If you hate me, I understand. I am the woman you see running sprint intervals on Wandsworth Common at 7.52am on a Saturday in the new season’s Alo Yoga set. I show up at sports day with a Weck jar full of kale salad that my children may actually eat. I am already planning my husband’s birthday party, even though it’s not until November 29. Everyone in my family starts their day with some form of fermented food. I have lost entire months of my life to overcomplicating meaningless school galas that my children do not even want to attend, let alone any sensible adult. I have also worked full-time since the age of 22, although I suppose I did take two six-week maternity leaves, which I mostly spent banking breast milk and streaming Tracy Anderson classes.
In New York, where I used to live, I was nothing special. Just your typical millennial mother, high-functioning to a fault and believing that every role in my life — mother, wife, daughter, employee, friend — is equally important.
It was a surprise when I moved to London and realised that not all mums were like this. Here, the Bridget Jones type is alive and well, although the kind of woman who is only on time for wine o’clock and has not even drafted a covenant on screen time is becoming an endangered species.
The recurring themes of millennial motherhood started to make sense when I watched Motherland, the BBC series in which a frazzled everymum named Julia skirts catastrophe on every front. She drops off her children at school during the half-term holiday and bashes a store-bought birthday cake to make it look homemade. On World Book Day, which escaped her memory, she strips down to her bra on the pavement so her son can wear her red-and-white striped shirt and go as the Where’s Wally? character.
(It’s not like I’m judging. I’m far too preoccupied with my own insane life to waste time weighing in on how others are doing it.)
Julia was a laugh, but Amanda, the show’s alpha antagonist (played by Lucy Punch) and now the star of the spin-off Amandaland, was much more my speed. She wants a big life and would never even consider apologising for that. She does not tolerate an espresso stain on her Me+Em blouse or a hormone disruptor in her cleaning spray. Even though her Tesla was repossessed, she is a poster girl for stealth wealth. (Although her creamy separates are probably from Zara.) Her toxic positivity can be grating, but a lack of self-awareness is not her curse but her superpower. She does not take great pains — or any pains, really — to acknowledge her flaws or disguise her ambition. And even when it all goes to hell, she forges ahead with the determination of Celine Dion at the Olympics warbling atop the Eiffel Tower as rain smudged her mascara and spectators prepared for the worst.
Despite Amanda’s many adventures, her primary concern is motherhood. On that front she is deeply uncool when it counts, airlifting her daughter out of an alcohol-soaked party and banishing her to her books after bad news from the maths teacher. She endures a soul-crushing job with a smile straight out of a Crest Whitestrips advertisement because that’s what providers do. On the rare occasions when she can’t be around to supervise, she demands that her pampered mum put down the whisky and pick up the slack so her teenagers aren’t left to their own devices, Apple and otherwise.
Some of my Gen X friends whose children are now fully launched did things much differently. They were far more willing to outsource and chill. They didn’t see the value in picking up their children from school if it meant missing an important meeting. They fed their babies and put them to bed whenever Gina Ford told them to. Those mothers bravely railed against the idea that they always had to have everything together, allowing their children to use iPads whenever they pleased if it meant they could have a little peace. They often woke up in a fog of sancerre — and still do — because they had great respect for a good time.
We Amandas are such control freaks
But they were raising children in a dramatically different era. OK, sure, the Nineties and early Noughties were not perfect. Bill Clinton had an affair with an intern and we cloned a sheep, and there were far too many wars and school shootings. But parents back then were not gnashing their teeth about the latest horrors live-streamed from Palestine, Ukraine and Iran, as well as the rising seas and the existential threats posed by AI, Donald Trump and Kanye West. Millennial motherhood was born in a world that gets more terrifying by the moment. And while we conveniently like to forget that the pandemic ever happened, we are still processing its trauma, including Zoom school.
No wonder we Amandas are such control freaks. We operate with military-like precision and subsist on nutrient-dense rations, an aversion to substances and tuning into circadian sleep cycles. Wellness is our religion; we have followed Gwyneth Paltrow for long enough to know more about microplastics than the Green Party. We may be down for a seasonal negroni, but offer us chocolate laced with magic mushrooms and we’ll discreetly spit it into the nearest linen napkin. We like to think of ourselves as simple and straightforward, but those around us know we are anything but. We cling too tightly to our sunniness, often lying to ourselves in the name of positivity. “My bum looks great in these!”; “Surely that situation in Dubai will sort itself out!”; “It’s a tough diagnosis, but Dad’s not going to die tomorrow!”
And the Amandas are a growing tribe. This is probably because we began breeding in the age of Instagram, where everyone is an expert on how to do motherhood better. Even if we would like to avoid the influence of people like Ballerina Farm’s Hannah Neeleman, who give birth every 18 months and try to build a multimillion-dollar business without relying on a single processed food, it’s impossible. We have come to fetishise motherhood to such an extent that even new mum Jessie Buckley dedicated her Oscar — the pinnacle of her professional life — to “the beautiful chaos of a mother’s heart”. So now our chaos is beautiful? Is this my cue to take a new freelance job or give sourdough starter another try?
