Motherload

The difficult question of what it is safe or appropriate to reveal about one's inner life maps directly onto what it is safe or appropriate to blurt out on a blog or Facebook, where an act of writing might carry you away, and your false sense of anonymity might fool you into thinking that there are no consequences to what you say. This leads to a striptease of revelations, in which it is ever possible to shift the position of the truth back behind one more veil of irony, lying, exaggeration, generalization or minimization. Truth is often only the truth if it hits its mark, which is why we spend so much time complaining to others about what we really ought to be saying to our loved ones or employers. The status of confession and truth-telling, the revelation of the self, in social media, is an extraordinarily fluid thing. Much of the time, the apparent greater disclosure we go in for by using the first person to tweet, blog, or post is in fact another kind of conformity: the Bri...

Why Love Matters (Susan Gerhardt, Routledge, 2004) was first published when my daughter was about one year old. I heard about it, but could not bring myself to read it. It sounded like the kind of argument I was already struggling so hard with that it could only cause pain -- it sounded as though it would tell me that my place was in the home with my baby, and that only mothers could provide the kind of affection and attention that their babies need to thrive. When I finally sat down with it, because of the reading list set by a School of Life course on the family, I could not put it down. Yes, it does in large part advocate a social organization in which it is possible for caregivers to stay at home with their babies, solely focused on their needs, delights, demands and neuro-cognitive development. And that's fine, because it's pretty much the conclusion I came to during my own early-years development experience. Gerhardt would love to live in a society without conflict, ...

So, in November, I have signed up to the 'write a novel in a month' website ( http://www.nanowrimo.org/ ). This means I am aiming to write 50,000 words of my book on motherhood. I have already written reams and reams of words on motherhood, and done a lot of interview-based research. I get up every day at 6am (ok, sometimes I don't make it, but a lot of the time I get up). But I feel terrified, and unable to progress. During the day I go to work, write all day, in a very different style, and execute tasks. My checklists have become clean and ordered, they are accomplished checklists. In the evening, my time with the children has become contained and neat: a bedtime story and we're done. Occasionally, alone in the dark morning, I glimpse a future in which my battery-farmed children will emerge, pale-skinned, into the adult world, devoid of personal interests, utterly narrowminded, unable to cross a road by themselves, and in debt for the rest of their lives because I cou...

Last night I had an argument. Among many other things, my husband and I discussed what we each wanted in our lives that we don't already have. I said repeatedly that I had what I wanted, and that the happiness of the children came first. He accused me of being dishonest about my real needs and wants, which were to keep writing and publish. He said that he thought I would be a better mother if I were a happier mother, satisfying more of my career aims. I pointed out that I would be doing this, were it not necessary to bring in an income. This meant failing my ideals on two counts: not being there for the children, and not being there to write. Three counts: I really hate it when the house gets messy. I explained that this was a conflict which I had to live with, but maintained that I care more about the children's development and happiness than my own ambition. He said that if all there was to look forward to was living with one's conflicts, then what was the point of tryin...

Tomorrow I start a new life. I am returning to full time work. How am I feeling about it, I ask myself? The answer comes back: tranquil. For the first time in my life, I have taken a step towards making a separation between life and work. Life will take place outside work. Life will be where my deepest ambitions are, where I keep the repository of my emotions, where my children and husband are. Work will be where I am driven, assertive, pro-active, determined, quick-witted, efficient, ruthless, and analytical. Work gets all that. I get a lunch break, to cycle into central London, and to be a working mother. Life gets the best of the rest. Life gets loving mummy (no stress because she cycled it out on the way home); life gets cooking, and reading, and gardening, and writing a blinding best-seller. And children's clothes, and ironing, and deciding which of my many travel, holiday, house extension projects and gadget purchases I will make in the next decade. For many years I viewed co...

http://www.guardian.co.uk/culture/2010/aug/01/art-children-pram-hallway What a fantastic article. I have nothing to add, except why don't WOMEN write articles like this? Could it be that they are holding the baby?

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-10786279 For any mother reading this, of course the answer to the question 'To have or not to have' children is that it is now a fait accompli , enjoy and/or get on with it. But I was fascinated to be sent this link on the 'Childfree Debate' by a friend the other day. I haven't even heard the Women's Hour debates yet; simply reading the comments was enthralling. (an aside: they were far more considered and polite comments than I have seen on the topic of mothers and children in the press: I wonder what made the difference?) The gist is that a woman's decision about whether to have or not to have children is all too often seen as public property. In the main it is women who are asked whether or not they want to have children, are pregnant yet, told they must have children, or told they are unwomanly if they do not yet, cannot, or choose not to. As more than one commentator pointed out, however, the converse is also true: th...

