Motherload

My mother-in-law's raspberry cupcakes Ever the student, I have learnt a lot from this (fingers crossed) minor encounter with cancer. It's to do with how I cope best – through silence, telling almost no one, yoga, exercise, practicality, being Dutch about the whole thing, cutting out any white noise that derails me, being more ruthlessly focused than I normally let people know I am, looking at the positive and the concrete over the chimerical and the negative. And jokes. The negative is, of course, there, I don't deny it, lurking about in an anti-matterish sort of way, but, in my life, I have welcomed in far too much of that, felt I had to be negativity's caretaker. And that is linked to allowing myself to be bullied, and miserable. I'll take Newtonian over Quantum mechanics for the time being. The sub-molecular level will have to wait. What I've learnt is… that a well-timed joke has a therapeutic power as great as a surgeon's blade. I'll ne...

My daughter sent me the following link yesterday, and I watched it with growing confusion: see what you think: 'If Moms were treated like Dads' is the title – so, let me think, what was I expecting? A few witty comments about American women taking it easy as men don't do enough around the house; feigned incompetence – suddenly becoming unable to do the washing; never taking responsibility for parenting decisions? A teasing interlude of reverse sexism? If I'm honest, yes, that's what I was expecting – a Buzzfeed moment I could laugh ruefully at, but privately deconstruct. Or publicly deconstruct, pointing out the basic stereotyping of men and women alike, and bemoaning the paucity of representation of middle class lives etc etc. Instead what I watched illustrated what I mean by 'Motherload' perfectly. In the video we watch a teacher tell a mother to ask her husband's permission before their child can enter a gifted reading programme. We see a ...