Groundhog Day
Well, once again, it's a delightful day here in Motherloadland. Its early September, Indian Summer, the leaves are on the turn, the tan is fading, the children have skipped off to school in their new uniform and shoes, little faces shining and upturned for new knowledge.
I feel I have been here before. It feels a lot like all the other Septembers I've had in my nearly five decades – I used to be the child skipper, now I am the adult skipper. Wait! Let me reach for an apt, Tim Minchin-flavoured metaphor – my life feels like Groundhog Day.
I myself have just returned from comparing plastic clothes airers in Tescos and John Lewis, paying over good money for the one that looks least likely to break in my hand, and for yet more socks for our son, because he seems to eat them. I've made a coffee (another one!) and I'm just sitting down to finish writing a book.
Only I can't write, because I'm SO BLOODY FURIOUS ALL THE TIME. As I seem to have been since 2003.
Let me give you a cultural flavour of why my inner Furies are off the leash. Again.
Coming soon to a screen near me is the film Captain Fantastic, by all accounts a riveting tale of Swiss Family Robinson meets Bear Grylls meets Frankenstein – a radical libertarian leftist father decides to raise his six children in the woods, to take them close to nature, to teach them to live off-grid, to learn to sustain themselves, and to read Middlemarch by candlelight in the evenings – as we all did in the Good Old Days.
Oddly enough, his muscular eco experiment (one radical step on from muscular Christianity-cum-Thoreau-cum-New World Settler-kumquat) comes a cropper when he has to return to the City, that malign purveyor of all of humanity's ills. Turns out he's forgotten to teach his children how to cooperate with others. He's un-hothoused them.
Qua film, it sounds like a great thought experiment – the perils of extreme parenting! Don't make your kids do maths GCSE aged 10! – but, as usual, the mother, who in most childrearing scenarios, whether woods or suburbs-based, is doing all the work, is silenced.
I sympathise with Viggo Mortensen. I mean, I've tried to raise my kids off-grid from my base in the woodlands of North London for the last thirteen years, but we've only got as far as me yelling at them every day for leaving the TV on standby. My biggest victory is making my son walk to school – obviously when the paedophiles aren't out to get him. Oh – and he can poach an egg.
My husband suggested, lightheartedly, that we watch Motherland on iplayer tomorrow. Poor man. Why does he do it to himself? It sounded Fun – until I read the chatty Guardian review, written, obviously (and so wittily and self-deprecatingly), by a man – a new father! – hilariously terrified by the apocalyptic vision of his wife's future stress.
How marvellous it must be to have a day job in which you review television programmes your wife is too tired to watch, because she is looking after your baby! How deftly ironic that you include this in your review! How hilarious that the 'jokes – punchlines, slapstick, blink-and-you-miss-them visual gags' that apparently feature in Motherland will constitute the actual lived experience of your spouse for the next decade! Because the 'exaggerations' of Motherland sound a lot like my daily reality used to be – until I started to say, hand on heart, and as a loving mother of two, and former management consultant, 'I don't care, do it yourself'.
Wait until she's whey-faced with it, mate, wait until she's standing screaming on the pavement at her little sweetness, because he is being an arse, and would rather watch television and eat biscuits than walk to a piano lesson.
Wait until she's crying every evening, wondering why her dutiful and well-executed middle-class education never prepared her to have her career stuffed, her body shafted and shamed, to have complete strangers tut, roll their eyes, or just plain tell her off in the street, to be reduced to endless cooking and tidying and decluttering the family home, frantic with deadlines for endless primary school performances, without a social life, all the while being told she is Having It All, when what it feels like is the unreconstructed 1950s.
Then come and tell me over a quinoaccino how funny, ironic and post-postmodern Motherland is.
(Addendum: having now watched Motherland I can vouch for my own hyperbole. Motherload is when hyperbole IS reality in a woman's life. Motherland is supposed to be a comedy, but to me it was a documentary).
