Rachel Cusk, mother and author of Arlington Park
It is time to for mothers and fathers to unite to rebel against the workaholic culture that is crushing family life, making life a misery for mothers and fathers.
John Gray writes of our work culture: “Nothing is more alien to the present age than idleness. If we think of resting from our labours, it is only in order to return to them. In thinking so highly of work we are aberrant. Few other cultures have ever done so. For nearly all of history and all prehistory, work was an indignity. For the ancients, unending labour was the mark of a slave.” (Gray’s Anatomy 2009)
Rachel Cusk in her dark, witty and disturbing novel about the 21st century motherhood, Arlington Park, writes: “When she got them [house and a husband and children] the feeling of lead started to build up in her veins, a little more each day….the time Benedict returned to work a week after Barnaby’s birth and she realised she would be looking after him alone; the countless times a domestic task had fallen to her, so that she became experienced and preferred to do it because it was easier than asking Benedict - it was all surprising to her, outrageous almost. With her sense of justice she expected that at some point the outrage would be detected and addressed, but of course it was not.”
And a father speaking last week to the camera on the streets of Newcastle put it succinctly: “If you’re not going to be there, if you’re not going to give them hugs and kisses and look after them when they’re ill, there’s no point.”
Rachel Cusk rails against the way that modern motherhood sucks away the identity of women. Of Juliet, one of the mothers in her novel, she writes, “She had forgotten she was a woman. She had forgotten she was a creature, a thing of the flesh…. Was that what Juliet would be, one day? Empty, all poured out into Katherine, into Benedict and Barnaby? Dead, yet living?” Meanwhile Solly “couldn’t locate a continuous sense of herself. It seemed to lie all around here in pieces, like the casings of Dora’s Russian doll when all the babies were out.” And Christine declares dramatically to her fellow mothers over coffee: “We’re all such good wives and mothers, and there we are feeding our families these healthy meals and taking our children to piano lessons and making our houses all perfect, and sometimes you just want to have some fun, don’t you? Sometimes I think, God, I could just bring all this down. I could just bring it all down around me.”
Rachel Cusk contrasts this with the husbands of the mothers. Martin, Juliet’s partner “didn’t seem to have changed at all over the years. He had only weathered a little, like a monument.” But Martin was no slouch. “In the evening, when Martin returned, Solly immediately went and lay down on the sofa in the sitting room. She stayed there until she had heard the children be fed, bathed and taken away upstairs. She felt that if she had to spend even one more minute with them she would explode. She heard Martin bellowing on the top landing, and the sounds of multitudinous footsteps running this way and that. Really, Martin was wonderful. He was what you called a hands-on father.” But then comes the real truth….”The trouble was he was never there.”
Cusk points the finger at work and at business: “I hate the way men like that think they’re important. They expect you to defer to them, just because they run a business! What’s so important about a business? It’s just selling things for your own personal profit. It’s just greed, dressed up as usefulness.”
But it’s not just business. Health services, social care services and charities are all busily making the most out of the same culture of unending labour.
These feelings are backed up by research findings. At a conference in April in USA, hosted by the Council for Contemporary Families, researchers presented the latest evidence. Families in which parents have more egalitarian roles do not on average experience a decrease in satisfaction with their relationship, unlike families where the woman slips into more housework than she did before and the man does most of the breadwinning. The tables have turned - nowadays, parents who do not share roles are more likely to split up.
The bad news is that the gender equality movement in the UK is heading in the wrong direction. Defeated by the difficulty of changing the long-hours working culture of men, it has persuaded itself that progress can be achieved by trying to make working life easier for mothers only - more leave entitlements for mothers (but not for fathers), and more regulation of business to be fairer to women, at the same time as handing businesses economic incentives to do the opposite. And so, with the best of intentions, we encourage more of the same - mothers at home more and fathers working more.
The Equality and Human Rights Commission puts it thus: “New parental rights introduced over the past decade are well intentioned but entrench the unequal division of labour and caring between the sexes and work against gender equality.” Current Government policy “conveys the message that it is primarily women who are responsible for the care of young children”.
Rachel Cusk again: “Was this what they mean when they talked about sexual inequality? Was this it, the front, the hump, the line of battle? She’d never seen her father so much as boil an egg, but then her mother had never mowed the lawn or mended the kitchen cupboards either. It had never seemed worth the bother to Christine, trying to sort it out when it was all so much of a muchness; but now she wondered whether that wasn’t exactly what kept you in your place, this acceptance of things, so that you were forever going round and round in a circle and never getting anywhere. If you accepted things, where were you meant to go when it got unacceptable? Who were you meant to tell? There had to be room for change - there had to be room for a contingency! Like her father: even when Viv was ill with pneumonia, she had to get up to make his tea. That was no way to live, was it?”
It is time to rebel, mothers and fathers alike. At home we must engage in daily battle against all the economic incentives that promote non-sharing of roles - we must fight the pressures, not each other. In public we, mothers and fathers alike, must stand together to support the liberation of each other and challenge the laws and policies that force us apart.
Above all, we must challenge the slavery of unending labour. The prize is to see our children grow up. John Gray proposes contemplation as the opposite of ceaseless activity. “Contemplation is not the willed stillness of the mystics but a willing surrender to never-returning moments.” And was there ever such a never-returning moment than the millions of tiny steps of a child growing up?
Fatherhood
family, Fatherhood, parental relationships, work
At the weekend I went to the demonstration in London against the destruction by King’s College Hospital of the Albany Midwives, a beacon of family and community based midwifery. I even spoke at the demo from the top of a double decker bus in front of the Department of Health - the listeners were certainly a lot more responsive than at any of the many meetings I have been to inside the Department!
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