Motherload

I set off into this book with a slight prickle about my person. It can get my goat when a book seems to trade in self-deprecating humour, especially when the author is a woman. What is being masked by the humour? So often it is self-loathing, as if the only legitimate entry into public discourse for the (female) speaker is self-negation. Why do women have to twist themselves into such knots in order to speak. Can't they just... Speak?  Perhaps How to be a Woman trades a little too much in this form of self-justification. But its approach to its subject is so unusual and riveting that it can be forgiven.  I have never seen a feminist account of womanhood written in such an irrepressible blend of first person memoir and self-help.  Caitlin Moran has a certain kind of passport past the customs officials guarding feminism precisely because she is not an Oxbridge-educated success story. Hers is a story of success against most people's odds: home-educated -- or rather an aut...

This morning was another typical Motherload day: children need feeding, clothing, walking — no, driving to school (driving because another of the electric window motors died last night, and must be repaired, at enormous expense, immediately) — doctor's appointment, forms to fill in, car tax to pay, my own work disappearing further and further down the list of priorities. Suddenly I remembered that my daughter's swim gear was in the boot of the car, now at the garage. She needs it, of course, tomorrow. We have, of course, received dire warnings from teachers, while perched on tiny chairs in the classroom, feeling awash with memories of childhood admonitions, warnings about Not Forgetting The Swim Gear Or Our Children Will Be Humiliated. I rush out of the front door to walk to the garage. On my way I pass a squat object covered in a black bin liner. A notice taped to it reads, "Piano Stool. Please take". I walk on to the garage, retrieve swim bag, and return ...

I have been hysterical for the past few weeks, roughly coinciding with, oooh, the Summer holidays. There is something terrible about taking a holiday, an enforced holiday, when you have projects on the go, and people you need to keep talking to, for anything to go forward. Every summer, indeed every few weeks, I am told I need to take a holiday. Not for the good of my health, but for the good of my children and teachers... or rather the agrarian needs the academic calendar is calqued on. Summer holidays = harvest time. You couldn't keep the critters in school, or rather in church, so best invent a holiday for them. Parliamentary and university holidays were built around the same idea. Holy-days invented by the church to work around farming. Not so folk could go and do nothing, but so that we would all have food to eat in the winter. Given that we no longer live in an agrarian economy, or rather live in a globalized version which basically does away with seasons, why don'...

Go and see Brave . Go and see it if you have a daughter. This is the latest Pixar, and it's directed by a woman, Brenda Chapman. Hallelujah! A female animation director! Brave  manages to bring together Celtic and Norse legend with Astérix-style animation, and produce a story about the transformative power of... transformation. The rebellious tomboy daughter of a Scottish king rejects her upbringing, and the destiny planned for her by her mother the queen, and inadvertently turns her into a bear, when she foolhardily buys a spell from a witch. In wanting to be brave, and challenge the status quo, the girl finds herself in a nightmare in which she is on the verge of destroying everything she knows, mother, father and kingdom. Her bravery is revealed to be impulsiveness and pride. But in turning her mother into a bear, she also enables the mother to see that she is being literally overbearing, and that the daughter needs greater freedom if she is to succeed in life, and if ...

I was recently flying back from Australia and had a good long time to appraise the genre of Family TV, by watching The Middle , Parenthood , Suburgatory , and Modern Families between halal chicken dinners (we flew via Abu Dhabi). I was surprised to find out how different each series was, even though they were all part of (ahem) one big family. The Middle is a sitcom that looks at the 'squeezed middle' from the perspective of the harrassed mother and father who can't afford what most of their peers seem able to give their children. They have obligations to both the older and the younger generation. They worry incessantly about the impact their own lack of material success will have on their children. They love and resent their choices. Obviously, the answer is that a loving family conquers all, despite problems along the way, pretty much because the alternatives (divorce, adoption) appear to them to be so bleak. Parenthood is a family saga drama, featuring a patriar...

