Don't get me wrong. I love my children. Some of my best friends are children.
But the Summer Motherload. Oh, the Summerload. I've had a few of these 'summer holidays' now, my two children being 13 and 10.
I had to go to work today, but my daughter's holiday has already begun, and for her, this means doing absolutely nothing, with the blinds down. I came home and told her to load the dishwasher. She grunted. They really do do that.
My son is still seeing out his term. Mothers are strung out at the school gate, knowing that the teachers' countdown has begun and that their own Time to Shine is about to come round again.
Back in summer 2004, when my daughter was one, I sold a flat (mine), resigned a career (mine), organised a wedding (ours), secured an Australian visa (mine), rented out a flat (husband’s), and then flew to Sydney to join my husband, who'd set off early to start a new job and find accommodation for us. Even writing that down now, twelve years later, exhausts me. Ever the overachiever, I felt I ought to be taking on this much. Somehow I felt I had something to prove. It seemed to set the tone. Since then I’ve been the person who, every summer, has sorted out clubs and sports camps, drama weeks and fruit picking, trips to the cousins and to my mum's. It's not my husband's fault: he's out there earning a living for all of us, while I bring up the rear, and the kids, and fume.
Each summer I have had to wheedle and wangle working from home, or come to the end of a job, or have quite simply been unemployed. I've been working on the same book for the last six years (writing it, I mean, not reading - I've read a couple more than that, I just can't remember the plots).
When we haven't had the cash for a holiday, there have been the London staycations - weeks of resenting playing referee for endless squabbles, while wondering why everyone else seems to be doing marvellous wholesome things in Salcombe or Sicily. Days spent putting up the leaking tent in the garden to pretend I like camping, and visiting exhibitions the kids run through to get to the souvenir shop.
But it's all behind me now. At 10 and 13, I've decided that, with a summer holiday booked and paid for, the rest of the time they'll just have to amuse themselves, and I'm going to shut the door and write. I don't care how much TV they watch, whether they dress or not, and whether our son has done any work towards the 11+. I will not organise them, because they need to learn to organise themselves. After a decade of doing everything, I plan on hanging on to the things that make me happy.
The short answer to the question: "Why is it mothers who have to do everything?" is economics. It didn't matter how much better qualified I was than my husband: when I gave birth, he was earning more. And that was that, whether he or I liked it. Sadly, because I'm a competent adult, it turned out I could do everything – by which I mean everything else.
And so I have. But my own feelings about being with my children also come into play. You see, for all that I rant about the capitalist economics that put me in this position, I actually love my children, and almost like spending time with them.
In summers past, I could never escape the high expectations I had of myself as Chief Entertainer - no matter how much I railed against the idea that organising and amusing should be my sole responsibility. I am still haunted by these unrealistic expectations. I miss the years where so much effort went into creating mythical summers for the children, which never really came to pass.
I think this gets to the real heart of Summerload. It just isn't possible to unravel the double standard of being forced to do everything for your children (because society tells you it's your job, and no one helps), while at the same time actually wanting to do everything for your children (because you would lay down your life for them).
That paradox - which then turns into a double standard and a power imbalance, because we still live in a patriarchy - applies all year round. The external and personal pressure to do everything for your children is the fallout feeling of gradually inching towards a time when they will stand on their own two feet, and will no longer need you. Summertime, when the living should be easy, but when being the manufacturer of all the dreams means it is anything but, is only a particularly poignant reminder of what is to come, and what you are going to lose.