Make no mistake – if we have got to the point where our culture is wall-to-wall carpeted with ironic parenting STUFF that is constantly, subtly, hilariously pointing out how hard it is to be a mother, how overlooked, how put down, how competitive, how overworked, what witches and bitches and gossips and sharp-elbows all mothers are – while simultaneously making feeble jokes about how emasculating this is for fathers (Mum on the BBC, Josh Howie's Losing It, Radio 4, How it Works – The Mum, the hilarious faux-Ladybird book lampooning maternal drudgery, Modern Family, Outnumbered)… then we are in trouble.
Not to mention – but I've started so I'll finish – today's Woman's Hour offering, the erudite Professor Alison Gopnik, with her new book The Gardener and the Carpenter, informing us (again) that children are Little Scientists, that their play is about hypothesis-testing, about how we need to grow our children like plants in a garden, not put them together like wooden chairs. I know! Bad parents! Beat them with their own woodwork tools.
Does Alison Gopnik have any idea what it costs to Raise a Child Like a Garden? I understand, exactly, what she is arguing – I used to argue idealistic things like this when I was a researcher in a university writing beautifully-phrased pieces about French literature. Play is marvellous! I still love play! Back then, I imagined myself remaking society as I raised children in a gentle aura of calm nurturing, listening and love.
That was before I became an actual modern mother. Perhaps Professor Alison Gopnik would like to come to my house and help me when I'm trying to make sure my kids play and do the moronic spelling list ready for a test on Wednesday, and focus on extra maths, and that they're off the TV/phone/social BLOODY media and that you've done the weekly shop and that they have clean clothes and enough socks, because they seem to eat them. BECAUSE NO ONE IS HELPING AND EVERYONE IS CRITICISING. Where's my play? Everything in my garden is dying, but nobody's building me any chairs.
Nothing is changing for women – in fact discrimination against pregnant women in the workplace has actually got worse between 2005 and 2016, and now we're supposed to find it funny, too?
How many feminists does it take to change a society? It doesn't. It takes a society to accept that women are female, and not men in dresses or drudges in pinnies. Or stupid.
I think we may have been here before. We're on our second female Prime Minister, first time as tragedy, second time as farce.
I'm exhausted. I'm furious. I'm experiencing Groundhog Day. Please wake me up when it's all over.
I feel I have been here before. It feels a lot like all the other Septembers I've had in my nearly five decades – I used to be the child skipper, now I am the adult skipper. Wait! Let me reach for an apt, Tim Minchin-flavoured metaphor – my life feels like Groundhog Day.
I myself have just returned from comparing plastic clothes airers in Tescos and John Lewis, paying over good money for the one that looks least likely to break in my hand, and for yet more socks for our son, because he seems to eat them. I've made a coffee (another one!) and I'm just sitting down to finish writing a book.
Only I can't write, because I'm SO BLOODY FURIOUS ALL THE TIME. As I seem to have been since 2003.
Let me give you a cultural flavour of why my inner Furies are off the leash. Again.
Coming soon to a screen near me is the film Captain Fantastic, by all accounts a riveting tale of Swiss Family Robinson meets Bear Grylls meets Frankenstein – a radical libertarian leftist father decides to raise his six children in the woods, to take them close to nature, to teach them to live off-grid, to learn to sustain themselves, and to read Middlemarch by candlelight in the evenings – as we all did in the Good Old Days.
Oddly enough, his muscular eco experiment (one radical step on from muscular Christianity-cum-Thoreau-cum-New World Settler-kumquat) comes a cropper when he has to return to the City, that malign purveyor of all of humanity's ills. Turns out he's forgotten to teach his children how to cooperate with others. He's un-hothoused them.
Qua film, it sounds like a great thought experiment – the perils of extreme parenting! Don't make your kids do maths GCSE aged 10! – but, as usual, the mother, who in most childrearing scenarios, whether woods or suburbs-based, is doing all the work, is silenced.
I sympathise with Viggo Mortensen. I mean, I've tried to raise my kids off-grid from my base in the woodlands of North London for the last thirteen years, but we've only got as far as me yelling at them every day for leaving the TV on standby. My biggest victory is making my son walk to school – obviously when the paedophiles aren't out to get him. Oh – and he can poach an egg.
