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...

The other day I was announcing the fact that I'd wangled a month in the country to write a book. Usually there are very few comments on my blog — but this post was somehow noticed by Mumsnet, and then caused a micro-ripple in the blogosphere.  The gist of the post was that I had felt the ire and judgement of people when I told them I was going away, and had assumed they thought I was a bad mother for leaving my duties for such a long time.  But the comments were an absolute revelation — people were not judging, they simply felt jealous .  I'll write about jealousy another time, but in the heat of the moment, this is what I felt, and wrote as a comment.  I saw afterwards that it's really the heart of the book I am trying to write: Oh no! the last thing I want to inspire is jealousy — I want everyone to find a way to do whatever it is they need to be happy.   — Part of that is a serious critique of the ideologies governing life...