I knew going into reading Kathleen MacMahon's first novel, This is How it Ends , that I would have trouble with it. Straightforwardly, this is because it received an enormous advance, and I'm envious. I'm hoping that by outing that here and now, what I have to say will somehow be more objective, as opposed to simply objectionable.  Let me also say, however, that I really wanted to enjoy it — no one goes into reading a novel wanting it to be rubbish. There isn't enough time for that. You're always hoping for gold. Here are the problems I had with it: 1. Contrived literariness It’s such obviously obvious literary ground. It comes across like a recipe for a 'literary novel' — you can feel the market positioning.  Can you, by the way, have a 'literary novel'? Surely something's either brilliantly well written, or it's not. Surely 'literature' refers to a piece of writing that's so powerful it st...

I loved Jeffrey Eugenides's Virgin Suicides , for its kooky, gothic feel, and the beautiful pendulous, globular writing. His next, Middlesex , meh, not so much. It felt to me like a novel-length splurge on a Foucauldian or Judith Butlerian problem. Perhaps a little precious of me, but it seemed dated, although apparently to the rest of the world, a thing of wonder. I also felt there were longueurs . The Marriage Plot , which we have waited many years for, feels like, literally, more of the same. I found it meandering, for all the wrong reasons. If its title referred ironically to its own lack of plot, this raised little more than a tired lit crit eyebrow in me. I kept waiting for the motor to start, to get under way. I felt as though I kept being fed character synopses. Perhaps this was because he'd chosen to write a perspectival novel in the third person: we move from one of the three main characters' points of view to another, filling in gaps in the (very simple) plo...

Daniel Kahneman was on Radio 4 today. The author of Thinking Fast and Slow set listeners a couple of logic problems. I put down the broccoli chopping and paid attention. A bat and ball together cost £1.10. The bat costs £1.00 more than the ball. How much does the ball cost? I fell straight into the trap — the ball must cost 10p. I jotted it down, and waited for the next. All roses are flowers. Some flowers fade quickly. Therefore some roses fade quickly. Is the logic right or wrong?  WRONG! Just because some flowers fade quickly, it doesn't mean that roses are in that group automatically. And while some roses might fade quickly, it's not because of the reason that 'some flowers fade quickly'. The latter I felt able to 'do': it was a syllogism , and its third part didn't follow from its first two, a logical fallacy. The maths question niggled at me, I felt dumb, because I knew it must be a trap, but I literally couldn't think how to solve i...

Here's something a bit fascinating. I just looked up the definition of 'jubilee'. It comes from the Hebrew, yobel , meaning ram or ram's horn, the thing with which you proclaim a jubilee. In Jewish history, the year of Jubilee was: A year of emancipation and restoration, which was to be kept every fifty years, and to be proclaimed by the blast of trumpets throughout the land; during it the fields were to be left untilled, Hebrew slaves were to be set free, and lands and houses in the open country or unwalled towns that had been sold were to revert to their former owners or their heirs.  The Romans got hold of this concept, and then the Christians, so that in the Roman Catholic church during the Middle Ages, a jubilee is 'a year of remission during which plenary indulgence may be obtained by a pilgrimage to Rome and certain pious works' . By 1526, it's come to mean 'shouting'. By 2012, as far as this mother is concerned, it has come to mean thi...

So I'm driving along, having just come out of a meeting, towards the end of last week. I hear the phone go, and when I have a moment look to see who the caller is. It's the children's school. The only reason the school calls me is if something bad has happened. I brace myself, and listen to the message. "Your son has been stung by a bee. Could you come into the school and take out the sting, as we're not allowed to do it." What? What ? So you're able to take my son and teach him, feed him, demand that he go to the toilet on time, tell him off for not paying attention, let him play in the enormous playground, tell his friends off for being rowdy, tell me off for somehow not teaching him at home enough ... but you're unable to administer basic first aid if he is stung? I go to the school. My son is sitting on his tiny chair, whey-faced, blotchy with shock, clutching a bear, and streaked with tears. He sees me and goes completely to pieces. He is ...

