Motherload

Yesterday I took the children to Tate Britain for a Family Day. They had given over some five of the rooms to art activities for children: a cardboard city, costumes imprinted with famous artworks which children could use to act out playlets, a musical section with amplified instruments, and a room filled with building blocks. The place was mayhem. The cafe was manned by just one server, and the queue was round the block. In a side room, parties of buggies, babies and toddlers were camped out. The scene resembled a refugee camp. On the opposite wall was a series of Gilbert and George tapestries. They looked like vast pencil sketches, and featured the two men sauntering through Constable country. Printed in capitals along the bottom was a message which, paraphrased, reads: 'Art is a way of contemplating life, love and nature, and makes things better for Gilbert and George'. It was a lovely tease: is Art only for the initiated? Is there always a risk of solipsism in the art...

What the hell just happened? Oh I know, it was Half Term. Somehow I quite often seem to blog about holidays when they are about to be over, when I am at an ebb so low you can see the the mid-Atlantic ridge of my soul. What is it about these energy-sapping, will-defying, hope-unplugging weeks? On paper I was good to go. My military precision planning had ensured: food supplies in the house a diary neatly stocked with things to do a weekend at my mother's (always a good way to use up several days, while knowing that there will be a soothing caress and a gin at the end of each one — did my mother bargain on having to mother me until her mid-seventies?) playdates library cinema cultural exploration shopping a sleepover special time with each child menus planned for the week a night out pour la mère packed lunch goodies and I was even able to do a bit of teaching and dance.  What a domestic goddess, I hear you cry, cheering me on in my maternal triumph. Hmmm...

My beautiful daughter has always sucked her thumb. She found out how to do it just days after her inordinately long birthing ordeal, and fastened herself to a tiny triangular comforter, christened Flossie by her father. This creature has travelled all over the world, greying and fraying on her way. She has been lost for months at a time on several occasions. Flossie has become so central to the mental health of this family that when we moved back to the UK from Australia, and Flossie was not to be found, we returned feeling as though a part of ourselves had been left behind. We were triumphant when she emerged serene and intact, six months later, from an old handbag, which had been co-opted by my daughter. We were complete. Recently my daughter has been teased at school (not in a bullying way, just out of thoughtlessness) because she cannot quite say her 's' clearly. We have never really noticed it, but once the thoughtless boy had drawn it to our attention, it quickly assu...

I was supporting a colleague yesterday to run a training session on how to speak persuasively. I love this work, it's always so interesting to be with a group who are being asked to focus on a specific aspect of psychological and interpersonal functioning. As the session beds in, pre-emptive intellectual defences are gradually eased away, and an intense, very intimate focus on feelings takes its place. What I love about this is that it's an opportunity to think about feeling , which is a deeply difficult thing to do, because it entails the attempt to see one's self clearly, a near impossible task. We are like cats, trying to work out what that long flippy appendage behind us is, yet unable to recognize that it's part of us. Frustration is an emotional response to a perceived impediment . Our English word for it comes straight from medieval Latin, frustrare, disappoint .  The feeling of frustration can be connected to further emotional reactions, notably anger a...

I'm delighted that Professor Beard is so constantly herself, or perhaps her selves , in all her fantastic intellectual variety. I'm thrilled that she is a role model for other women. Bearding Mary  might have seemed funny at first, but the trolling that has been aimed at her is, as she puts it herself, truly 'vile'.  Thank you, Professor, for not  spending time plastering yourself in makeup. For not wasting hours of your uniquely multiple public intellectual's life in salons. How would you get everything done? Thank you for spending your time... professing instead, which is what you're paid to do. Thank you for being intelligent, for having common sense, and for having the intellectual humility to know what you know, and listen when you don't. What you do encourages other women to do the same. Thank you for wearing, doing, saying and thinking as you please, in conversation with others. Your freedom to do this, and your openness, is one of the signs t...

I turned down an offer to write a Proust biography in 2006. I didn't want to write on the writer, having spent several years drowning in his book while I swam my way through a doctorate. Why so snotty about biography? I had been indoctrinated as an undergraduate with the idea of focusing exclusively on reading text — privileging close reading to the exclusion of history, whether personal or contextual. In fact I was taught to despise history and biography as being unworthy of study in their own right, in order to bring the study of language further into the light. This was the late 1980s, the heyday of critical theory. It was assumed, firstly, that I would just know historical and biographical facts, and secondly, that they were of a lower order of knowledge than interpretations  of the text. There was such a debate about the valency, credibility and construction of historical perspective, that I was able to wriggle through university history-free. It shocked my history-lov...

So I come from the generation that grew up knowing they were supposed to have self-esteem. Work on it, build it, have it respected by others, etc etc. The term is such an embedded cliche it seems to hold little power any more. When Gok Wan does his thing, he is wholly focused on enabling women to reevaluate their self-esteem, and encouraging them to believe that they are 'worth it'. It seems so cheesy, so easy to laugh at. So I looked up 'self-esteem' on Wikipedia. Self-esteem, apparently, is an evaluation of one's own worth. Only under conditions of capitalism could psychology be commodified in this way, it seems to me. That it took Carl Rogers to invent the notion of 'unconditional regard', that we needed to be told or sold the idea that we ought really to be nice to each other, speaks volumes about the appropriation of essential humanity by its own false representations of itself. Self-esteem is a mixture of a JUDGEMENT we perform upon our own com...