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...

Apparently the heading tells you everything you need to be frightened of, and talking about, with your daughters. This was a two-page listicle in The Times, in the Body + Soul section, written by parenting expert Tanith Carey, who has just written and is promoting a book called Girls Uninterrupted . Actually, Ms Carey is not an expert in parenting, and, to her credit, does not call herself one on her own site . She is a journalist, with a degree in English and French, who has carved out a career in health, wellbeing, and the parenting markets. That does not constitute expertise, it constitutes being a journalist for a living. Writing a book does not make you an expert in a subject (I know, because I've done it, and know how much I don't know about my area of expertise). My mother sent me this article, because she regularly sends me clippings of the dire things that are going to happen to me and my children if I don't (a) save more, (b) worry more, (c) enjoy life eve...

"A MON TH!" This is the main reaction I received to the news that I was going away for a month to write a book (about motherhood, as it happens).  I couldn't work out whether it was men or women who were more likely to stare in incredulity. As if I was leaving my children on a frozen hillside, or having an affair with a well-known politician. Of course there were some people who got it (I think), who didn't react with a quickly-suppressed cough of scandal in their throats. These people said, “Go for it, just make it worthwhile, get that book written already! How brilliant that you've got a room of your own!” Of course it’s the doubtful  and silent  judgers I believe. Yes yes, it’s wrong to go, I should be safely at home, doing the washing, shopping for the endless routine of children’s teas, monitoring the activities, the homework, the notes home from school, the Forest Schools equipment, doing the Guides run, making inane conversation at drop off...

My beautiful, fantastically intelligent friend, Gill Howie, died on 26 March 2013. She died of cancer, after a long illness, and she has left two young boys. We had drifted apart over the last decade or so, for no reason other than that both of us were working hard, she had had children, and then I did. She was in Liverpool, I was in Cambridge, then Australia, then London, then moving, then management consulting, then researching, then governing bodying, then... then... you get the picture. Busying myself. Gill was a feminist philosopher, and asked difficult questions all the time about Marxism, and critical thinkers. Gill was an activist intellectual. She thought it was vital to live out her moral investigations in her own actions. So she was a union activist, and later, once she was a professor at Liverpool, and a head of department, I imagine she looked after the interests of her staff to the very best of her abilities. Because Gill was one of the most compassionate people I h...

I was chatting to two good friends over the weekend. First of all the talk turned to the rudeness of dinner guests who RSVP, not with food allergies, but with whole shopping lists of foods they just don't happen to like. In one priceless example, a woman wrote back to one of my friends saying, " if you're thinking of a creamy pudding, I'll pass ". After we'd stopped laughing about this, one of my friends said, "oh, and can I do a straw poll on sheet washing? How often do you do yours?" It was perhaps sad in the first place that she wouldn't have thought of asking my husband this question, or perhaps it's just a capitulation to the apparently inevitable. But setting that aside, the point behind her question was her consternation at finding out that mums at her children's school wash their family's sheets every week. It wasn't that this made my friend feel sluttish. Far from it. My friend runs a highly successful marketing c...