I was chatting to two good friends over the weekend. First of all the talk turned to the rudeness of dinner guests who RSVP, not with food allergies, but with whole shopping lists of foods they just don't happen to like. In one priceless example, a woman wrote back to one of my friends saying, " if you're thinking of a creamy pudding, I'll pass ". After we'd stopped laughing about this, one of my friends said, "oh, and can I do a straw poll on sheet washing? How often do you do yours?" It was perhaps sad in the first place that she wouldn't have thought of asking my husband this question, or perhaps it's just a capitulation to the apparently inevitable. But setting that aside, the point behind her question was her consternation at finding out that mums at her children's school wash their family's sheets every week. It wasn't that this made my friend feel sluttish. Far from it. My friend runs a highly successful marketing c...

This week, my son has been iller than I've seen him for a while. It's been a strange journey, which began with a headache at the weekend. It cleared up, so we went to visit a friend, but on the journey, he seemed to subside in the back of the car like a wilting leek. By the time we arrived at our friend's, he was sleepy, feverish and complaining of a stiff neck. The mention of the neck sent us ricocheting to the local A & E, suddenly envisioning meningitis, undiagnosed and fatal. They declared the problem to be an ear infection, and sent us packing with Amoxycillin and ear drops. I left the hospital, and took him for a treaty snack in a cafe. Whereupon he vomited vast amounts of pink liquid all over the floor, against the bin, up my sleeve, down his coat. Everyone in the cafe froze into a waxworks rictus of horror, pity and concern. This was the prelude to a couple of days of mystifying fever, projectile vomiting, further agonizing trips to the GP, re-diagnoses ...

I've been exercised about exactly what creativity is for some time now. Apparently while I've been exercised about this, others have been busy appropriating it. Which is odd, because I had the feeling that creative used to be what your mother hoped you weren't, so that you'd do well in your exams and get a good job. These days, creativity is a term that is linked more often with enterprise , innovation and collaboration than with drug-fuelled hippies, going off the rails, and lone artists in garrets. What's being stolen is the origin of creativity. It's being sold back to us as a commodity, something we can buy cheaply and easily, but which effaces the origins of the product, like brightly-lit supermarkets purveying white milk in plastic containers, rather than cows. Let me give an example. Jonah Lehrer is a clever young chap, who wrote a book called Proust was a Neuroscientist (by implication, I am not, I am a grumpy old woman). I read and enjoyed ...

A post scriptum to 'Safeguarding Gone Mad in Tescos'.... We were just about on time for the school run this morning. But at the last minute I realised my deaughter wasn't wearing her cycle helmet. So I told her to go back inside to get it, and catch us up. Then I set off with son on scooter, assuming she would join us a few seconds later. Many seconds later it was clear that something had gone wrong. I sent son on scooter back as an envoy, she was duly found, and caught up with us. At first I tried to quell my ever-present impatience by asking if she was all right. But when she said that she'd been frightened because mummy wasn't there, I'm ashamed to say I lost that fragile patience completely. I know, I know, I'm not proud of this. Why do you think I write about it? What happened is that I told her off for not listening to me, and for not using her common sense. If you read the Tescos post, you'll sense a theme here. Into the gap between my expectation...

Ah, at last, a subject for a mothering blog to really sink your teeth into. Maternal negligence. So, I took the two children to the supermarket with me. I had only managed this by virtue of agreeing to let my son go to the toy section. He knows this particular supermarket stocks a brand of some unspeakable tut, which appears to be a 'trash monster'. Delightful. We now give our children replica waste disposal units, presumably to prepare them for a lifetime of cleaning up the environmental disaster we've caused. Anyway, I delivered both the children to the toys, and instructed my oldest, who is about to turn 9, to keep the youngest in sight at all times, and then walk up the central aisle and look down the side aisles for me when they'd had enough of window shopping. I peacefully got on with my shop, congratulating myself that we had at last got to a point where I could let my daughter be responsible, give her a little independence, and not have them trail after me, whin...