Work

The amount of sheer labour that comes with parenthood never fails to amaze me. As I move around my home, invisible to the world, I sometimes imagine myself on a time lapse film, bending down to pick something up, fold something, put something away, wipe something (or someone), hold something (or someone), on repeat.

The work of the house is more clearly and visibly work: hoovering, making food, washing up, clearing food away, sorting dirty washing, folding and hanging dry washing, changing nappies, taking the recycling out. The camera could record me doing all this and prove my busy-ness to the external world.

Add another layer of invisibility for mental labour, that which can't necessarily be seen but feels like a form of work: the remembering (I have to pay for a school trip, buy nappies and order the next size shoes up); the planning (ensuring someone has a nice birthday, nice weekend or their social development isn't impaired because I forgot to book their extra curriculars, which brings us to) the worrying (and it's getting murkier whether freaking out about that rash or that childcare option or that social anxiety is work, or something else). 

There is the more daily stuff that simply must be done - feeding people, washing and basic tidying (unless you want it to get out of control), washing up, unstacking dishwashers etc. The more infrequent but still generally essential (gotta clean the bog once in a while). The not essential but still feels important (my monthly mega tidy of my daughter's room, so she actually has a usable space to play and read and unwind).

When I took my first maternity leave, one thing I both found a huge challenge and also loved was the contrast to my office job, something I found myself referring to as my "real job". Rather than sitting at a desk I was spending time outside. Rather than trying to pack in a lot of work into an eight hour stint, I could meander with my child, and not really achieve anything. I could eat lunch at 10.30am and take an hour to make the half mile journey home holding a toddler's hand. 

In my best moments with my children, I feel like I have glimpsed a world beyond the "shoulds" and I can make the most of this flexibility and freedom. It feels like anything but work. Their smiles are free. I made them but they are their own beautiful souls that I get to watch develop. The feeling of hugging them is purer than anything anybody will ever be able to pay for.

In the more difficult moments I feel like it's all a drudge, and no one is grateful, and I can hardly bear to think back into history about women's unrecorded toil - washing clothes on a mangle, providing food without a supermarket, caring for babies without disposable or decent reusable nappies. Because even though it's convenient these days for many of us, it still feels hard.

And of course, it is not paid. I have struggled a lot second time around with attempting, and so often failing to break the link between my self-worth and my ability to earn money. Intellectually I smell bullshit but at times, I cannot shake the feeling that I am not doing enough by "just" caring for my children.

It gets murkier still when we consider that for some people, their "work" feels like a calling, is rewarding, is something that lights them up. It doesn't feel like work to them in the same way that parenting isn't quite adequately described as work, it is bigger than that.

In the first year or two after both babies, I felt like a total control freak about my house - the cleanliness, order/lack of. I kept sensing that I needed to relax, to let some stuff go, because I was both time and energy-poor and I KNEW there were more things to life than a tidy house. But also, in this situation there is so little you can control - whether you sleep for more than four hours! Whether someone screams in your ear for hours! Whether they need picking up all day when they weigh as much as a sack of potatoes! - that I think it's pretty understandable that we hold on tightly to this one thing, the feeling of order around us.

Now I look back I sense a bit of self-bashing - as in, I saw the control freakery is just another sign of my uptightness, my failure to go with the flow in the chaos of motherhood. But in the vein of every one of our more unappetising characteristics also having a positive side, I know that my ability to be organised, to make things nice for people, to nurture them is also the very best of me. There's something quite cool arty feminist about a mucky house - it's hard to imagine Viv Albertine or Virginia Woolf with their marigolds on - but in reality, there shouldn't be any value attached to whether we are neat and ordered or more chill and freewheeling.

In Thomas Moore's Care of the Soul, he describes the small tasks of a life - watering plants, arranging of food on a plate, sweeping the floor in our sacred space of home - as ways to nurture both our lives and our selves. He makes the point that the way we do things, the energy we bring to a task, makes a difference, perhaps as much as the actual thing we're doing.

It's both true that my kids don't care how clean our house is and also that living in a pit makes me feel disordered and twitchy. It's true that when I make my daughter a well-balanced, colourful snack plate and arrange it in a nice way, that is an aspect of my love for her and a tiny shoot of creativity that wants to burst forth. And it's true that when I make them fishfinger wraps because I am tired and CBA, I am still a good person, and a good mother.

I don't know exactly how to find freedom from the burden of how heavy things can feel. But I know that sometimes I can glimpse it when I cut corners or find myself in a fuck it mode. That my life will not be judged on the basis of how tidy my drawers are. That the best moments are when I feel it fall away from me, like clouds parting, and I find myself - find us - just here, in a moment, drinking it all in.