Super Duper Mom

At the age of 40, Morrissey earns a seven-figure salary running a fund management company in charge of £32 billion assets. And her eighth baby is on the way. Morrissey is modest about her achievements, denying she is a superwoman and saying she feels “lucky to have lots of children and a fulfilling career and not to have had to choose one or the other”.

Then again, it’s not every mum who has not only a nanny but also a husband who is a Buddhist monk and stays at home looking after their burgeoning brood aged between 18 months and 15 years. Morrissey was 24 when she met her future husband Richard, who used to work in financial publishing.

He dismisses himself as merely ‘an unremarkable, super-unsuccessful man with an unamazing career’. But on his website he describes himself as a Zen Buddhist monk, with the Buddhist name Ritsu-do. He says he is ‘not a teacher in the conventional sense’ but a possible catalyst to help people find happier and less conditioned lives.

Richard, 43, who provides a private counselling service, studied philosophy at Trinity College, Dublin, and then law at Cambridge University. His wife, who graduated from Cambridge with an MA in philosophy, cut her teeth in financial services with Schroders in New York. She was 35 and already had five children when she was made chief executive of Newton Investment Management, a London-based investment company. Despite her high-pressure career, Morrissey says she does take maternity leave. And she claims to be a firm believer in the ‘continuum concept’, which dictates that babies need constant physical contact while small and defenceless.

‘Although my maternity leaves are short, they are intense,’ she said. ‘Then it’s a gradual handover to my husband and we have a nanny when I go back to work. We didn’t envisage having eight children, but in fact it’s easier now than when we had our first. I was 25 then and we were both working and running to and from the nursery.’ She added that fund management lends itself to family life, because the job is less about hours put in and more about ideas and results. In the past she has described taking responsibility for the laundry, while the school run was done by the nanny or Richard