Motherload

Lady Writer on the Verge What has working life been like for mothers under lockdown, I hear you cry? Far be it from me to hold back. Here is my view from the edge. My experience of 'working motherhood' is no longer linked to corporate life. As avid readers of this blog will know only too well, I was an academic, a lecturer at Cambridge in the early noughties, but was bullied into resigning after having my first baby, by my female head of department. Blah blah blah, old news. Ever since, I have focused on, experimented with and written about effective practices for working mothers — been frustrated by the ineffective ones, and taken matters into my own hands. Matters, maters, martyrs, eventually ending up on the yoga mat. I have worked from home as a writer and education consultant since 2012, when I told my husband, “I’m not going back into an office again”.  After my beloved mother died, I built an office in the garden, in the Autumn of 2018. It is my Room of Mum’s Own, my She...

Literary Movement Beneath My Feet: Writers on Walking ed. Duncan Minshull Notting Hill Editions,  2018,  £9.99 Beneath My Feet is an anthology of writers meditating on walking, intended to be ‘tucked into a rucksack’. Conjuring visions of hiking with Kendal mint cake in one hand and Wordsworth in the other, it is a wonderful assemblage.  I originally wrote this review for another publication, but managed to miss my deadline by a few days, after which it seemed to go walkabout. So I’ve decided to post it here. After all, this particular gem may come into its own again, if Covid comes back to bite us in the Autumn.  I blame Rebecca Solnit for missing my deadline. ‘I sat down one spring day to write about walking and stood up again, because a desk is no place to think on the large scale,’ she begins.  As soon as I read this sentence, I went for a walk.  It may not have been on a large scale, but early morning constitutionals, golden hour passeggiata, foraging ...

The stereotyped image of the 'working mother' Female academics are writing less during Lockdown than men. Why would that be, then? To enlighten myself, I read an article today – here's the headline: Women academics seem to be submitting fewer papers during coronavirus. ‘Never seen anything like it,’ says one editor.  Men are submitting up to 50 percent more than they usually would I wonder if readers of this blog will be able to guess my response? Yes? No? I'm unable to restrain myself anyway, so here goes…To sum up, and at the risk of sounding like the Daily Mash , this is more fabulous Motherload nonsense from the No Shit Sherlock School of Research, University of Life. Go on then, I know you know I want to. Let me spell out why.  Particular restatements of the problem, as opposed to doing anything, anything at all, about the solution (um... men need to do more housework and let go of some of their entrenched power; women need to stop trying to do ...

Lara Feigel is publishing what sounds like a fascinating analysis of maternal ambivalence, centred on Doris Lessing. Feigel writes , thoughtfully and thought-provokingly, about Lessing and other female writers on ambivalence. Here are the thoughts Feigel provoked in this particular ambivalent mother. I took The Golden Notebook with me when I went away for a month to write the first draft of Motherload , in 2014, and it found its way into the manuscript. I remember reading it in horror, while wind and rain lashed the February house, and I felt dreadfully alone. Horror, because I identified so much with Anna Wulf, and didn't want to have to. Why had nothing changed between 1962 and 2014? Just reading the book made me question exactly why I had felt it so necessary to leave my children, aged ten and seven, for a month, to write a book about motherhood. But it was perfectly obvious why. It had nothing at all to do with maternal ambivalence: of course I couldn...

Last night I went to Watford. There was a good reason – an old friend of mine from college days was doing a one-woman play at the Watford Palace Theatre. Getting into Watford is like driving into  Solaris , a one-way spiral to concrete hell. The Palace car park is a triumph of function over design, lowering across the town centre like a premonition of the world's end. I had to do the circuit at least twice to get into it. Once I was in the theatre, things brightened up a lot – the Palace is a cheerful Edwardian theatre covered in gilt and red velvet, with comfortably bulging balconies. There I sat with my plastic glass of beer, resplendently alone on my night out, waiting to see my lovely friend perform. Fourteen  is a kind of cross between The Diary of Adrian Mole and Kindertransport . It's about a girl with brilliant academic promise growing up in Watford in 1984. She is an only child, and her parents seem to fight a lot. We see her upstairs in her bedroom, chatting to ...

