Motherload

The writer Matthew Parris wrote in August 2009 about the grief of losing his father  several years on, and I so wish I could send him a letter. If I could, this is what I would say. Dear Matthew, Thank you for your wonderful essay about losing your father. I think what I was so grateful for was the permission your piece gave to feel exactly as I do feel about my own mother's death – that there really isn't a single right way to feel or to grieve. I know that rationally of course, and tell others this all the time. I was surprised to read your piece and realise how easy it is to feel that one's own way of grieving is somehow wrong, or 'not good enough'. Your writing about what it is like, five years after losing your father, and your memories of what it was like straight after he died, gave me the space to feel my own feelings, some two months after losing my mother, and offered me the huge consolation that I do not need to worry about forgetting, or feel ...

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...

Jacqueline Rose's review of a recent glut of publishing on motherhood makes, as ever, brilliant and thought-provoking reading. But, oh dear, I struggled to read it — not remotely because what she says is somehow inaccessible or highfaluting, or jargon-filled (the usual accusations made against 'academic' writing, mostly without bothering to read it). What she says is limpid and multi-layered, suggestive, provocative, and I agree with it. I struggled because there is just no bridge today between academia and other areas of life, and it causes me pain every day. She opens on Tim Minchin's Matilda , noting the wry critique he offers of vicious perfectionism in childrearing. Music to my ears. Try, however, actually saying anything like this about Matilda in Muswell Hill. What it means here is the summer workshop at the local performing arts centre, populated by little girls, whose parents are assuring them constantly that they are (and must remain) miracles while pus...

Roman Krznaric has published a new book called Empathy: A Handbook for Revolution . I feel like crying. Everything that he says is, of course, correct. We are evolved to develop empathic skills by the age of around three. Empathy, the art of listening and putting one's self in the place of another, is crucial to conflict resolution, whether in marriage, the workplace or in parenting. I have myself practised an artificial empathy when trying to prevent myself from screaming at my children — he cites the parenting book How to Talk So Kids Will Listen and Listen So Kids Will Talk , from which I learnt to stop, look and listen when my children were acting out, and try to understand what they were feeling , through asking them intuitive questions. Often, in my experience, you can feel what another is feeling by monitoring the tension levels in your own body. If you start to feel stressed and anxious, ten to one it is not your own feeling, but the feelings of someone close by...

I have been horribly aware of exiting the blogosphere without warning (to myself as much as anyone else) in the middle of last year. The fact is that much of last year was spent in a job that did not allow much time for anything else -- but I actually had to do a LOT else. Writing fell by the wayside, its wheedling, needy claims outstripped by the claims of children, other activities, and frankly, depression. Now I'm back in the saddle, and have been for a month, but have found myself afraid to try writing again. Don't get me wrong, I write all the time, but so, so often for other people, within frameworks, controlled, contained, unferal. This is so much easier than writing for myself. So, in coming back to the blog, at first it seems to me that none of my concerns have changed: I am still reading, and dying to express my unasked-for opinions on what I read ( The Tiger's Wife is jolly good, by the way; and did you see the Richter retrospective; and I'm struggling a li...

Mommy Wars (edited by Leslie Morgan Steiner (Random House, 2006)) is billed as a ‘face-off’ between ‘career’ and ‘stay-at-home moms’. My heart began to sink immediately. Another attack on women, another simplistic polarization of the choices women make and the choices that are open to them once they have children. In fact, however, this collection of essays isn’t nearly as bad as its own cover makes it sound. It’s not a ‘face-off’ at all, but a collection of essays about motherhood written by highly literate women, many of them already well-established writers and journalists. I really enjoyed the experience of reading about so many women’s lives (even though I had a guilty twinge at the realization that pretty much all of them exactly shared my profile, so that all that was really going on was a huge moan-fest). Some essays have clearly been taken from other sources and re-published for the purposes of this book. In that sense there is an element of professional performance here: man...

Isn't it amazing what you can get even out of trashy films? Exhausted last night after a full day spent doing nothing very much, I curled up with the television, and surfed till I hit paydirt: Ice Princess . Picture the scene (but don't ask why I secretly love teenage slush like this). A young girl wants to follow her dream and become an ice dancer. Her mother is a dowdy academic, and dreams of her daughter going to Harvard to study physics. Our heroine practises by herself, out on the frozen pond behind her house, and hopes and prays quietly. Another mother, blonde-haired ex-ice dancer, trains her own daughter to compete at the highest level. She is the original ice queen, glamorous and beautiful, ruthless in her competitiveness, and determined that her daughter will win... at any price. She carries a dark secret from her own competing days.... Of course she does. Eventually this opposition comes into conflict: the two mothers go head to head for their daughters' achieveme...

December 2009 has proven the first major obstacle for two of my highest-flying female friends. One a Director of a major publishing company, and another a partner at a major accountancy and consulting firm, both of them had not only survived giving birth, one to 3 children, the other to 2, but had determinedly gone back to work, and stayed the course. One had managed to arrange her hours so that she went in at 8ish and left to pick up her children by 2.30, then worked at home in the evening. The other had a fantastic nanny arrangement. Both were up at nights, and never missed a school bake sale. This Autumn, both were called into meetings, one an appraisal, the other to inform her about restructuring, and told that there wasn't room in the organization for them. Both have fought back, through unions, and both have or will walk away with payouts to prevent tribunals taking place to investigate constructive dismissal. Neither woman has ever received anything but the highest praise, a...