The Pandemic and the Female Academic or Motherload in a time of Covid

Two people recently sent me a piece called 'The Pandemic and the Female Academic', so I felt it incumbent upon me to clamber back onto my Motherload soapbox, lean from the top floor window of my coronavirus lockdown retreat, and scream into the indifferent winds.

Very yogic.

This is a paraphrased version of what my poor unwitting friends received in response:

Thank you! Mmmmm… thesis: "it's going to be even harder for women with children to get their work done if they are on lockdown at home."  

I don't want to appear rude, but isn't this of the No Shit Sherlock school of writing? This is normal Motherload, merely topped off with the whipped cream of pandemic. 

And BTW I have never heard the term 'maternal wall' before, in all the years I've spent banging my head against it, writing about the nonsense that is combining children and a career as a woman. Speak soon, love, Ingrid.

Although when I come to think of it, whenever I have (once again, and wearily, ever since 2003) raised the idea that having children might be the last great feminist problem, to be solved mainly by men having less and doing more, and that there is also a post-feminist issue with women bullying each other, exacerbated around reproduction, I have been met with stony faces. As if I have somehow said, 'I hate my children'. I don't. This isn't about children. It's about Western society still not being sure what a woman is for.

*

Tomorrow, Lockdown Bush School begins for our nearly fourteen-year-old son.

After some, ahem, discussion, father and mother will be ALTERNATING supervision days, because we both work. My work, after years of Motherload, now earns me next to nothing, but I still can't actually do it unless I have the time and space.

I'm not remotely 'curious what lockdown will reveal about the "maternal wall"' as the author of the article in Nature so artlessly puts it.

I know for sure what it will reveal – massive resentment and antagonism – and just how hard it is to shift the rubble of patriarchy from its current semi-collapsed state.

Not because my husband is somehow deficient – he's absolutely the opposite, as everyone who knows him will attest – he is our lockdown cook! He vacuums! No, because it is almost impossible to loosen the choking hold of Motherload, so deeply entwined is it with our socialisation.

Let me say it again, once more, without feeling: being a 'mother' is not the same as being a 'domestic servant', however normalised that ideology has become in the post-industrial era. 

Yes, I'm aware of the joy of care, the love of service, the deep heroism of humility. I've had my face pushed into this lie for seventeen years – have pushed my own face into it, because, hey, I love my children, and want to be with them – and I have never become less angry.

Unsung hero be damned. I want to sing.

*

The last words my mother ever spoke to me were, 'Do what you have to do, Ingrid.'

There are many ways to read those words. Do your duty. Do whatever you like.

But I know for certain what my mother meant. She meant, "Live the life I gave you through my own painful labour, and nurtured and cultivated in you, Ingrid, live it to its very fullest, love that life, see all the beauty and richness that you can possibly see in it, and push away the bullying and the undermining and the gaslighting. Serve your true purpose, and define that purpose for yourself."

How can I be so certain what my mother meant? Because she uttered those last incredible words as she watched me tear myself in two trying to be with her in Norfolk, and be with our son 100 miles away as he began secondary school. She told me to do what I had to do, because she was giving me permission to leave her and go to my son.

The next time I saw her, one night on, her brain tumour had completely paralysed her. She was no longer able to speak. I drove to London, saw my son start secondary school, and drove back. My mother died a week later.

That deep courage, her willingness to face the end of her own life alone, so that her daughter could be with her child, that pure encouragement, that is what I aspire to pay forward to my son and daughter. That, I pray, is my gift to them. My infinitely strong mother is still guiding me.

And that is why my husband, who is the main breadwinner of the family unit, nevertheless needs to do his share of homeschooling under lockdown. After all, one of the reasons he is the main breadwinner is because it wasn't made possible for me to be. But we are both full-time parents.

My thundering tirade to my poor friend ended: 'They have already got there in New Zealand, with Jacinta Ardern, and it is no coincidence that NZ was the first country in the world to give women the vote, 19 September 1893. That's how long it takes for the kind of leaders we want and long for women (and men) to be to emerge. Social progress takes about three generations.'

See you on the far side of the maternal wall.