I was beyond thrilled the other day, when a woman came up to me in the playground, and said, "Your blog about going away for a month to write inspired me! I decided to ask for something at work, and now it's going to happen". It transpired that she runs a dressmaking business, and an opportunity came up to run a dressmaking retreat in the south of France. Until now she would have longed wistfully to run it, then turned away to her domestic duties. This time she jumped at it. "What was I worrying about? It's just a week!" she said. "But somehow I felt that if I wasn't there to do every single ballet class and school run…". She didn't even finish her sentence. She just mimicked rolling her eyes and pursing her lips in disapproving judgement. I knew exactly what she meant – it's that continuous fear that we will be judged and found wanting by other women . That if we are not doing things 'perfectly', then we must be castigat...

I was watching teenage boys the other day. Don't worry, I'm no cougar, although I was abstractly looking at their just-formed musculature, their flicky hair, their sulky pouts, and thinking how beautiful they were, these young animals, as they hopped and flew on their skateboards. Our seven-year-old boy was trying to keep up with them on his trick scooter — half their height, without the fuzzy facial hair on his upper lip, and with upper arm muscles that look like tiny chicken dippers. He tried to zoom up the board they had leant against a block in the skatepark, and didn't have the oomph to leap over its lip, so kept sliding back down, bringing the board with him. They stood in a row, a frieze of beautiful youth silhouetted against the setting Spring afternoon sun, calling to him not to bother, to stop trying. Boy picked up his scooter and carried it off the piste, through the grass to sit behind a nearby tree. I sauntered casually over, to find him moodily staring i...

How do I bring this experience to an end? I have just been given the most generous gift possible by my husband, my children, and my friends — a month, by myself, in the country. To come away from my everyday life for a whole, fire-filled, walk-soaked, wind-wakened month, to be able to write exactly what I wanted and have been trying to write for so very long — the release from a bottle I have to stuff myself inside most of the time — has been… calm. The whole point about being here has been its understatement. To be able to escape the hysteria of exams, schools, Forest School clothes, what Doris Lessing calls 'the housewife's disease' through her character Anna Wulf in The Golden Notebook: The tension in me, so that peace has already gone away from me, is because the current has been switched on: I-must-dress-Janet-get-her-breakfast-send-her-off-to-school-get-Michael's-breakfast-don't-forget-I'm-out-of-tea.-etc.  Each morning I have been able to wake when...

This was the thing he never understood: yes, he would give me time to work when I demanded it, but my time was considered to belong to our family unit unless I signalled that I wanted out. His time was considered to  belong to himself and his work unless I demanded that he opt in.    Even the nice ones don't understand what this is like. ' What's the problem?' They say it sadly, trying to do the right thing. 'All you have to do is ask...' *  I did not fall out of love with him at any stage.  I did not fall out of love with our lives here, in this house, with the world we had built around us… I fell out of love with the way I had coped, over the years, with the hard work I had done, the sacrifices I had made… if I fell out of love with anything it was with that competence of mine. I fell out of love with myself.   Apple Tree Yard , Louise Doughty A friend of mine told me about the thriller  Apple Tree Yard the other day, and sent me the...

I Don't Know Why She Bothers has just been published by Daisy Waugh, to join the Mummybook pile. I read it at a couple of sittings, like a bag of sweets in front of Strictly Come Dancing . Nice to gobble, but not particularly nourishing. I Don't Know Why She Bothers , to be fair, wasn't intended to be a heavy read — its whole raisin d'être is that time is precious, and shouldn't be wasted agonising about one's children. Loving them, yes, but not agonising pointlessly about them. It's meant as an antidote — the cure of laughing at one's self — to killjoys, health and safety mongers, self-appointed experts, meddlers and misogynists. It's a joy manifesto. So far so good, I applaud mightily the motivation to write this book. It's important — so important, in fact, that I have been thinking about the same issues for a decade. It's not that Daisy Waugh is wrong — it's that she doesn't go nearly far enough. The book purports to be...

