I'M not a mother, but I’m sick to death of the unnatural focus the media places on celebrity mums as if they’re some special breed.
Why are we constantly marvelling at how women like Kerr ‘‘juggle’’ their career and family, as if it’s some huge struggle that only they face?
MIRANDA Kerr barely gets any publicity, so you may have missed the fact she was in Australia recently on a 10-day promotional tour.
Obviously I’m joking. If you somehow missed the Kerr-pocalypse that engulfed Australian media over the past two weeks you really must have been living under a rock. And even then you must have been diligent about ignoring the world, because I’m not entirely sure Kerr-related news wouldn’t have made it there, too.
The 29-year-old Victoria’s Secret and David Jones supermodel was featured in and on practically every media outlet in the country during her trip here, blathering on about the companies that pay her lots of money to blather on about them.
Watching Kerr blah blah about her organic skincare range yet again might be as boring as watching a banana
take a nap, but she’s earning a wage, so good for her.
What rankled me about the slew of dull interviews Kerr gave during her trip were the fawning reporters who all asked her, for about the umpty-billionth time, how she manages to ‘‘juggle’’ her career with looking after her two-year-old son Flynn.
My problems with this question are multiple. Firstly: it’s completely boring. Every interviewer in the world has asked Kerr this question, and she is yet to give anything resembling an interesting answer.
To be fair to Kerr, it’s probably a difficult question to answer in an entertaining fashion, because secondly: it implies that it is somehow a magical feat to balance work and family, when billions of women around the world do it every day, without nannies, helpers, personal assistants and millions of dollars to go on first-class trips to lots of holiday destinations.
Kerr may be famous and work at an extraordinary job, but that doesn’t make it more amazing when she does something motherly.
Not that you’d know it from the way her daily life is reported in the gossip pages.
‘‘Miranda Kerr and son Flynn bare their soles in Los Angeles’’, blasted England’s The Sun, about Kerr and her son walking barefoot, while the Celebrity Baby Scoop website breathlessly reported her trip to a toddlers’ gymnastics class.
‘‘Miranda Kerr spends day in the park with son Flynn’’, gasped American news station WFMY, while OK! Magazine went completely off the wall with ‘‘Miranda Kerr snapped shielding baby Flynn’s face as she flaunts tiny waist’’.
I’m not a mother, but I’m sick to death of the unnatural focus the media places on celebrity mums as if they’re some special breed.
Why are we constantly marvelling at how women like Kerr ‘‘juggle’’ their career and family, as if it’s some huge struggle that only they face?
Why aren’t everyday working mums ever asked how they manage? Mums who actually have to drive their kids to school in the morning before going to their job, who pick them up again at night and then go home to cook dinner, clean up and tuck them into bed.
Maybe they’re single mums, in which case their ‘‘juggling’’ act is more like a Cirque du Soleil performance.
Why aren’t famous fathers ever asked this question? (Although frankly, Miranda Kerr’s husband, Orlando Bloom, would be lucky to have to balance family with anything at the moment, given his apparent lack of film career.)
It seems to me this intense focus on famous mothers – how they parent, whether they breastfeed, how they’ve lost their ‘‘baby weight’’ weeks after giving birth – only serves to make other mums feel inadequate
by comparison.
Being a mother is a tough job no matter how famous or wealthy you are, but if we could all stop pretending that celebrity mums have ‘‘got it all worked out’’, maybe it would help to ease the pressure on the rest of us.
First published in The Advertiser, February 21, 2013.