Motherland
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Motherland
(written by Graham Lineman and Sharon Horgan)
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Mean, I know. Below the belt, yes, literally. Accurate? Almost certainly. I can do hard satire too. I do apologise if I hurt anyone’s feelings.
But to Motherland itself. I actually watched it last night (as opposed to writing about it first).
On second thoughts (or first thoughts if you’re going to discount my pre-thoughts, which were, for the most part, and though I flatter myself, absolutely accurate), Motherland could be the start of something really interesting.
You see, it’s billed as a hilarious new sitcom about what it’s like for modern mums, but for more than half of its viewers it won’t be comedy, or even drama, it will just be the mumdanity of their every waking minute.
Motherland isn’t a comedy, it’s a documentary.
Don’t worry reader, I did not want to commit suicide. I’d quite like to stick around and make it to old age. I just want society to WAKE UP, and see what it is doing to its women, as it demands that they hold it together for no money, no promotion, no visible source of hope, while being kicked about, put down, and stressed to the point of breakdown. Working Mother, c’est moi.
The Working Mother we see at the beginning, stressed to the point of screaming and crying in her car as she tries to juggle the school run, while fielding calls from work demanding her pointless presenteeism (“I don’t actually need to be there while she prints out a form… yes, two children, yes, five and nine… yes, no, I’ve just got some childcare issues, I’ll definitely be in on Thursday”)? That woman didn’t make me laugh at all. I was just watching myself.
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Before managing to move our children to a primary school within walking distance of where we lived, I used to have a ‘school run’ that took maybe 45 minutes or an hour, Monday to Friday, in a car, to travel about a mile and a half. Too far to walk with very small children. Even slower by bus. No options. I would sit, stalled in traffic, having been that fraction too late to push the kids out of the front door to have beaten it, tears rolling down my cheeks as I realised that again, despite my best efforts, London was going to defeat me before 8.55am. Oh, and when our son was three, the idea was that, in order for him to attend the school's nursery, I was going to do this run THREE TIMES EACH DAY: 8-9am, 12-1pm, 3.30-4.30pm. Six times. There and back. I'm so sorry if I sound fussy – but that's insanity.
I remember sitting one day, near the end of this nightmarish period, in the playground of the school where I was later to become the chair of governors, after one of these runs. I was catatonic, unable to speak, sobbing… in front of a woman who had herself suffered so appallingly from mental illness that she had had to be sectioned. She was trying to comfort me as Samaritans and psychologists must have tried to help her – her words were those of one attempting to pull another back from suicide. I only wish I were joking.
Don’t worry reader, I did not want to commit suicide. I’d quite like to stick around and make it to old age. I just want society to WAKE UP, and see what it is doing to its women, as it demands that they hold it together for no money, no promotion, no visible source of hope, while being kicked about, put down, and stressed to the point of breakdown. Working Mother, c’est moi.
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Back to the show. Motherland is a great title – as we watch, we realise that what is at stake is akin to what awaits us all post-Brexit, an island of narrowmindedness defined by what it excludes, that has been invaded and colonised and is now ruled over by Amanda the Queen Bee, and her spagbol-for-the-children hazing rituals.
The Queen Bee (or Alpha Mummy) in Motherland as in every single playground and cafe up and down this fair land at the moment, is the self-appointed arbiter of what constitutes acceptable motherhood, in the same way that Theresa May is the self-appointed arbiter of what constitutes acceptable Britishness. Anyone who won’t comply or doesn’t conform (for which read any mother poor, single, working class, male (they can be 'mothers' too), or just plain working) is brutally excluded:
“It’s wonderful how you can just… switch off from your family, and go to work. [Beat] I just couldn’t do it, I’d suffer too much, I’d die for my children.”
The Queen Bee prowls the boundaries of Motherland, driving mothers who do anything other than mothering to its margins. ‘Good mothering’, in Motherland, means sitting on the big table in a posh cafe while your children play prettily, making plans to go on holiday and talking about home extensions and mani-pedis.
The Queen Bee prowls the boundaries of Motherland, driving mothers who do anything other than mothering to its margins. ‘Good mothering’, in Motherland, means sitting on the big table in a posh cafe while your children play prettily, making plans to go on holiday and talking about home extensions and mani-pedis.
At the end of the pilot ep, we see the Working Mother, definitively rejected by the Queen, drunkenly linking arms with out-of-work Single Mum, who freezes all her food including cheese and eggs, and who has stoically taken herself to A&E in a taxi after chopping off the top of her finger, trying to make her friend a cheese sandwich – Working Mother having not eaten all day. The final sequence shows Working Mother trying to get Single Mum to take her children on Thursday, so that she herself can go into work.