My husband suggested, lightheartedly, that we watch Motherland on iplayer tomorrow. Poor man. Why does he do it to himself? It sounded Fun – until I read the chatty Guardian review, written, obviously (and so wittily and self-deprecatingly), by a man – a new father! – hilariously terrified by the apocalyptic vision of his wife's future stress.
How marvellous it must be to have a day job in which you review television programmes your wife is too tired to watch, because she is looking after your baby! How deftly ironic that you include this in your review! How hilarious that the 'jokes – punchlines, slapstick, blink-and-you-miss-them visual gags' that apparently feature in Motherland will constitute the actual lived experience of your spouse for the next decade! Because the 'exaggerations' of Motherland sound a lot like my daily reality used to be – until I started to say, hand on heart, and as a loving mother of two, and former management consultant, 'I don't care, do it yourself'.
Wait until she's whey-faced with it, mate, wait until she's standing screaming on the pavement at her little sweetness, because he is being an arse, and would rather watch television and eat biscuits than walk to a piano lesson.
Wait until she's crying every evening, wondering why her dutiful and well-executed middle-class education never prepared her to have her career stuffed, her body shafted and shamed, to have complete strangers tut, roll their eyes, or just plain tell her off in the street, to be reduced to endless cooking and tidying and decluttering the family home, frantic with deadlines for endless primary school performances, without a social life, all the while being told she is Having It All, when what it feels like is the unreconstructed 1950s.
Then come and tell me over a quinoaccino how funny, ironic and post-postmodern Motherland is.
(Addendum: having now watched Motherland I can vouch for my own hyperbole. Motherload is when hyperbole IS reality in a woman's life. Motherland is supposed to be a comedy, but to me it was a documentary).
Make no mistake – if we have got to the point where our culture is wall-to-wall carpeted with ironic parenting STUFF that is constantly, subtly, hilariously pointing out how hard it is to be a mother, how overlooked, how put down, how competitive, how overworked, what witches and bitches and gossips and sharp-elbows all mothers are – while simultaneously making feeble jokes about how emasculating this is for fathers (Mum on the BBC, Josh Howie's Losing It, Radio 4, How it Works – The Mum, the hilarious faux-Ladybird book lampooning maternal drudgery, Modern Family, Outnumbered)… then we are in trouble.
Not to mention – but I've started so I'll finish – today's Woman's Hour offering, the erudite Professor Alison Gopnik, with her new book The Gardener and the Carpenter, informing us (again) that children are Little Scientists, that their play is about hypothesis-testing, about how we need to grow our children like plants in a garden, not put them together like wooden chairs. I know! Bad parents! Beat them with their own woodwork tools.
Does Alison Gopnik have any idea what it costs to Raise a Child Like a Garden? I understand, exactly, what she is arguing – I used to argue idealistic things like this when I was a researcher in a university writing beautifully-phrased pieces about French literature. Play is marvellous! I still love play! Back then, I imagined myself remaking society as I raised children in a gentle aura of calm nurturing, listening and love.
That was before I became an actual modern mother. Perhaps Professor Alison Gopnik would like to come to my house and help me when I'm trying to make sure my kids play and do the moronic spelling list ready for a test on Wednesday, and focus on extra maths, and that they're off the TV/phone/social BLOODY media and that you've done the weekly shop and that they have clean clothes and enough socks, because they seem to eat them. BECAUSE NO ONE IS HELPING AND EVERYONE IS CRITICISING. Where's my play? Everything in my garden is dying, but nobody's building me any chairs.
Nothing is changing for women – in fact discrimination against pregnant women in the workplace has actually got worse between 2005 and 2016, and now we're supposed to find it funny, too?
How many feminists does it take to change a society? It doesn't. It takes a society to accept that women are female, and not men in dresses or drudges in pinnies. Or stupid.
I think we may have been here before. We're on our second female Prime Minister, first time as tragedy, second time as farce.
I'm exhausted. I'm furious. I'm experiencing Groundhog Day. Please wake me up when it's all over.
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