Motherload

  Injections hurt. But not as much as the disease they teach the body about. I do not want to say that I am cured of my Motherload. Like ham, I think that would imply something… dried out . Preserved, but at a cost. Sliced like salami and sold in packets. Perhaps instead the right metaphor would be ‘inoculated against’? After all, what would I be cured of? To be cured of Motherload – that tentacular, polyvalent term which signifies every woman’s complex relationship with her reproductive function, throughout her lifetime, and always in a fraught social and cultural context – would mean… to be withered, a crone, abandoned, pointless. Redundant. I’m not quite ready for that, being still alive.  No, ‘Motherload’ in that sense, I don’t think can be cured. Like DNA, Motherload partakes of the very stuff of life, it is a principle of creativity. A handy mnemonic to understand that creation always also implies an act of destruction, at once a fusion which elides difference, and a fis...

I have been trying to get into Crow Pose without success for at least a decade, probably longer.  I’ve also been trying to recover from being bullied out of my academic career, by a vicious female head of department, for the simple misdemeanour of having a baby, even longer. Since 2004, as it happens.  Yes, I’m ashamed, both by the ousting, and by how long it takes to recover from bullying. Move on!  I hear you cry. Let go of the past!   She can’t hurt you now! What are you waiting for? Would that it ’twere so simple, dear reader.  ‘Recovering from being bullied’ doesn’t mean lying in a darkened room for fourteen years, fanning yourself. No, there’s been a living to earn, children to raise, a husband to support, sometimes financially, and a few other choice life events I won’t bore you with here. So ‘getting on with it’ hasn’t been my problem. Recovery , on the other hand, healing… well, that’s a very different murder of crows.  All through that time, I hav...

Lady Writer on the Verge What has working life been like for mothers under lockdown, I hear you cry? Far be it from me to hold back. Here is my view from the edge. My experience of 'working motherhood' is no longer linked to corporate life. As avid readers of this blog will know only too well, I was an academic, a lecturer at Cambridge in the early noughties, but was bullied into resigning after having my first baby, by my female head of department. Blah blah blah, old news. Ever since, I have focused on, experimented with and written about effective practices for working mothers — been frustrated by the ineffective ones, and taken matters into my own hands. Matters, maters, martyrs, eventually ending up on the yoga mat. I have worked from home as a writer and education consultant since 2012, when I told my husband, “I’m not going back into an office again”.  After my beloved mother died, I built an office in the garden, in the Autumn of 2018. It is my Room of Mum’s Own, my She...

Literary Movement Beneath My Feet: Writers on Walking ed. Duncan Minshull Notting Hill Editions,  2018,  £9.99 Beneath My Feet is an anthology of writers meditating on walking, intended to be ‘tucked into a rucksack’. Conjuring visions of hiking with Kendal mint cake in one hand and Wordsworth in the other, it is a wonderful assemblage.  I originally wrote this review for another publication, but managed to miss my deadline by a few days, after which it seemed to go walkabout. So I’ve decided to post it here. After all, this particular gem may come into its own again, if Covid comes back to bite us in the Autumn.  I blame Rebecca Solnit for missing my deadline. ‘I sat down one spring day to write about walking and stood up again, because a desk is no place to think on the large scale,’ she begins.  As soon as I read this sentence, I went for a walk.  It may not have been on a large scale, but early morning constitutionals, golden hour passeggiata, foraging ...

Anni Albers's loom This, published in the New York Times, 8 May 2020. Where have you been all my life, Kim Brooks? I love you. Forget Pancakes. Pay Mothers . Yes. Yes. Lysistrata. Cinderella. Wages for Housework, Italy, 1972. Studs Terkel. Work done in the home is work . Cooking, cleaning, making, mending. Labour. Labour should be remunerated. Fairly. It takes skill to clean and care. It can be itemised, shown as a workload document. This work is not invisible. It exists and can be quantified. It is invisibilised, feminised, certainly. But it is not women's work for all that. I needed a doctorate to raise children. I needed a doctorate to ward off the shit that is flung at women once they become mothers (or indeed if they don't become mothers). Shit is just flung at women, and they are expected to suck it up, clean it off, say nothing, be pretty, and be flung on the heap when they're done. Fuck that. Pay carers, or you'll end up paying the ...

The stereotyped image of the 'working mother' Female academics are writing less during Lockdown than men. Why would that be, then? To enlighten myself, I read an article today – here's the headline: Women academics seem to be submitting fewer papers during coronavirus. ‘Never seen anything like it,’ says one editor.  Men are submitting up to 50 percent more than they usually would I wonder if readers of this blog will be able to guess my response? Yes? No? I'm unable to restrain myself anyway, so here goes…To sum up, and at the risk of sounding like the Daily Mash , this is more fabulous Motherload nonsense from the No Shit Sherlock School of Research, University of Life. Go on then, I know you know I want to. Let me spell out why.  Particular restatements of the problem, as opposed to doing anything, anything at all, about the solution (um... men need to do more housework and let go of some of their entrenched power; women need to stop trying to do ...