Here's something a bit fascinating. I just looked up the definition of 'jubilee'. It comes from the Hebrew, yobel , meaning ram or ram's horn, the thing with which you proclaim a jubilee. In Jewish history, the year of Jubilee was: A year of emancipation and restoration, which was to be kept every fifty years, and to be proclaimed by the blast of trumpets throughout the land; during it the fields were to be left untilled, Hebrew slaves were to be set free, and lands and houses in the open country or unwalled towns that had been sold were to revert to their former owners or their heirs.  The Romans got hold of this concept, and then the Christians, so that in the Roman Catholic church during the Middle Ages, a jubilee is 'a year of remission during which plenary indulgence may be obtained by a pilgrimage to Rome and certain pious works' . By 1526, it's come to mean 'shouting'. By 2012, as far as this mother is concerned, it has come to mean thi...

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...

http://www.guardian.co.uk/culture/2010/aug/01/art-children-pram-hallway What a fantastic article. I have nothing to add, except why don't WOMEN write articles like this? Could it be that they are holding the baby?

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-10786279 For any mother reading this, of course the answer to the question 'To have or not to have' children is that it is now a fait accompli , enjoy and/or get on with it. But I was fascinated to be sent this link on the 'Childfree Debate' by a friend the other day. I haven't even heard the Women's Hour debates yet; simply reading the comments was enthralling. (an aside: they were far more considered and polite comments than I have seen on the topic of mothers and children in the press: I wonder what made the difference?) The gist is that a woman's decision about whether to have or not to have children is all too often seen as public property. In the main it is women who are asked whether or not they want to have children, are pregnant yet, told they must have children, or told they are unwomanly if they do not yet, cannot, or choose not to. As more than one commentator pointed out, however, the converse is also true: th...

I've just finished two books that in equal and opposite ways have left their mark. One is Singled Out, by Virginia Nicholson, the other Can Any Mother Help Me ? They are both social histories, aimed at exposing the state of marriage and womanhood in the first half of the twentieth century (now ripe for memorialization). Both books take unimpeachably admirable subjects as their themes: Singled Out looks at the 'Surplus Women', the some two million women left behind when all the young men died in France and Belgium in the First World War. Can Any Mother Help Me? looks at what is known as a 'correspondence magazine', a pre-email round robin between invited members, in which each adds articles dealing with subjects close to their hearts (children, husbands, work, illness, loss and so forth). From the outset then, we are prepared for a great deal of Fortitude, Dignified Suffering, and Achievement Despite (a) Housework, (b) Lack Of Housework. I did enjoy both books, an...

Recently one of my contemporaries from Robinson College days became the Deputy Prime Minister. That's just about how I look at the world these days, seething with rancid bitterness as contemporaries sail past me, and I am left tied to the sink... by my own choices. Here's the thought process that regularly assails me: I was the one who wanted to write. I was the one who wanted to have babies. I was the one who wanted to get out of a monolithic gerontocracy, geared only to reproducing the Establishment, through the promotion of an orthodoxy (I was an academic). Well, I have made my bed, had my babies in it, and there I must lie, until the little one says roll over, and my determination to Have A Career somehow carries me through these years of early childhood and out into a glorious future of saying "just a minute, darling", and "mmm, yes, sorry, what was that? GCSEs?", as I pen brilliance, and tour the world basking in my own gl...

Over the past few weeks I have been astonished at the number of people who have referred me to an article by journalist and writer Lucy Cavendish, which appeared at the end of March 2010 in the Observer . I read it with interest the first time it was mentioned, but felt that it was all old news, that we all know the story of the 'Mummy Wars', the stay-at-homes v. the working mums, the power of Mumsnet, and the playground antagonism. I wasn't sure what the article contributed to the debate, or how it took the debate forward, other than to re-present the normalizing perspective of the self-confessed 'Slacker Mum', speaking from the position of non-hothouser, non-combatant, mild-mannered raiser of kids. This, it seemed to me, was a very appealing position to take (supine), which was bound to solicit a lot of empathy, sympathy, and further first-person accounts of unwarranted sniping by mothers on mothers. Except that it didn't: the comments at the foot of Cavendish...