Welcome to Mother’s Gonna Work it Out – a newsletter not just for mothers with children, but for everyone who cares for anyone.
My life came to screeching halt last week when I came down with the throat infection to end all throat infections. Sweating and shivering, I felt like I was swallowing razor blades, even when I wasn’t swallowing.
I went to bed for three days. With no more care in me to give, all I could do was be mothered myself. It was an exquisitely vulnerable place, and one that I don’t remember visiting for a very long time.
Days before I got ill, I met a friend in central London for lunch. Our table was sandwiched between two work meetings; lunching pairs animated by new-business pitch fever as they gesticulated meaningfully, and cartoonishly pretended to listen. One host forgot the pay the bill. She returned, glassy eyed, as if waking from a dream.
Since we’ve been freed from the shackles of Covid lockdowns, it feels like we’ve been stampeding to make up for lost time. All that enforced slow has transmuted into frenzy, and I’m not sure it’s doing us any favours. I’m not the only one getting ill. We’d do well to take better care of ourselves and those around us.
Writer Jia Tolentino’s luminous piece for the New Yorker, ‘Can motherhood be a mode of rebellion?’ ascribes an enormous value to this seemingly simple act, although she opens with this quote from the late anthropologist and activist David Graeber: ‘In our society, there seems a general rule that, the more obviously one’s work benefits other people, the less one is likely to be paid for it.’ Which is why it’s not so simple.
In her piece, Tolentino argues that she can only care for her daughter because she’s being cared for herself, and, ‘how we have to make of ourselves and our situations a soft place for others to land’. Motherhood, then, becomes a mode of rebellion against the capitalist system in its capacity for fostering interdependence, building communities, and raising the value we attribute to this so-called ‘soft’ power.
This care rebellion wouldn’t be hard to incite. It doesn’t take much to hold a door open for the person behind you, give someone a seat on the train, keep donating to the Ukrainian Red Cross, give blood, clean your flat before you rent it, give your old clothes to charity, babysit for a friend, listen to a colleague. Build a momentum that leaves people better than you found them.
Being nice would also be sticking two fingers up to our current government here in the UK, where Machiavellian behaviour is celebrated, and they conduct themselves like a historical re-enactment society (Brexit) rather than attend to issues, like the cost of living crisis, that’s causing the populace real pain.
Is the trouble that no one’s being nice to them? Psychologist, physician and author Gabor Maté discusses just this with Russell Brand in the fascinating podcast ‘Damaged leaders rule the world’. The impact of childhood trauma is real. And, says Maté, trauma keeps the economy going. A useful perspective to maintain when the machine is grinding hard.
I’m out of bed now, the lone swordsman in my throat gently losing interest. I’m just about ready to mother again, but only because I’ve been so beautifully mothered myself.