Those of us raising Gen Alpha tend not to be helicopter parents or tiger moms. We might exercise self-control ourselves, but we aspire to be free-range with our children. This is partly because by the time we’ve made a high-protein dinner, we are so depleted that we’re in bed by 9.30pm. But mostly we dispassionately watch them struggle with science homework because we religiously follow the guidance of the academic and author Jonathan Haidt. You may know him from the “smartphone-free childhood” movement that has colonised the WhatsApp chats of everyone in their childbearing years.
Haidt and his millions of acolytes despise social media and the toxic scourge of smartphones and simultaneously advocate for childhood independence. I personally use his teachings to justify sending my 11-year-old daughter to Tesco, or allowing her older brother to walk home from Westfield armed with nothing more than a Nokia. I tell myself that this sort of parenting, which some might see as borderline negligent, is good for their mental health — also, apparently, another of my responsibilities.
Stop faffing about. Put your head down
It’s a lot. But motherhood has always been a lot. The difference with Amandas is that we believe this beautiful chaos is just another thing to be managed. Remember Allison Pearson’s book I Don’t Know How She Does It? Well, Amandas sort of do. Just stop the faffing about, put your head down and quit feeling sorry for yourself.
If you want to get things done, call an Amanda. I was previously allergic to working with friends, but when my husband and I bought a crumbling house that would be torn down in any other country but here, where it is grade II listed, there was only one person to phone. Lucinda Sanford, an interior designer, building manager and mother of three children at three different schools, wears more hats than anyone I know. One is plastic and high vis, another has a wide brim that will pass muster at Cheltenham.
When Lucinda is not serving homemade coronation chicken from the back of her Tesla at Royal Ascot, she is managing at least 5 building sites, a team of 12 and 30 subcontractors and working furiously from London all the way to Ibiza.
Lucinda is a regular at the 6am class at Barry’s Bootcamp that’s a 20-minute drive from her home and is often seen on the phone, ordering hoodies for her daughter’s class (printed with each girl’s name). She’s the busiest woman I know, and like me also signed up to be a class rep so we can remind everyone that, yes, school still ends at 3.40pm.
How is she so productive? “I don’t think about exactly how I’m going to do it all. I just get it done,” Lucinda explains. “The truth is that everyone is very busy. Whether you’re at home with the children or at work, this phase of our lives requires a massive amount of management on every front. Sometimes it helps if I drink wine.”
‘Like all Amandas, I’ve had challenges’
Nimrita Dadlani, another one of our mum chums, is bringing tech to the rescue of Amandas everywhere. When Nimrita is not immersed in parenting her two children, she’s running the show at Pivot, her legal AI start-up that solves all sorts of problems for family lawyers. Her end goal? To make divorce less painful for everyone.
She had the idea when contending with the complicated end of her own marriage. She realised lawyers were drowning in the messy, fragmented evidence clients bring them — WhatsApp threads, bank statements, screenshots scattered acrossa dozen devices — and built Pivot as the intelligence layer that makes sense of it all. A problem only an Amanda could solve.
“I love a challenge, and I face them head on,” Nimrita says. “Like all Amandas, I’ve had many, but I’m not a quitter. Sometimes in the past that has not served me well, but I’ve always learnt from my mistakes.”
In Amanda, Nimrita found a kindred spirit. “She’s made her bed and she’s lying in it,” she says. “She’s doing her thing, being herself, but also being a wonderful and present mother to her children.”
That being said, being an Amanda is a lot. It definitely causes premature ageing. That’s why I book in to see fellow Amanda and cosmetic dermatologist Dr Catharine Denning every four months. I was referred to her by yet another Amanda and if there’s a reason I look only 25 per cent as exhausted as I feel, it’s because “Faff”, as she is known, painstakingly fluffs my face with neuromodulators, Profhilo and other unpronounceable treatments. We Amandas always look out for our own.
‘I’m not good at being vulnerable’
Faff too is classic Amanda: cheerfully commuting to her clinic in Marylebone from her farm in East Sussex, where she lives with her husband and young son. Before she braves the train she mucks out the barn; she loves her horses almost as much as a smooth forehead. Twice a month, she jets to conferences all over Europe. She navigates all of this in bespoke Knatchbull tailoring, high heels and a Hollywood blow-dry. Oh, she’s also in the process of launching her own chain of skin clinics in the countryside.
“As someone who has been somewhat underestimated my entire life, I tend to be an overachiever to prove to myself and others that it’s worth taking me seriously,” she says. “It also means I’m not good at being vulnerable, which is something I share in buckets with Amanda.”
Sometimes I wonder what my children make of the fact that I rarely stop doing, doing, doing. They certainly notice that when I am not doing I can’t seem to stop scrolling, which is especially rich since they are not allowed to have iPhones until they turn 15. Does this relentless perfection chasing even get me anywhere? Does anyone value all this effort? “Well, I really like your cooking,” my son says tentatively but encouragingly. “And it’s nice that you come to watch the rugby.”
Maybe that’s all there is. Maybe that’s all there has ever been — getting the job done to the best of one’s abilities. Despite Herculean efforts, every generation has failed but also succeeded, no? And besides, the chaos won’t last for ever. Now that’s a beautiful thought.
The new series of Amandaland starts on BBC1 and iPlayer in May
Hair: Alice Theobald at Arlington Artists using Hourglass and Tatcha. Make-up: Niki Mark using Westman Atelier and Lisa Eldridge
