Motherload

  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 fis...

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 hav...