'Guilt and fury: how Covid brought mothers to breaking point’, Natasha Walter, Guardian 28 Feb 2021
*
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 support is needed.
That’s where any government does need to take active steps, to fund care work generously. Motherload cannot ultimately be put down, because Motherload is made of love. As Walter and I, and many others all argue, care is an intersectional issue — not caring for the carers is what splits women into fragments of themselves.
We need a care revolution. It’s true. Britain is at high risk of becoming an uncaring society. The blame for that lies squarely with Conservatism as it’s practised in Britain and has been since Thatcher, with the connivance of New Labour.
I have never myself advocated bloody revolution, not after seeing what happened when the French tried one. Feminists didn’t do well out of it. Just look up Olympe de Gouges, feminist and anti-slavery activist… and think of the mess to clear up.
No. True revolution at the national level is through dogged policy work, and good policy work needs to be based on good understanding of what makes a human life in a human society worth living at all.
Everything in this debate about care is about defining the nature of care, its crucial importance as a foundation stone in building any human society, because care cannot be other than mutual and reciprocal. The very idea of care implies an other who is cared for.
We are all each other’s other, all connected.
There are no exceptions.
We have all been cared for at some point in our lives, and will all need care at some point and certainly at the end of our lives.
We cannot escape care, caring or being cared for.
Care is the action that enables people to communicate with each other without killing each other. It precedes everything, holds everything, and its absence marks danger, damage, collapse.
At the level of the individual, it’s a slightly different story, but there is a clear line that runs between the individual and the national narrative about what care is, how to support care work, and why we do any of it at all.
Primarily, the lifelong responsibility of each human is to learn to care for ourselves. This is a developmental, not a political goal. This isn’t the same as saying we are on our own in a dog eat dog world. This is not an argument in favour of individualism. We simply cannot care for others unless we already know how to care for ourselves. What is political about this idea, is that we also need the means to be able to care for ourselves.
It’s quite hard to look after yourself if you are starving or homeless.
Secondarily, our greatest, deepest fulfilment as human creatures is to care for what is around us. Our greatest fulfilment is not making money, or achieving public success. Those things are great. But they are not fulfilment. To care is not a duty, it’s the extension of love for ourselves outwards into the world. And it generates huge efficacy wherever it happens.
That’s what underpins the powerful anger in Natasha Walter’s article — her anger is founded on care – what she cares about, and what so many people labouring under Covid’s threat, to keep the home fires burning, looking after children while trying to keep their jobs, have suffered from the lack of.
No one can be excluded in the terms Walter lays out.
That’s the imperative to government.
That’s how she holds government to account.
By pointing out where the gaps in care funding are.
Her reasoned fury is how change happens. Inch by steely inch.
Motherload begins and ends with ‘because I love myself’ and that is such a hard problem to unravel. It’s incredibly hard to love ourselves when we are already depleted and desperate to be shown love. It’s too late then. Self-love comes first. Because when we forget this, are told to forget it, make ourselves swallow the lie that it is selfish to love ourselves, then, thus shorn of self- love, we become unable to recognise ourselves when our love is turned into exploitation and drudgery. In forgetting who we are and why we do what we do when we care, we make ourselves forgettable.
Care, yes, for others, yes, but on one crucial condition. That we care for ourselves, love ourselves first.
Without love, we are lost.
Really loving yourself. Wow. There’s a thing.
Comments