Motherload

  Injections hurt. But not as much as the disease they teach the body about. I do not want to say that I am cured of my Motherload. Like ham, I think that would imply something… dried out . Preserved, but at a cost. Sliced like salami and sold in packets. Perhaps instead the right metaphor would be ‘inoculated against’? After all, what would I be cured of? To be cured of Motherload – that tentacular, polyvalent term which signifies every woman’s complex relationship with her reproductive function, throughout her lifetime, and always in a fraught social and cultural context – would mean… to be withered, a crone, abandoned, pointless. Redundant. I’m not quite ready for that, being still alive.  No, ‘Motherload’ in that sense, I don’t think can be cured. Like DNA, Motherload partakes of the very stuff of life, it is a principle of creativity. A handy mnemonic to understand that creation always also implies an act of destruction, at once a fusion which elides difference, and a fis...

Two people recently sent me a piece called ' The Pandemic and the Female Academic ', so I felt it incumbent upon me to clamber back onto my Motherload soapbox, lean from the top floor window of my coronavirus lockdown retreat, and scream into the indifferent winds. Very yogic. This is a paraphrased version of what my poor unwitting friends received in response: Thank you! Mmmmm… thesis: "it's going to be even harder for women with children to get their work done if they are on lockdown at home."    I don't want to appear rude, but isn't this of the No Shit Sherlock school of writing? This is normal Motherload, merely topped off with the whipped cream of pandemic.   And BTW I have never heard the term 'maternal wall' before, in all the years I've spent banging my head against it, writing about the nonsense that is combining children and a career as a woman. Speak soon, love, Ingrid. Although when I come to think of it, whenever I have...