Working Mother's other arm is linked to that of Stay-at-Home-Dad, utterly emasculated, utterly excluded by the Queen Bee and her servile courtiers. The only other men in (or rather not in) Motherland are: (i) the Working Mother’s husband (calming deciding what kind of coffee he’d like, and putting down the phone on his wife with a breezy “I’m right behind any decision you make, darling”); (ii) the Queen Bee’s husband, phone glued to his head, viciously barking at women and children who enter his home and dare to stray into the living room, as opposed to milling downstairs in the basement kitchen, his trophy wife’s domain.
We dimly begin to realise that the Queen Bee is stranded in the very Motherland she has been forced to create, pushed back into her designer lair by the affluent economic circumstances which allow her to preen in public in the local cafe, and pretend she is looking after her children fulltime, but which really mean she has no purpose in life other than to keep up the appearance of financial success.
The real enemy isn’t Amanda the Queen Bee, and it isn’t even the unpleasant man she married – it’s late capitalism, and its intersection with the English class-based caste system, back in full force after a few hopeful decades of progressive pruning.
A class system with some new layers: those linked arms? The Stay-at-Home-Dad, the Working Mother and the Single Mother? All of these types are outcasts from the new face of the middle class. All three types have been ousted from the class they grew up in, and have been pushed to the margins by the new divisions in our society between rich and poor. All three types thought they were choosing, but were always being chosen for, as Britain has gradually sunk beneath the waves between the Miners’ Strike, and Brexit.
The airbrushed Amanda herself, in this tottering pyramid scheme – the one currently governing our society – can only be sustained on crazy money, the kind of money that can only be earnt in the financial sector itself. Usually by a man.
The whole thing, through the Alice in Wonderland prism of Motherland, can only be sustained on the paradoxical pretence that staying at home to raise children isn’t work. And this is why Amanda and her courtiers are scandalised when Working Mother is discovered eating the children’s spag bol out of the bins, and asks the Queen Bee if she could possibly, like some perverted Oliver Twist… have something to eat.
We can only pretend that ‘looking after children’ isn’t simple unpaid labour if care is dressed up as a perma-party, and exclusively aimed at our little princes and princesses, while the women serving them pretend not to have needs of their own, pretend, essentially, not to exist at all.
If Amanda has to prepare food for another woman in her own home, then she is no longer the Hostess, but a woman without servants – she is in fact herself the servant. When Working Mother asks for food, she rips a hole in the artifice, and the Real reveals its horrifying head.
We can only pretend that ‘looking after children’ isn’t simple unpaid labour if care is dressed up as a perma-party, and exclusively aimed at our little princes and princesses, while the women serving them pretend not to have needs of their own, pretend, essentially, not to exist at all.
If Amanda has to prepare food for another woman in her own home, then she is no longer the Hostess, but a woman without servants – she is in fact herself the servant. When Working Mother asks for food, she rips a hole in the artifice, and the Real reveals its horrifying head.
The Queen Bee can only maintain the lie that she is in control of her reality and her destiny through intrasexual bullying and hazing. Analogously, and further down the Motherland food chain, Working Mother can only maintain the lie that she is in control when she turns up at her children’s school after the insanity of the school run – and discovers it is half term – by accusing a complete stranger’s child of bullying hers, and then, when this lie is about to be exposed, blaming her own children for manipulation and exaggeration.
All of this social comedy is well observed, as if on some checklist of clichés governing modern women’s lives. Every mother will have had at least one of the experiences documented in Motherland.
The wittiest moment in the whole show, however, is when the excluded Single Mother lip synchs the conversation between Queen Bee and Stay-at-Home-Dad – she voices the subtext of their blocked and failed interaction, in which he struggles, manfully, to express solidarity about breastfeeding, and finds himself beaten back by a dominant female primate, all breasts and lips, defending her exclusion zone on the top table in the cafe.
Single Mum is both Chorus and protagonist in this drama – revealing the workings while pinioned by its structure. I want to see more of her. She might just be the future.
The wittiest moment in the whole show, however, is when the excluded Single Mother lip synchs the conversation between Queen Bee and Stay-at-Home-Dad – she voices the subtext of their blocked and failed interaction, in which he struggles, manfully, to express solidarity about breastfeeding, and finds himself beaten back by a dominant female primate, all breasts and lips, defending her exclusion zone on the top table in the cafe.
Single Mum is both Chorus and protagonist in this drama – revealing the workings while pinioned by its structure. I want to see more of her. She might just be the future.
What is, in the end, truly brilliant about Motherland, and gives it the potential to be a new genre of comedy, the Frankenstein offspring of Outnumbered and League of Gentlemen, is the way it veers so crazily between naturalism and the grotesque, the way 'reality' is shown to tip over at any moment from normality into psychodrama in the world of modern mothers. For so many women, that crazy veering is their reality.
Where British culture salvages something from the wreckage of its own self-destruction is through its comic history – at last, the spirit of Monty Python is coming along to save mothers.
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