Ideal mum and high-achieving worker: Can a woman be both?

Ideal mum and high-achieving worker: Can a woman be both?

Published: Thu 9 May 2024, 5:41 PM

Olive is a young girl with questions. Questions that are not always convenient for adults around her but they’re important. One such question leads her to wonder where her mummy vanishes during the day. It also becomes a pressing question because while kids her age are familiar with the idea of daddies being absent during daytime, not all mothers are missing, are they?

Underneath this seemingly simple premise of Helen Farmer’s debut children’s novel My Mummy’s Secret Adventures (illustrated by Pavithra Suresh and published by The Dreamwork Collective) are complex questions: of normalising dreams and ambitions of a working mother, that of making space for all individuals in a family to thrive without demanding sacrifice.

Helen, one of the most popular radio personalities in the UAE, is also a mumfluencer. But she is not the one who’s all about the dazzle of parenting. As her followers know, her insights into the messy side of parenting are often delivered with wit and humour, which makes her all too identifiable to women who may have embraced motherhood but are silently coping with it.

“When my older daughter was about six months old, I was having a really tough time,”