Can my Mother’s Day gift be a society that puts love and care at the centre?

What would happen if we rethought the whole idea of a ‘worker’ as a mum?

Cushion cover from my house. Made in India. Artist unknown

I didn’t realise I was in labour until I was fully dilated. It was two and a half weeks before my due date and both my doula and I were convinced the contractions must be Braxton Hicks – ‘practice’ contractions. I made my husband go for a walk in the woods with me. He was diligently timing each surge on his phone, nervously suggesting that it might be time to turn back. ‘No no, it’s nothing, I’d like to walk more’.

By the end I was holding onto trees every few minutes, howling, while passers-by stole concerned glances. On the way home, I insisted on popping into the Armenian deli, snarling down sweets and pastries as we climbed the hill. I guess my body knew what was coming even if my mind was in denial.

The hospital staff were also apparently convinced that I wasn’t really in labour, as it took them hours to check how far dilated I was after we finally checked in. By the time they realised that I was in fact ready to pop, it was too late to get an epidural, or any pain medication at all while I was pushing. After it was all over I asked the doctor what she thought about the way it had gone down. She said that it was highly unusual for someone to be fully dilated before getting any care but that, from the way I was behaving, they couldn’t tell whether I was actually in labour. This was despite the fact that they had hooked me up to a machine that was literally plotting my contractions on a screen. Oh and that I was screaming in pain with each, perfectly spaced, contraction.

Hm, what was that about?

After I finally pushed out my tiny, black-furred goblin, our beautiful Esmeralda, the midwives laid her on my chest while I shook violently (why does no-one tell you about the violent shaking?) and they carefully sewed me up. I’d been especially anxious about tearing because of my ulcerative colitis, a chronic bowel disease I was diagnosed with in 2017. I’d been in a flare up the entire eight and a half months of pregnancy. On the phone, my gastroenterologist had helpfully warned me that I really didn’t want a fourth degree tear, given my condition. Thanks. Luckily it was only a second degree tear, woohoo.

That day was the beginning of what I think of as my ‘radical restructuring’ as a mother. A few months later, my brother came to stay for a few days while my sister-in-law stayed to take care of their two girls. On a video call, we jokingly congratulated her on ‘crushing it’ as a mum. She wryly retorted, ‘oh no, you’ve got the phrase wrong. What you mean is being crushed into a mum’.

The not being able to recover after a catastrophic event to your body because you are sustenance for a quivering new life. The sadistically being told to ‘sleep when they sleep’. The mounting dread as evening approaches. The whispering ‘I’m sorry’ in the darkness because your breasts aren’t working and you can’t feed your baby. The seeing your partner stumble downstairs with eye bags like sausages after doing the night shift while you sleep on the camp bed and set the alarm to do a ‘power pump’ every few hours to get the milk flowing. The bursting into tears when your new friend comes to visit and asks how you’re doing.

‘No one can prepare you for what it’s really like’. That’s what we all say to each other. That’s our mantra. But how true is that? Yes, the biological changes are radical, and you can’t experience them first-hand until you do. But there’s absolutely also a societal element to how unprepared we all are – and how much of a grenade a new baby is in the first place. How come we keep saying it to each other and yet it always comes as a total shock to the system?

It’s because mothering – and all care work in general – is a side show in our societies. Even though it’s the thing that keeps life going, it’s shoved out of sight. Even though being cared for is the thing that is most important to every single one of us, it is hidden behind closed doors. Somehow, somehow, the people who care for us professionally are some of the worst paid workers on the planet. Somehow, somehow, even more of the care work that we do is completely for free and not even acknowledged to exist.

Yes, that’s what’s behind the terror of knowing that you’re basically alone because your partner is freelance and doesn’t get any partner leave, your parents are getting on in years and live too far away anyway, your friends are barely keeping it together themselves, the health service is at breaking point and doesn’t have time for you, and care services like lactation consultants and doulas are privatised and too expensive.

Mumming to the centre

A long time ago I read a book by the ecofeminist Maria Mies. It was titled Patriarchy and Accumulation on a World Scale and was first published in 1986, back when I was a shiny black-haired tot clinging to my own mummy. Ecofeminists link together the oppression of women, colonised people and nature. One part of this book stayed with me in particular. Mies argues that the entire concept of what work is – and the figure of the worker itself – should be redesigned.

