Motherload

Where are all the children? Nursery fees rise as free childcare scheme backfires So this is how life in Britain will get worse, or has never improved. In France, the State subsidises about 80% of the cost of childcare. They *just pay for it* and have done for years. The amazingly simple rationale is that it's good for kids, and good for parents. No shit Sherlock. In Australia, government offers parents a healthy subsidy towards the cost of childcare – it depends on income, but it's generous. In Britain, the Government makes a promise to 'give' 30 hours a week of free childcare – but doesn't back it with nearly enough funding. This means that childcare providers are at risk of going bust, and have to start charging parents for the so-called free care, which excludes the poorest. The State is simply creating the conditions for a vicious circle. You can't tell both parents in a two-parent family, or single parents, to 'go back to work...

Amsterdam We recently took a trip to Holland, and were very excited to go by ferry. At least, I was – husband and children were a lot less enamoured of the idea. For me, it was pure Proustian Rush – the car queue in the freezing 6am wind and exhaust fumes on the quayside, the endless monotony of grey North Sea slapping the bows of the ship, the hours and hours of doing nothing except word search games in a stuffy lounge on fixed plastic seats – marvellous! The car ferry has not changed since the 1970s, and this made me preternaturally happy. But at Dutch immigration, things took an unforeseen turn. Married to an Aussie as I am, I am used to his being sized up suspiciously at immigration. He was once nearly sent back to Australia as we stood there, whey-faced, at the London border control, after the twenty-four-hour flight from Brisbane, because he hadn't transferred his right to remain stamp into his renewed passport. I am used to cracking hilarious jokes about his being ...

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...

The Bernina 730 While my mother lay dying of a brain tumour last summer, in a secluded Norfolk nursing home, hidden away in a suburb of Norwich, I would drive blindly up and down the M11 each week to be with her. On each trip, I would return down the motorway with things hopelessly ransacked from a home no longer occupied, cold and still. I brought her jewellery back for safekeeping, and some of her scarves to tuck in a bottom drawer. Later I brought thick blue wineglasses from Teheran, tea towels, handkerchieves, her pots and pans, even the cutlery I had grown up using, nearly five decades earlier, much to my children's annoyance. On one of these return trips, I don't remember when, I brought her Bernina sewing machine back to our home in London. For some months, the machine sat, squat in a pristine cream box, on top of her previous machine, which was in its own worn but sturdy green case, a clamp for its slide-on sewing table attached to the inside of the case, a...

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 ...

Motherland  (written by  Graham Lineman and  Sharon Horgan) OK, I admit it. I flew off the handle about Motherland . Or rather I flew off the handle about a a perky young male reviewer in the Guardian – one of the smug new breed of reconstructed men, who have managed to reconstruct a society around themselves in which they think they are feminists, while never actually doing anything in the family that doesn’t serve their own interests first.  Mean, I know. Below the belt, yes, literally. Accurate? Almost certainly. I can do hard satire too. I do apologise if I hurt anyone’s feelings. But to Motherland itself. I actually watched it last night (as opposed to writing about it first).  On second thoughts (or first thoughts if you’re going to discount my pre-thoughts, which were, for the most part, and though I flatter myself, absolutely accurate), Motherland could be the start of something really interesting. You see, it’s billed as ...

Well, once again, it's a delightful day here in Motherloadland. Its early September, Indian Summer, the leaves are on the turn, the tan is fading, the children have skipped off to school in their new uniform and shoes, little faces shining and upturned for new knowledge. I feel I have been here before. It feels a lot like all the other Septembers I've had in my nearly five decades – I used to be the child skipper, now I am the adult skipper. Wait! Let me reach for an apt, Tim Minchin-flavoured metaphor – my life feels like Groundhog Day. I myself have just returned from comparing plastic clothes airers in Tescos and John Lewis, paying over good money for the one that looks least likely to break in my hand, and for yet more socks for our son, because he seems to eat them. I've made a coffee (another one!) and I'm just sitting down to finish writing a book. Only I can't write, because I'm SO BLOODY FURIOUS ALL THE TIME. As I seem to have been since 2003. L...