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 th...

Summer is as dreadful as ever – it's not that we're not doing nice things, it's that woven into those things come horrible events like having too many friends with cancer at the moment, two with terminal brain cancers. This week I have been an adult. This week I visited my friend who has terminal brain cancer. We wanted to put on a 'play in a day' with her children, mine, and her cousin's, because she and her cousin used to love to do this in their own childhoods. The play eventually ended up as a two-minute iMovie, some kind of insane Arthurian Dance-Off. It was fun, but it was also not at all fun. It is not fun to see children playing, and know that their mother is going to be taken away from them. However much one can dress up the day with costumes, and ice cream, and pasta and iMovie. Yet this is what you do when there are children, because children want to play. They understand what is going on, but they want and need to play. They are full of unquencha...