Motherload

  This needs sharing far and wide — Natasha Walter’s brilliant article on the feminism of care .  * Here’s how I see things, relative to that thing I call ‘Motherload’. Care is the highest value humanity has. My personal metaphor or shorthand for it has long been ‘Motherload’ (as any avid reader of this blog will exhaustedly be aware). The visible and invisibilised labour of care. Others have termed it the ‘mental load’, the ‘emotional load’. It doesn’t really matter what label we give it, we are always brought back to this idea of a burden, and the question of what to do with it. The greatest vulnerability that carers face is not that others exploit what they offer, it is that those who care cannot not care. Whether it is a role more or less willingly or resentfully adopted, or an identity thoroughly embraced and celebrated, those who care cannot put that load down . They do not allow themselves to, and they do not want to. They want to carry their Motherloads.  And that’s where sup

  Injections hurt. But not as much as the disease they teach the body about. I do not want to say that I am cured of my Motherload. Like ham, I think that would imply something… dried out . Preserved, but at a cost. Sliced like salami and sold in packets. Perhaps instead the right metaphor would be ‘inoculated against’? After all, what would I be cured of? To be cured of Motherload – that tentacular, polyvalent term which signifies every woman’s complex relationship with her reproductive function, throughout her lifetime, and always in a fraught social and cultural context – would mean… to be withered, a crone, abandoned, pointless. Redundant. I’m not quite ready for that, being still alive.  No, ‘Motherload’ in that sense, I don’t think can be cured. Like DNA, Motherload partakes of the very stuff of life, it is a principle of creativity. A handy mnemonic to understand that creation always also implies an act of destruction, at once a fusion which elides difference, and a fission whic

I have been trying to get into Crow Pose without success for at least a decade, probably longer.  I’ve also been trying to recover from being bullied out of my academic career, by a vicious female head of department, for the simple misdemeanour of having a baby, even longer. Since 2004, as it happens.  Yes, I’m ashamed, both by the ousting, and by how long it takes to recover from bullying. Move on!  I hear you cry. Let go of the past!   She can’t hurt you now! What are you waiting for? Would that it ’twere so simple, dear reader.  ‘Recovering from being bullied’ doesn’t mean lying in a darkened room for fourteen years, fanning yourself. No, there’s been a living to earn, children to raise, a husband to support, sometimes financially, and a few other choice life events I won’t bore you with here. So ‘getting on with it’ hasn’t been my problem. Recovery , on the other hand, healing… well, that’s a very different murder of crows.  All through that time, I have actively been trying to ‘pu