I've just finished two books that in equal and opposite ways have left their mark. One is Singled Out, by Virginia Nicholson, the other Can Any Mother Help Me ? They are both social histories, aimed at exposing the state of marriage and womanhood in the first half of the twentieth century (now ripe for memorialization). Both books take unimpeachably admirable subjects as their themes: Singled Out looks at the 'Surplus Women', the some two million women left behind when all the young men died in France and Belgium in the First World War. Can Any Mother Help Me? looks at what is known as a 'correspondence magazine', a pre-email round robin between invited members, in which each adds articles dealing with subjects close to their hearts (children, husbands, work, illness, loss and so forth). From the outset then, we are prepared for a great deal of Fortitude, Dignified Suffering, and Achievement Despite (a) Housework, (b) Lack Of Housework. I did enjoy both books, an...

http://nymag.com/print/?/news/features/67024/ Check this out. An article by a New Yorker, analysing the analysis which routinely turns up the idea that parenting makes people less rather than more happy. The article trawls through a number of American studies by psychologists and social economists, and paints a saddening picture of millions of households condemned to misery by their foolish desire to have children. Along the way Scandinavia is mournfully mentioned and tossed aside. Scandinavia is in danger of turning into Paradise in the popular imagination, haven of all things to all people — proper welfare, good schools, happy parents and every child looking like Pippi Long Stocking, as the population dance till midnight in the Arctic summer. When one actually talks to people who come from Scandinavia, apparently it's not as marvellous as the rest of the world thinks. They have arguments too, and high taxes, and furious arguments about the concept of the 'Free School'. B...

Recently one of my contemporaries from Robinson College days became the Deputy Prime Minister. That's just about how I look at the world these days, seething with rancid bitterness as contemporaries sail past me, and I am left tied to the sink... by my own choices. Here's the thought process that regularly assails me: I was the one who wanted to write. I was the one who wanted to have babies. I was the one who wanted to get out of a monolithic gerontocracy, geared only to reproducing the Establishment, through the promotion of an orthodoxy (I was an academic). Well, I have made my bed, had my babies in it, and there I must lie, until the little one says roll over, and my determination to Have A Career somehow carries me through these years of early childhood and out into a glorious future of saying "just a minute, darling", and "mmm, yes, sorry, what was that? GCSEs?", as I pen brilliance, and tour the world basking in my own gl...

I had a most compelling conversation the other night with a close girlfriend. A term swam into the discussion that I haven't heard used in years: Bohemian. It cristallized a thought that has been bubbling away at the back of my mind for the past few years: that it has become impossible to raise a family in a creative, bohemian, or eccentric way. There seems to be no alternative, or middle ground, between hyper-commercialized, preternaturally childcentric helicopter parenting, or fundamental neglect amounting to child abuse. I think one of the (many) reasons why I question parenting at the moment is that it is so suffocatingly dull, not because children are dull, but because what's expected of mothers is. I was in the school playground giving my children their daily snack of nuts the other day, and another mother, usually very friendly, barked at me: "Nuts? Did I hear the word nuts? Don't you know that you are not allowed to bring nuts onto school premises?" I had ...

I recently went to the Continent, to the Netherlands, to be precise. My Dutch nephew was getting married. I ended up having to go sans husband, whose passport is currently with the Home Office awaiting a stamp of indefinite leave to remain in the UK (he's Australian). Charmingly, they have had it since the end of January, and have just informed him airily that it might take 'up to six months' to lift a wrist and put a stamp in the document. Meanwhile, husband carries on working day in, day out for a British organization, and paying UK tax. This is less of a digression than it seems. What I encountered while acting the single mother in the land of Spinoza, Grotius, tolerance and liberalism reminded me that parenting is a cultural, not a natural, phenomenon all over again. As if I needed reminding. My two children are, by British lights, fairly well-behaved, heard more than seen upon occasion, but not thugs. Not to my knowledge, anyway. But in the house of my decent and c...

I've just listened, twice, to Between Ourselves , which asked the question: "How Should We Raise Our Children?". A subject close to my heart. It was structured thusly: first, a spiel about the psychologists' own childhoods (James's was rather lacking in nurture, he told us, while Antrobus's was blessed with a very present mother). Secondly, an excursion into what children need (love, from one continuous source, a parent or another, until they are 3, then love and more love, with a few more people thrown in for good measure). Thirdly, a critique of the Supernanny style of intervention ('thinking step' only good in extreme situations according to James; 'thinking step' good for irate mummies who need to calm down, for Antrobus). Finally, an answer to what needs to change in society for us to be better parents. For James, it's simple: we need to be Scandinavian. We need to move to a society in which everything is set up for the wellbeing of ...

