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...

Yesterday, I came home from scotch eggs and slabs of carrot cake with the children and my husband, eaten outside at the local farmers' market, in the May sunshine, to discover that my son had chopped up the cable to the lawnmower. I'd gone to the shed for something else, the kneeler, so that I could do the weeding. I confronted him immediately, not even entertaining the possibility that the cat, my husband or my daughter might have committed the crime. He stood in the tall grass and weeds at the back of our garden, his mother lowering at him from the shed door, holding out flailing snakes of orange flymo cable at him with trembling hands. He looked up at me, and didn't try to deny it. 'Yes,' he said, 'I did it.' I set off into a furious tirade, appropriate to the occasion, utterly outraged and disbelieving, aware that the neighbours would be sticky-beaking each side of our tiny garden. In my head were mad images of corpses, severed limbs, my son the ...

I wish I'd thought of The Daughterhood . This is going to be huge. So, this book asks a very simple question — how are you going to feel at your mother's funeral?  It's so obvious, but it winds you. This book names something unbearable, and holds us to the deepest meaning of it. To ask about our mothers is to ask about the nature of love, and our capacity to understand love, whether it was given in our earliest years, or withheld. The Daughterhood tells the story of what the authors went through, from Natasha Fennell's own realisation that her mother was not immortal, through convening a group of women connected solely through their wish to improve their relationship with their mothers before it was too late, then the Motherwork that each daughter tried to undertake, and finally to epilogues from the authors' wonderful, articulate mothers themselves. The Daughterhood is unashamedly a self-help group, but is really giving a name to what is already happening...

I am sitting at my table, and my husband is leaving me.  He's going to China for three weeks, and he has gone to drop off the boy, collect shoes, bank money, remember bits and bobs. And I am sitting at my table, only just registering that I will be alone for three weeks.  Except that of course I will not be alone. The children will be here to keep me company, and I will be looking after them.  What that makes me feel is… sad. I spend so very very much of my time managing  their lives, an incredible amount of time arranging and rearranging my iCal calendar, synchronising four lives, orchestrating visits from other members of the family, planning to fine granular levels exactly what we eat, where we go, what homework is done, etc etc.  There is so little time for being or love.  For a person who thinks she does little else but try to understand her own feelings and those of others around her, I actually do an awful lot of doing .  Now that th...

Having spent my time recently haring about to interview men and women for the book I'm working on, I felt like sitting back with a glass of wine and some good TV the other night. I had taped the current series running on BBC4 entitled Women , and lo and behold, our Lovefilm account spat Enchanted through our letterbox. I ended up glutting on a programme about who really does the UK's domestic work, followed swiftly by Enchanted , Disney's deconstruction of the very figure it has itself created: the cartoon version of the fairytale princess. The Women doc was about how men and women divide up domestic labour, and whether it has become equally shared -- posited as 'one of feminism's central goals' (I'm not sure it really was a goal, more an object of critique). Enchanted is about how A. N. Fairytale Heroine comes to question her faith in the ideal of 'Happy Ever After With A Prince'. She learns to value reason, and to listen to her own emotions, ra...