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A high price for stress

1st June 2007 by Helena 4 Comments  

You have to wonder where our priorities have gone when two babies are left to die in over-heated cars by their “stressed” mothers in one week.

We have all done stupid things. I once forgot I had three children shortly after Leo was born and almost left him in the park. The anxiety dreams I have had about forgetting children in supermarkets/at school/in the street cannot be counted. But to forget to take your child to its crèche and come back five hours later to find it dead is worse than any nightmare I ever had.

Apparently this stressed Dutch mother had a pre-school meeting to go to. So she parked the car and rushed in, leaving her 11-month old son in the car. Earlier in the week a five-month old suffocated in a stuffy car after his mother drove to work at a laundry in Belgium and left him there.

 “The hectic pace of modern life is the root cause of both tragedies,” said Belgian psychologist Theo Compernolle.

“It’s too much to suppose that a woman can cope with so-called multi-tasking, keeping several balls in the air at the same time.

“The truth is that the brain is not able to cope with both a family’s needs and a responsible job at the same time. The brain can only really focus on one thing at a time.”

Call me old fashioned, but aren’t we all working hard to give our children a nice life? So if by doing so we inadvertently kill them then there really isn’t much point is there? And as for the brain not being able to cope with both things at once, well that’s just nonsense. Millions of mothers (and some fathers) cope every day. OK we may not be perfect and sometimes a school bag gets left behind (like this morning), but we do cope.

And sometimes it’s all worth it. The mortgage may be high, but where would you rather be when a little girl comes wandering into your room first thing, looks out of the window and says: “Aren’t we lucky to be living in the mountains. We got the sun, the sky, the green hills, lovely flowers and trees. Aren’t we lucky mummy?”

Copyright: Helena Frith Powell 2007


Filed Under: Children, Family, Life, Women, blog --> Tagged With: price, stress

4 thoughts on A high price for stress

  • Peggy says:
    1st June 2007 at 4:38 pm

    The real tragedy is that we live in a world where “experts” immediately turn a sad “fait divers” into an opportunity to put working mothers in their place–at home, pregnant and barefoot, financially dependent.
    Why is it that a woman can’t focus on being a mother and holding down a responsible job, while it is apparently no problem for a man to multi-task, being a dad and a jobholder?
    I thought this battle had been fought and won a long time ago. Why does it come back whenever a dead or missing baby comes to our attention? I guess that making women feel guilty is still one of the easiest games in town.

  • Claire says:
    1st June 2007 at 5:17 pm

    We all make choices.
    If you want to change some things in your life, then change some things in your life.
    If you don’t, then enjoy what you’ve chosen to do or to be and realise that an expert opinion is just that : an opinion.

  • alchesay says:
    1st June 2007 at 10:55 pm

    Your daughter sound very sweet 🙂
    when you are reminded in such a lovely way of why you are so tired at the end of the day then it makes it so much easier to be exhausted.

  • Daniel says:
    25th June 2007 at 4:22 pm

    Follow

    Create like a god. Command like a king. Work like a slave

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Helena Frith Powell was born in Sweden to a Swedish mother and Italian father, but grew up mainly in England. She is the author of eleven books, translated into several languages including Chinese and Russian. She wrote the French Mistress column The Sunday Times about life in France for several years. She is a regular contributor to the Daily Mail, Mail on Sunday, The Times, Daily Telegraph, Tatler Magazine and Harper’s Bazaar.

Helena has been the editor of four magazines, including M Magazine, a supplement for the Abu Dhabi-based National Newspaper and FIVE, a high-end fashion glossy, also published in Abu Dhabi. Helena was also editor-in-chief of 360 Life, a quarterly glossy magazine published with the Sports 360 Newspaper in Dubai, part of the Chalhoub Group.

Helena contributes regularly to UK-based newspapers and magazines and holds a Masters in Creative Writing from the University of Cambridge. She is working on a thriller set in Sweden as well as a novel about the relationship between Virginia Woolf and Katherine Mansfield called Sense of an Echo.

In 2022 her short story The Japanese Gardener came second in the Fish Publishing Short Story Prize. One of her stories was also shortlisted for the Bridport Short Story Prize. When she’s not writing, she works as a headhunter for the media and entertainment industry for the Sucherman Group. 

Helena, who was educated at Durham University, lives in the Languedoc region of France with her husband Rupert and their three children.

Bibliography

More France Please, we’re British; Gibson Square 2004

Two Lipsticks and a Lover 2005; Gibson Square (hardback)

All You Need to be Impossibly French; (US version of above) Penguin 2006

Two Lipsticks and a Lover; Arrow Books (paperback) 2007

Ciao Bella Gibson Square; (hardback) 2006

Ciao Bella Gibson Square; (paperback) 2007

So Chic! (French version of Two Lipsticks) Leduc Editions 2008 (also translated into Chinese, Russian and Thai)

More, More France; Gibson Square 2009

To Hell in High Heels; Arrow Books 2009 (also translated into Polish)

The Viva Mayr Diet; Harper Collins 2009

Love in a Warm Climate; Gibson Square 2011

The Ex-Factor; Gibson Square 2013

Smart Women Don’t Get Wrinkles; Gibson Square 2016

The Arnolfini Marriage; Amazon Kindle December 2016

Smart Women Don’t Get Wrinkles (paperback); Gibson Square spring 2018

The Longest Night; Gibson Square spring 2019

 

 

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