The Invisible Woman

Mum rage at the bus stop

There are roadworks near our house at the moment, which means the bus I usually get home from the high street is diverted. The alternative is a little single-decker bus that goes through the estate but it goes every 20 minutes, which by London standards is not ideal. Still, on Monday afternoon, when I was exhausted and long past ready to go home, I waited with my two boys and the double buggy well in advance for this particular bus.

Waiting at the bus stop we were the only ones with a buggy. This is important to say because as it is a little bus, if I get on this bus, I take up the whole buggy space and no one else with a buggy can get on. Sometimes I have to get off early for disabled passengers. This is a risk actually, that I often don’t bother taking instead opting for the double deckers and a bit of a walk home. (An option that was disrupted by the roadworks.)

Just as the bus arrived another lady with her buggy walked in front of me and got on the bus that I had been waiting for. I walked ahead to check the space available on the bus and as I thought, only one buggy could fit on the bus. I was livid.

I was really annoyed. I was fuming.

It had been one of those mornings already. At a play group my two boys wouldn’t stop fighting other children; snatching trains and pushing kids out of their way; kids that were smaller than them, kids that had done nothing wrong. “They don’t understand,” I tried to explain to my eldest son. “He’s a baby. Please don’t hit other children.” I begged.

There is a story time at the end of the play group session. This is always a stressful time for me, my children never sit still but that morning they had decided to go off to the back of the hall and quietly build a road with the square mats that slot together like puzzle pieces. I allowed it for a quieter life. Two kids both a similar age to my eldest started to help and it was all going well, until one decided to pull part of it away and my eldest snapped at him and pushed him over. Embarrassed, I had to pick the child up off the floor and call his mum over. He was screaming and it had happened on my watch. “He pushed him, I’m sorry.”

We left early and got the bus down to the high street to get some lunch in a local café, not because they deserved it but because I was hungry, I knew my son would be hungry. I wanted to stay out because my youngest had fallen asleep. I got my eldest eggs on toast, his favourite, and we sat nicely for ten minutes or so. I could breathe again. Easier, I thought with one asleep. Except I must have relaxed too much. I don’t think I had my phone out but I might have been day dreaming or something but suddenly I saw a crust of toast flying through the air. Two ladies screamed as it landed in front of them. “I’m sorry,” I said my face red again.

When we arrived at the bus stop, I’d had enough, I just wanted to get home. I walked to the next bus stop, shouting that I couldn’t believe she would walk in front of me like that, it was obvious that I was there already; I was in the front of the queue. She didn’t see me! She didn’t even look!

I don’t know who I was shouting to, no one paid any attention, except now I know my children would have been and I regret it, obviously. It wasn’t my finest hour.

Reflecting on it all later I thought why did I get so angry? Why was I so annoyed?

This lady clearly had a smaller baby. If she was heading home past the roadworks, it was only fair that she took my spot anyway. She probably had no other way of getting home. If she had asked I might have said, okay fair enough. But she didn’t. She didn’t even acknowledge I was there. When I was shouting in the high street no one acknowledged me either, no one could hear me, again it was like I wasn’t even there.

Much of my time is spent with children and it is lonely. It is lonely because they don’t get me yet, they can’t have proper conversations with me, I am one of my kind in our group of three. I love them, they can be nice children, but it is hard. I spend hours not speaking to adults, I spend hours longing to be elsewhere. I feel invisible to my children sometimes; they don’t listen to me. I repeat my self over and over, yet they carry on doing whatever they want, my voice is just background noise to them.

I spend all my time with them but it is no secret that the value of this work I am doing, unpaid, is undervalued. It is invisible labour raising the adults of the future and yet I constantly feel this pressure that I should be working to earn more, I should be working harder, that what I am doing isn’t enough.

In taking care of my kids, I have left the job I had and gone freelance. I’m invisible now to the colleagues I had, to friends even that I may have met after work for a drink. I joke with friends I don’t see often that I “disappeared off the face of the Earth when I had kids”, which is exactly how I feel. Since having the kids I feel that part of me has disappeared anyway and in that moment at the bus stop, I felt like I had gone completely.

I am in another world now to most of the people I knew and I am not sure that I fit in this one. This world where (mostly) women wander around halls covered in wooden trains and lego bricks, wiping snotty noses and in my case begging my children not to hit each other, to be gentle. This world where I am not seen, even though I am there. People ask how the children are, what the children have been up to, what the children’s names are. They call me T’s Mum or as I have mentioned before Mrs C. Names that are not mine.

I thought of the lady at the bus stop and that was what had hurt. That she didn’t see me. No one did. That was what made me angry, made me shout at strangers in the high street.
Can’t you see me? Am I not here?
Did I have children and become invisible? Have I disappeared?

I wonder sometimes if the problem is systemic. The government don’t value the work of looking after children under school age, as we have seen with their consistent underfunding of the childcare sector, despite the promises they make, it is no wonder that would trickle down.

Is it just mums or is it women in general? It is no secret that we live in a world designed for men, where even things like a phone, which is huge in our smaller hands, have been designed for men - seat belts in cars, our safety is compromised by being not as tall or as wide as the average man. Or is it my age? In my mid 30s I am aware that without youth and beauty I am fading into the background, I know many women find this liberating, but I’m not sure I am there yet.

This sense of feeling invisible has been there from the very first stage of motherhood. In pregnancy, appointments focus very much on the baby and during the birth, the baby is prioritised. In the days after birth, the check ups at home are 90% about the baby, with the question of “How is Mum?” put in at the end, as the midwives are putting their things away. It feels like a passing comment rather than a genuine enquiry. Again even the fact that from the very first days your name is erased and replaced with Mum, coupled with the new routine of putting the baby’s needs above your own, makes it hard to remember you are a person and that you do exist. This is all part of an identity shift, which has, for me, improved over time, but now with two kids, as a mostly stay at home mum, in a society that doesn’t value my contribution, I feel like I am disappearing once again.

I was angry that day because I couldn’t get the bus that I wanted. I was angry because I had to walk ten minutes further home from a bus stop on the main road. I was angry because my children had been hard work and I was angry at myself for not being able to handle it all, for not being as calm and collected as the parent I want to be. I was angry in that particular situation, but really there is more to it and I realise now as a woman, and especially a mother of two, it feels like there is a lot to be angry about.

If this post resonated with you, I would love to hear your thoughts. Please do join me in the comments.

Has anything angered you recently?
Do you feel overshadowed by your children?
Have you felt a shift in your visibility since becoming a mum/dad?

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