Over the past few weeks I have been astonished at the number of people who have referred me to an article by journalist and writer Lucy Cavendish, which appeared at the end of March 2010 in the Observer . I read it with interest the first time it was mentioned, but felt that it was all old news, that we all know the story of the 'Mummy Wars', the stay-at-homes v. the working mums, the power of Mumsnet, and the playground antagonism. I wasn't sure what the article contributed to the debate, or how it took the debate forward, other than to re-present the normalizing perspective of the self-confessed 'Slacker Mum', speaking from the position of non-hothouser, non-combatant, mild-mannered raiser of kids. This, it seemed to me, was a very appealing position to take (supine), which was bound to solicit a lot of empathy, sympathy, and further first-person accounts of unwarranted sniping by mothers on mothers. Except that it didn't: the comments at the foot of Cavendish...

Having spent my time recently haring about to interview men and women for the book I'm working on, I felt like sitting back with a glass of wine and some good TV the other night. I had taped the current series running on BBC4 entitled Women , and lo and behold, our Lovefilm account spat Enchanted through our letterbox. I ended up glutting on a programme about who really does the UK's domestic work, followed swiftly by Enchanted , Disney's deconstruction of the very figure it has itself created: the cartoon version of the fairytale princess. The Women doc was about how men and women divide up domestic labour, and whether it has become equally shared -- posited as 'one of feminism's central goals' (I'm not sure it really was a goal, more an object of critique). Enchanted is about how A. N. Fairytale Heroine comes to question her faith in the ideal of 'Happy Ever After With A Prince'. She learns to value reason, and to listen to her own emotions, ra...

A Good Childhood is a report for the Children's Society. I'd never heard of it, but my husband got it for work. I think he was in part inspired to buy it by the terrible UN report back in around 2006, which put the UK at the bottom of the heap for good places to raise kids. The report's been put together by Richard Layard and Judy Dunn, although they are really only the final adjusters, synthesizing an absolutely huge amount of research, that has been done on the state of childhood and all that contributes to it (ie the whole of British society, saturated in consumerist capitalist ideology). Richard Layard is the economist who wrote Happiness , and the report is written in a delightful avuncular style, which just makes my heart melt. It's very tough: we hear about the dreadful state of the UK education system, about mental ill-health in children and young people, and the terrible impact of consumerism, substance abuse, violent games, and overworked parents. Yet because ...

Mommy Wars (edited by Leslie Morgan Steiner (Random House, 2006)) is billed as a ‘face-off’ between ‘career’ and ‘stay-at-home moms’. My heart began to sink immediately. Another attack on women, another simplistic polarization of the choices women make and the choices that are open to them once they have children. In fact, however, this collection of essays isn’t nearly as bad as its own cover makes it sound. It’s not a ‘face-off’ at all, but a collection of essays about motherhood written by highly literate women, many of them already well-established writers and journalists. I really enjoyed the experience of reading about so many women’s lives (even though I had a guilty twinge at the realization that pretty much all of them exactly shared my profile, so that all that was really going on was a huge moan-fest). Some essays have clearly been taken from other sources and re-published for the purposes of this book. In that sense there is an element of professional performance here: man...

In Ransom , David Malouf has taken an episode recounted in the Iliad , and investigated it to find its inner workings. It is a moment of suspense and inaction, in which war has petered out because of a failure of mourning, on both sides. A father’s desire to honour his dead son is pitted against a man’s desire to avenge the death of his best friend, and stalemate has ensued. Hector, King Priam’s son, has been killed by Achilles, the Greek warrior and leader of the Myrmidons. This is in reprisal for Hector’s killing of Patroclus, Achilles’ best friend. Achilles has dishonoured Hector’s body by dragging it behind a chariot up and down in front of the walls of Troy for twelve days, in front of the horrified Priam and Queen Hecuba. He has refused to return the body for proper burial. War is suspended while Achilles, maddened by grief, cannot abandon Hector’s body or grieve for Patroclus. Neither side, in fact, can begin the grieving process: on Priam’s side because the symbol of death, th...

Legend of a Suicide is an astonishing set of short stories and a novella by David Vann (Penguin, 2008). It would be hard to call it a novel, although all the stories revolve around the same theme: suicide (oddly enough). David Vann comes from Alaska, which is an odd enough country to be from in the first place. It’s a little like coming from Iceland, where it’s practically obligatory to be a craftsman or woman, in some line of creative endeavour, whether making clothes or jewellery or Nordic myths. Seemingly everyone worth their salt in Alaska is a huntsman and carpenter, filling their homes with handmade tables and beds, and covering their floors with furs. But Vann’s personal history makes simply coming from Alaska pale into insignificance. Here is a man whose father went out and had affairs, divorced his mother, divorced his stepmother, had more affairs, failed as a dentist, a woodsman and a fisherman, and then shot himself. You can’t trust that all the facts about Vann’s life that...