… or as my son puts it, 'How To Avoid How I Live'.
This book has one objective: to help parents, especially mothers, put down their Motherload and seek their own pleasure.
How do we raise happy, resilient, independent children? By being happy ourselves. And how on earth can we be happy in an age of parenting puritanism, polarised opinions about 'women's work', guilt, compulsory anxiety, competition at the school gates, false expectations and contradictory advice?
Women who grew up in the 1970s and 80s, and became mothers after 2000, have been sold a lie. We were told we could 'have it all'. We weren't told that we could have it on one condition — as long as we did it all, and did it perfectly.
No one wins when the perfectionists are in charge. We — women, men and children — need a more tolerant and less judgemental, less fearful society, based on greater choice and greater equality. There's more than one way to raise a child, and the main thing those ways have in common is love and time.
This brave new world won't come from tinkering with maternity or paternity leave or childcare subsidy. It comes from slow mothering.
Slow mothering doesn't just refer to parenting. It means gradually reframing our working lives, seizing ourselves back, not reacting to ready criticism or joining in with it, standing up to bullying from employers, educationalists, healthcare professionals and other parents, actively working out what will really make us happy, and then going for it.
Women need to fight for their fulfilment after they have children, otherwise they are simply asset stripped, by social forces happy to see women utterly exhausted.
The evidence for these ideas comes from long conversations with other parents. Weighed down by my own Motherload, one day I just started asking other people how they lived, worked and raised children. This book is the story of what happened next.
You can read samples of this work on my blog, Motherload: 'The blogging equivalent of a bath, a book and a glass of wine'. (Mumsnet Bloggers Network)
Hunger Winter (fiction)
A man's first child is born. It is January 1945, the Hunger Winter. The Dutch are starving, eating tulip bulbs to stay alive. They must walk out into the countryside to find food from the farmers, and firewood to heat their homes. Men evade forced conscription by 'diving under' – onderduiken. The Germans are paranoid, trigger-happy. Time stands still. Europe watches, ashamed that the war is juddering on.
The man trudges out into the black streets of Haarlem. He leaves his newborn son behind. He must find food and fuel. He must keep his family alive. He longs to escape. This is all he knows.
How can you become a man under occupation?
Elements of this story were published in the durational web-based story-telling project 1001 Nights Cast, 2004-06. Further work has been carried out on an Arvon writing course, tutored by Tiffany Murray, March 2017.
Astronaut of the mind (non-fiction)
Dementia is a mysterious condition, still barely understood. This books argues that, while care for the sufferer is extremely important, it is even more important to care for the carer, who experiences deep psychological distress as the witness of dementia, yet must learn to accept the likelihood of surviving the sufferer without guilt.
The Adventurous Grandma (children's fiction)
The Adventurous Grandma is about an irrepressible grandmother, always off somewhere intrepid and exhausting, and how her grandchildren have to step in to save her from her own mishaps. It's co-written with my daughter, and co-illustrated to boot.
Whatever (non-fiction)
We all tend to assume that being indifferent is wrong. But what exactly is indifference? Is it all bad?
Here is a link to a conversation filmed in September 2011 as part of a Nick Knight project, Cafe Conversations, with the artist Henry Krokatsis. In it we talk long and hard about how artists think about and handle indifference.