family wouldn't be such a trial if my payslips had a couple of extra zeroes at the end of them

Published on Friday 29 May 2009 17:28

WOMEN can't have it all. Well, you could have knocked me down with a feather duster when Helen Fielding, creator of Bridget Jones, champion of singletons the world over and pioneer of the large control-panelled undergarment, delivered that little gem of Earth-shattering obviousness last week. And there was me still thinking a six-figure salary, toned body, perfectly behaved, well-dressed children and handsome, sensitive and supportive man were within my reach. Sheesh!

"There are so many advertisements now telling people they need to look a certain way and have this perfect life," said the 50-year-old while visiting her alma mater, Oxford University. "They feel they should be getting up at six in the morning and going to the gym, then doing a full day's work and coming back late and have to feed 12 people for dinner. It's a modern disease."

The only part of that statement that applies to my own life these days is the doing a full day's work bit. But surely, with Fielding's 20 million fortune, 1.5m home in LA, Hollywood writer boyfriend and two angelic children, she must feel pretty much as close to "having it all" as one can get.

Personally, I've stopped wishing for "it all" anyway – I know it's never going to happen and, if it did, I'd be permanently exhausted trying to make the most of it. But I'd settle for "some of it".

For instance, I wouldn't mind so much that my children have more than a touch of the Bart Simpson about them if they could, just occasionally, resemble something out of the Boden catalogue instead of motherless oiks in grubby tracky bottoms with holes at the knees. Or perhaps the stress of combining work and family wouldn't be quite such a trial if my payslips had a couple of extra zeroes at the end of them every month. And there's just the slightest possibility that my not-quite-up-to-Nigella-standards cooking could be forgiven if I had an effortlessly gym-toned physique and a walk-in wardrobe overflowing with Louboutins. But, alas, it seems even "some of it" is out of my reach.

The phrase "having it all" was coined by onetime Cosmopolitan editor Helen Gurley Brown, who claimed modern woman could do absolutely anything she wanted. But since Gurley Brown and her husband David never had children (she condemned the little ankle-biters as "competitors"), juggling a high-flying profession with potty training an incontinent two-year-old was never something she had to get her lollipop head around.

Then, in her bestselling 1982 book Having it All, she sagely advised: "Never refuse to make love, even if you don't feel like it." Which would seem to suggest that, though she may well be able to do anything she wants, sometimes modern woman may also have to do some things she doesn't. Which isn't terribly liberating, is it?

More recently, City businesswoman Nicola Horlick outlined what kind of detailed forward planning was necessary to combine a successful career with family life (six children – doesn't she ever misplace one of them?) in her book Can You Really Have it All? "I have to think months ahead," she said. "I timed the conception of my children so that my maternity leave could include the Christmas holidays."

So there you have it. "Having it all" has nothing whatsoever to do with cocktails and shoes and fulfilling careers and everything to do with spreadsheeting your sex life.

In the end, though, it's Shirley Conran who gets my vote. In her 1978 book, Superwoman, she claimed housework was a dreadful waste of an intelligent woman's time. Now 70, she admits to having had a facelift – "it's cheaper than a couture gown!" – and bemoans the fact that champagne no longer agrees with her, "but I can still drink gin".

And her thoughts on Britain's most famous singleton? "Bridget Jones is a stupid twit. I'd like to shake her shoulders and hurl her scales off a bus."

Shirley, I salute you.