So Kylie Jenner goes to Coachella without her baby? If I could, I’d do the same

Remember when we all lambasted Jay-Z for partying at his club 40/40 in New York just 12 days after his daughter Blue Ivy was born? Remember when we criticised David Beckham for going surfing a month after his daughter Harper Seven was born? No, me neither.

You don’t have to have a womb to notice that the media moral crime of “leaving your children at home” is committed, almost exclusively, by mothers. Fathers, particularly famous fathers – the sorts of fathers who travel the world, go to nightclubs, watch sport, drink in bars, surf, play golf, go to strip clubs, dance at festivals, eat in restaurants – are rarely if ever criticised for “leaving their children at home” in order to pursue their personal pleasure. But if a mother, let’s just say here for the sake of argument a mother who makes her living from being in the public eye, goes out in public without her baby a few months after pushing her offspring into the world? Then she, of course, is branded horrible, terrible, unfit, shameful.

Last weekend, Kylie Jenner was labelled a “horrible mother” on social media after going to Coachella for the weekend two months after the birth of her daughter, Stormi. The fact that Stormi’s father, Travis Scott, also decided to go to Coachella, rather than stay at home and look after his baby, doesn’t seem to have quite reached the Instagram radar. I mean, why would it? It’s not like a bottle-fed baby can be just as adequately bathed, dressed, soothed, rocked, played with and loved by a father as a mother. Oh wait, no, hold on: they can. They absolutely can. (I assume Jenner is no longer breastfeeding, simply because the titanic effort to express enough breast milk to cover a weekend away would leave most women red-eyed husks. But however she’s feeding her baby is, of course, none of my business, nor anyone else’s.)

There is such inherent sexism in describing Jenner as “barely a mom”, and urging the universe to #TakeAwayThatBaby, while utterly ignoring her baby’s father, and the hundreds of fathers that undertake precisely the same behaviour unremarked: going out, pursuing their career, leaving others to look after the baby. Such statements also ignore the specific circumstances of Kylie Jenner’s life; she is a wealthy, 20-year-old woman, living in the public eye; she can probably afford to provide a safe, secure, nurturing childcare environment for a weekend; the rest of her peer group probably aren’t parents and will still be going out and dressing up; she makes money from an existence that circles around social media, social events and social aspiration. You might not like her life, but that doesn’t necessarily make her a bad mother.

It’s so hard not to internalise the judgments made against mothers – to let the guilt, the shame and self-loathing slide down into your bones – that part of me genuinely congratulates Jenner for giving all that mum-shaming shit two sweaty fingers in a pink wig. I didn’t go to any festivals when my baby was two months old but that’s because I was a 32-year-old, of modest income, breastfeeding through a particularly snowy British winter. I did, however, go out running. It might not be three days in the heat and dust of Indio, California, but just two and a half weeks after giving birth I strapped my milk-heavy breasts under two sports bras, laced up my trainers and went out for a 45-minute run, leaving my partner to look after the baby.

In the following months I went swimming, went to therapy, went for walks, even went to the pub, all without my baby. Each time I had to remind myself: a happy mother makes a happy baby, I am not a medieval aristocrat, this isn’t confinement, child development centres around the loss and rediscovery of the mother, I need to get out. I need to be a woman, not just a mother, just for a moment. And yet, I still felt guilty. Even though I had spent 23 and a quarter of the last 24 hours with my baby at my side, those short windows of non-mothering would lay heavy on my conscience.

There would, probably, have been uproar had Jenner chosen to take her daughter with her to a festival. There would have been sniping comments about whatever she chose to wear, whoever she socialised with, however she fed her baby. To be a mother, particularly a mother in the public eye is, alas, to be in a near-constant state of failure; the failure to live up to the specific expectations of strangers on the internet. You can’t win, so is it any surprise that some of those millionaires choose to spend their money on nannies and parties? On pink wigs and makeup? On beer and boats? On having their fun while they can?

For many women, particularly the thousands of women bringing up their babies in a government-designed austerity, the need to go out and earn money forces them away from their babies long before they might feel ready. The pressure to provide for a family when your rent, your heating, your home are all just a week’s wages away from being lost entirely makes it impossible to do anything but “leave the baby” with someone else. Do we really think some of those women might not also crave a weekend of dancing, of sunshine, of eating with both hands, sleeping past 6am, not carrying a rucksack full of nappies, forgetting where they put their keys, wearing something that doesn’t smell of vomit on the shoulder? But they can’t, of course, because they can’t afford it. That’s not a question of mothering; it’s a question of capitalism. Which is a very big question indeed.

• Nell Frizzell is a freelance journalist