Back when she was thinking and writing for her book, the archetypal image of the worker was a factory labourer. These days, depending on where in the world you are and your circumstances, it might be an office exec, or perhaps still a blue collar worker. It’s usually a man. (I’m not talking about real life workers here, of which there are a vast array of all genders, I’m talking about the image that pops into your mind when you close your eyes and picture a worker.)

Mies argued that instead, when we conjure an image of a worker in our minds, we should picture a mum. For Mies, this would help us get our priorities straight and put caring for each other and planet Earth at the centre of our social and economic system.

Mies writes that the aim of all work should be ‘not a never-ending expansion of wealth and commodities, but human happiness… or the production of life itself’ (italics original).

For Mies, if we as a society reconfigured the worker in the image of a mum, work would no longer be about having to do pointless, spirit-crushing things for money that we then try to minimise through automation. Instead, work would become something that is both incredibly hard and burdensome and at the same time profoundly joy-giving and deeply nurturing. Because that’s what being a mama is. It’s both. It’s both wondrous and magical and exhausting and enraging.

But we can only experience this full duality and intensity of work if work is no longer about raking in profits for those at the top while the rest of us flail around and burn out. Work needs to be for us. It needs to be about caring, nurturing, tending to ourselves and each other. This is what the psychiatrist Scott Peck’s definition of love is: ‘the willingness to extend oneself in order to nurture another person’s spiritual and psychological growth, or one’s own’.

Instead of wasting our time and lives on pointless bullshit work that ultimately just ends up lining the pockets of some rich dude, work needs to be about what actually matters: this kind of active love for all of us.

Maria Mies has been accused of essentialism. That is, that she portrays all women as being inherently motherly by nature (ignoring the fact that there are some terrible mothers and also plenty of women who have no interest in children, of which I was one until the age of 39). This kind of essentialism can also exclude people of other genders from the category of motherhood, even though they might literally be biological mothers or might be doing care as intensely as the most dedicated mum.

I can understand this criticism and have complicated feelings about Mies myself, though she is crystal clear that the first step to us achieving her vision is men taking on their share of the care work (and I mean really doing it equally, not the kind of equal where they think they are doing 50% when they are actually doing 20%).

During postpartum carnage, one of the books that got me through was Revolutionary Mothering, edited by Alexis Pauline Gumbs, China Martens, and Mai’a Williams. I would read it while ensconced on the sofa with Esmeralda sucking for hours at my searing chest.

The editors of that book have an inclusive definition of mothering. They write that the term ‘Motherhood’ has been turned into a weapon that patriarchal politicians use to try to force ‘trad wife’ roles on certain women while denying others the right to fully inhabit their roles as mothers through horrific oppression and exploitation. ‘Motherhood’ can also imply that you have to be a biological mother to a child or that you have to be a cisgender woman in order to count as a mama.

However, their term ‘mothering’ is not necessarily attached to being a biological mother, while still acknowledging the biological and social transformations that mothers go through and the fact that women are socialised (not born) to care for others. This concept of mothering is about ‘creating, nurturing, affirming and supporting life.’

We can expand Mies’ ideas about work, and society as a whole, being centered around mothering to include all the essential work of creating, caring and nurturing, with mamas epitomising this work.

This emphasis on care doesn’t mean that we should get zero space outside of parenting, that we should be only mothers or carers with nothing for ourselves. That vision would make me run screaming in the other direction. No, quite the opposite. It means eliminating all the stupid pointless things we are forced to do to get money or satisfy the state’s bureaucracy so that we can all have a bountiful network of people who have buckets of time to give us a breather. It means stripping the workload down to the core of what is actually necessary for us all to flourish so that we can share that load without it being onerous.

Now Esmeralda is two, things are getting easier. After she goes down (in our bed – yes she’s one of those toddlers), Erik and I stumble towards each other and say ‘it is getting easier, it will continue to get easier’. I don’t want to jinx it but it feels like we’re out of the first bloodbath. I won’t say that my radical restructuring is complete, but it’s on its way (I can kind of remember life pre Essie but it’s getting ever blurrier…).

But what if we’d never had to go through the carnage in the first place? I’m not saying that there’s any universe in which the transition between pre and post baby would be a completely smooth ride. But what if we had a loving, voluptuous cushion of people – either professionally or personally or both – who we knew always had our backs, who were amply resourced to be able to care?

It’s this kind of revolutionary mothering I have in mind when, this Mothers Day, I wish each and every one of us an entirely new socioeconomic system, which has mothering – care and love – at its heart.