no. 63. a woman on her knees

I write this on the day of Trump’s second inauguration. I can’t help but think about my trip across the Midwest. Since I made that journey, American women have lost the constitutional right to abortion and are dying because they can’t access the help they need. Now they are watching a rapist be elected to the White House for the second time. I don’t think I’ll be able to stomach the pictures of Trump and Musk and Zuckerberg and Vance and their stupid faces as they pick up the keys to a job in which they’ll be able to protect their monetary interests above all else, stay out of prison when they should be in prison, and no one will be able to stop them (fuck you, SCOTUS). All while simultaneously giving an enthusiastic thumbs up to moronic arseholes everywhere to believe in ‘your body, my choice’. (fuck you, SCOTUS). I don’t need to list the other horrors that are expected. They are well documented. Yet in a completely irrelevant way, I do want to mention how this whole thing has left me feeling very homeless on social media. Musk has turned Twitter into a far-right sewage. And Zuckerberg has picked his team. As he tries to play catch up with Musk and sit at the big boy’s table with Trump, Meta, including Instagram, now has the same stain as it removes facts to make room for ‘free speech’. How have such vile, misogynistic men created products that so many women feel they can’t exist without? (or is that just capitalism?). And why do we all turn such a blind eye to it? Even the most politically outspoken I follow are still on Instagram. What will it take? Anyway, I will doubtlessly post this on Instagram and you can rightly call me full of shit. The angry men who are scared of smart women have won this round, and we’re all still helping them get richer. (Is this the moment I make the case that independent women’s writing has never been more necessary and needs your support? Can/should I be as shameless as them? Is this just the new world order? Here goes: today is a great day to support feminist writers. You can buy me a Ko-fi, set up a small regular payment or pledge below. If there’s someone who you think would enjoy this, please pass it on!)

On with the show

*

Sometimes it’s as if we’re in a film. Not the self-indulgence of an Instagram reel but the script and plot and production of a movie. I hear music playing over our lives. There’s a piano. Some strings. It happens when the mundanity has, just for a moment, been stripped back and it feels as if a giant glitter ball has suddenly descended from above, lighting up our faces, a spotlight cast upon us. It happened the other night at bathtime as I washed my little boy’s body, water splashing, giggles and squeals. Yet somehow that noise gradually faded as it became overpowered by an orchestra soaring and the key changing to minor. Soon the camera pans out and I watch myself and my son from above like I’m in a dream or I’m dead, but I’m awake and I’m alive and there I am; a woman on her knees, an ancient image of maternal devotion, a simple moment catching the light and sparkling through a long dark January evening.

The woman I am watching tends to her son’s eczema, wipes dried snot from his face. For a while, she rests her chin on the lip of the bath and watches him. Most days this act feels like drudgery but not today. She got a bit more sleep last night. The sun came out that afternoon and she felt the claustrophobia of short winter days lift off her skin. While her face might bear the hallmarks of worry and the flare of psoriasis on her arms might give her away, the constant hum of things that aren’t finished or fixed has been temporarily suspended. Instead, the music plays under the refracted sparkle of the glitter ball, the bathwater lapps at their edges like the ocean against the shore under moonlight. They are both entirely separate from the world, everything other than the two of them has faded away, and they are the very fabric of the world; a mother and son at bathtime, just like millions and millions of others.

Obviously, motherhood doesn’t always feel like a film, despite people’s best efforts on social media to persuade you otherwise. For the most part, my two-year-old’s will to assert his independence currently feels like a punishment from the Old Testament. He knocks down my patience like a tower of blocks. Often, I feel burnt out, empty, bewildered by parenting. I am failing, flailing, head sinking below water, sputtering out pleas to eat or sleep or not run in the road, or, for the love of god, stay still. Then it’s not a light-drenched movie, an Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind dreamscape, a shimmering expose of the majesty of being human and holding onto the memories that make us who we are. It is none of these things and that’s probably precisely why I attempt to turn moments of domestic labour into art. Not because I’m a narcissist, nor my generation’s fixation on ‘main character energy’, forever turning the lens on ourselves. But because it feels like survival. There is poetry and meaning here. I believe there is but I also need there to be.

And while it’s certainly not always art, it’s always love. The labour is the love. And most of the time, under the strip lighting of motherhood, being directed by a tiny tyrant, the current of love rushes on regardless, pushing day into night and night back into day, regardless of how I yell or how he sobs. Regardless that I feel out of control, that the good habits and routines we’ve spent an eternity (2 years) building now get thrown out of his cot like the stuffed animals aimed at my head while I lie on the floor pretending to be asleep because that’s the only thing left to do. As a mother, I’ve never felt like I knew what I was doing, but I felt I knew I could do it if I needed to. Some days now, I’m not so sure.

So I was surprised when the music started playing the other evening, when the glitter ball came down, when I saw the romance and wonder, blissful and together. I see that woman now. Her unwashed hair clipped high on her head. Her tracksuit bottoms. A stack of earrings creeping up her ears to remind her who she was. The dark winter night cosying in around them. His eyes as big as the moon, tummy wide and proud. In this film, the audience knows she’s spent the last week talking to survivors of domestic abuse. They know she is tired. These have been big, painful conversations, light years away from the little boy in front of her. The one who offers her tea from bath water and says “one more two” when she says it’s time to get out. She keeps her son a million miles from those conversations but she’s already wondering how to raise a son in a world that seems determined to bring women to their knees.

But what if it, this, motherhood, is all worthy of a film - even the exhaustion caused by a two-year-old boy who our childminder said was the most stubborn child she’d ever known in 30 years of looking after other people’s kids? Perhaps the projector has been running this whole time. The yelling, the guilt, and the feelings of failure are all worthy of being recorded and transmitted to the world. It’s drama, action, shame; it’s the most intense version of being alive I have yet to know. And perhaps it’s all part of the same love story, and that note, that key change, those soaring strings will tell you all of that. They’ll tell you that it’s hard at the moment, really hard. But that makes the love even more real, that’s why the glitter ball casts such a heavenly glow on the rare occasions it arrives.

Because despite his resistance, the frustration, the fear, I will always be that devoted mother, there to end the day with, looking at his face, desperate to know him, to love him. And when we aren’t locking horns, both desperate to assert our positions of power, we are best friends, co-conspirators, the thickest of thieves, each other’s first true love. And so maybe hearing the soundtrack to our lives isn’t delusional or narcissistic. Perhaps it signals something: a rare moment when the fog of motherhood lifts and we can see what is right in front of us, sparkling and bright, even during the darkest of nights.

Some great things:

Some not-new films you’ve probably already seen: American Fiction (2023, Amazon Prime) was so smart, funny and extremely moving. This interview with the screenwriter and director Cord Jefferson, is fascinating on many levels. Calvary (2014 Amazon Prime), a murder mystery highlighting the legacy of horror in rural Ireland left by the Catholic Church really got under my skin. Not for the faint-hearted. The sparse script was masterful as were the performances.

Again, I’m very late to this party but I’ve signed up to Jessica Pan’s Substack. Her writing on working in an indie London bookshop, and indeed, life, is utterly joyous and brilliant. If she’s not writing film scripts in the next 10 years, we’ll all be poorer for it.

I did Joanne Wolfath’s 4-week introductory art history course on motherhood, Picturing Mother, last year and it was stimulating, creative and so thought-provoking. I loved nothing more than looking at incredible art that grapples with so many of the same questions I’ve asked myself over the last two years. But I also loved learning about the history of the maternal image, and where it sat in politics and society [hint: in the middle]. She’s just announced she’s holding the course again. Highly recommend.

As ever, thank you for reading.

M