'Working mum guilt' explored in Jacinda Ardern's new children's book

Dame Jacinda Ardern was just the second head of state in world history to become a mother in office, but the feelings of guilt and ambivalence explored in her new book will be familiar to many juggling parenthood with a career. Katie Pickles offers an adult take on Mum's Busy Work.

Jacinda Ardern’s second book released within four months, following her memoir, is a simple children’s story. Its title – Mum’s Busy Work – appears to still hold true, then, despite her no longer being prime minister.

Dedicated to her daughter Neve (the narrator of this tale), the “busy work” in fact refers to the big briefcase Ardern brings home nightly.

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But the metaphor isn’t laboured in these 32 pages. It’s a book about emotions rather than events, dancing through the days of the working week that dictate Neve’s lifeworld.

“First bloke” Clarke Gayford is there, doing the washing and being present when Neve wakes up on Tuesday and mum is already at work. All three go out for a Saturday picnic. Mum arrives home early on Friday to play hide-and-seek.

In fact, positive mentions of work are thin on the page. On Monday, mum tells Neve she doesn’t always like going to work; Neve thinks, “She looked really tired when she got home.”

There is a welcome chocolate treasure hunt in the prime minister’s office when Neve visits. While mum works at home on Sunday, Neve asks what her job is. Mum replies, “Looking after everyone, like you.”

The book ends with Monday rolling round again and Neve going from stomping her feet at the thought of daycare to dancing with mum in her “clippy-cloppy” work shoes. For Neve, this is mum’s real job: spending time with her, dancing, reading, playing and loving.

The pages are cleverly illustrated by Ruby Jones, best known for her TIME magazine cover after the 2019 terror attack in Christchurch. Her signature spare, colourful style captures Neve’s perspective and mood, from separation anxiety to love and joy.

Of course, Neve didn’t write the book. But, as Ardern notes at its end: "This book is based on the words and lessons taught to me by my daughter […] while I was the prime minister of New Zealand. May every child know that no matter what, they are our life’s greatest work."

There is an echo of C S Lewis in this, who said, “Children are not a distraction from more important work. They are the most important work.”

There’s also a hint of conservatism in Ardern’s insistence on labelling herself a “mum” as well as a professional politician. According to the blurb of her recent memoir, A Different Kind of Power, she also “considers her greatest roles to be those she will hold for life – being a mum and proud New Zealander”.

But this isn’t really a retreat. Ardern is subverting the issue of women and work on her own terms. She’s working through her experience of being “a working mother who juggled mum guilt” to open up a conversation and find a better way.

In the memoir, Ardern writes of her fear that the guilt she felt about being absent after Neve was born would have been reinforced by “guilt-inducing words” from her daughter. "It hadn’t been. What I felt – that constant ache that I should be with her more – had been created by me, all on my own. But tonight, Neve finally asked me the question I’d known would come eventually: 'Mummy, why do you have to work so much?'"

We have to remember that Ardern had only just learned she was pregnant when she became prime minister – at 37, New Zealand’s youngest in 150 years.

She was entering new leadership territory on the national and international stage, and was only the second world leader to give birth while in office (after Pakistan’s Benazir Bhutto 30 years earlier).

As women in paid work often do, she largely left the backdrop of juggling new motherhood with her public role out of the picture. Neve was kept out of the spotlight and Ardern separated her job from her family’s private lives.

When she took Gayford and baby Neve to the UN in 2018, it was maybe a signal of things to come. Now, with a memoir, this book and a documentary about her time in power just released, she is challenging that separation.

Feminist scholars call it an “androcentric” view of work, where women entering traditional workplaces have to conform to restrictive and dominant masculine culture, rather than being able to craft new selves.

Mum’s Busy Work responds to that in two ways. On the one hand, it is clearly positioned as an “inspiring and heartwarming” story about the relationship between a working mum and her daughter.

On the other, it belongs to the genre of children’s books that tackle the challenges of unconventional households, such as those with same-sex or sole parents, or those made up of blended families.

This one is about “celebrating the relationship between working mums and their children”. Message: even if your mum works and you go to daycare Monday to Friday and feel separated from her, you are still the most important thing to her.

It’s a book that will be enjoyed and appreciated by working parents who’ve been asked “where is your child?” and “are you still working?”. And by children, who will hear that having a working mum is OK, being a working mum is OK – and missing mum is OK, too.

Katie Pickles is a Professor of History at the University of Canterbury.

This article was republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons licence.