Motherload

I started both anti-depressants and dancing, back in Autumn 2009. I had come back from a summer holiday to see my husband's parents in Oz as depressed as I had ever been as an ill-treated lecturer at Cambridge. All I knew was that I had to do something to change the terrible way I was feeling. This was also when I embarked on the idea for a book called  Motherload . What I thought was going to be a year's work extended and multiplied, because, of course, I was still  living  Motherload as well as writing about it – because the children were still very young, because my husband's employment was so unstable for so long, because there was a global recession. I couldn't just sit down and research and write, and let everything else take care of itself. Well, I could and did for two glorious years in Australia. But that's another story. After I was kicked out of Cambridge (for having a baby), I was forced to keep thinking up new ways to earn a living. First of all I s...

Rebecca Solnit has published the most wonderful essay in Harper's Magazine this morning. She, or her editor, have also managed to give it the best title – 'The Mother of all Questions'. On the face of it her essay is a response to all the pigs who've ever hounded her for not having a baby, but it is so much more than that. In it she comes up with an excellent term for the best way to respond to a closed, negative, spiteful question: to be rabbinical . I'm not sure that I could borrow that word, being so completely unJewish as I am. But I, too, long for a word for that way of being which allows you to respond to spite by gently reflecting it back, opening up its painful, mean little folds, and helping your hound to see a bigger picture. I'm currently reading Marilynne Robinson's Gilead , a yearning love letter from a dying father to his future adult son. There is that same quality of mercy, and perpetual wonder, that in anyone else's hands would soun...

Tomorrow I start a new life. I am returning to full time work. How am I feeling about it, I ask myself? The answer comes back: tranquil. For the first time in my life, I have taken a step towards making a separation between life and work. Life will take place outside work. Life will be where my deepest ambitions are, where I keep the repository of my emotions, where my children and husband are. Work will be where I am driven, assertive, pro-active, determined, quick-witted, efficient, ruthless, and analytical. Work gets all that. I get a lunch break, to cycle into central London, and to be a working mother. Life gets the best of the rest. Life gets loving mummy (no stress because she cycled it out on the way home); life gets cooking, and reading, and gardening, and writing a blinding best-seller. And children's clothes, and ironing, and deciding which of my many travel, holiday, house extension projects and gadget purchases I will make in the next decade. For many years I viewed co...