What’s this then? A mothers’ meeting?!
“What’s this then? A mothers’ meeting?!” was a favourite jovial admonishment from teachers at my secondary school. Not directed at me – I barely spoke – but at any groups of female pupils talking, or as I’m sure it was perceived, gossiping, in classrooms or corridors.
I didn’t give it much thought at the time, although I suppose I’d list it amongst the many things that, if I’m honest, made me look down upon many of my teachers. I was that sort of a kid. It was one of those jokes that I didn’t get. And I was the sort of child that for some reason tended to think that if I didn’t find a joke funny it probably wasn’t. I’d still hold with that belief – most children are pretty good at discerning whether a joke has merit, whether it is delivered with aplomb, whether it harbours sinister intent, whether it is worthy of a laugh even if no-one in the room understands the content. And I should know: by some unusual if honourable quirk of parenting I think I’d been witness to all of Shakespeare’s comedies, including some really quite dated material, before I was at secondary school. A child is a harsh but fair audience for comedy.
And this ‘joke’ seemed both obscure and ill thought-out.
It was only said to the girls I think, though perhaps to boys too, if their convening was ever seen as potentially malign. (One thing’s for sure though, I never heard the phrase ‘a Fathers’ meeting’. Still haven’t.) I knew that many of us would one day become mothers. We had already entered puberty. What gave calling girls talking a ‘mothers’ meeting’ an air of teasing combat? It seemed designed to convey ‘You are doing something which you’re not supposed to, but it is trivial and no challenge to my authority. I can take it in my stride, and disperse you with mockery. Take that, mothers!’ So what gave this opening sally its bite? Should we be insulted at ‘mothers’ or was it the idea of a mother’s meeting (whatever that might be, I wasn’t sure,) that was derogatory?
While my analysis never even approached this at the time, at some level I think I knew that being dismissive about pubescent girls by calling them mothers was neither big nor clever.
And now, about thirty years later, I’m hosting some mothers’ meetings as part of a project supporting the work of mothers, and addressing our - often unmet – impulses to record the experience of motherhood.
How are mothers’ meetings seen now? Probably not so much as ridiculous pointless crucibles of gossip and domestic trivia. Perhaps your local community has a Start-Up Mums group for networking of women who have begun a new business during maternity leave. Certainly there are apps that help new mothers to find friends in their local area; the loneliness of the early years of parenthood is acknowledged, not taken lightly.
But I believe the actual activity of mothering is still deeply undervalued. There’s that verb itself, which stuck in my throat when I first encountered it since becoming a mother. It’s parenting now isn’t it? Otherwise we’re doing ourselves down, ghettoising ourselves? “Mothering” can’t be rescued from its near universal usage as a synonym for suffocation or at least over-indulgence. Well there are worse words that have been reclaimed by other communities. (It was Naomi Stadlen, author of What Mothers Do – Especially When It Looks Like Nothing who made me question my outright rejection of this verb, and I think the book’s question about what it is that mothers specifically do, is still just as relevant.)
I have been running some workshops for mothers. We can bring our children although do not have to if there are other options available. The workshops are for us. Several people have commented that there are plenty of things to take your baby to, but once they are walking and talking far fewer opportunities to find activities or even spaces where you are welcomed. Even rarer, the adult-focussed space where children can come along.
So we may believe that the phrase ‘mothers meeting’ is no longer a laughable nadir of human assembly. But if there are few opportunities for mothers to meet and form associations for themselves, perhaps gain skills, exchange wisdom, while also mothering simultaneously, what does that say about how our culture values both the activity of mothering and the people who do it? What puts me in a ghetto more – using a gendered verb to describe what I’m doing, or the lack of public spaces to actually do it in, alongside other individuals, some of whom may also be (whisper it) mothering too?
Having spent some time hosting mothers’ meetings, I’m beginning to wonder what they are. I mean, I’m a bit further on than I was at eleven; I know they’re not (necessarily) tupperware parties, coffee mornings or something involving an Avon lady. (These were my best guesses at the time.) I’m beginning to wonder, in a parallel to the question ‘What do mothers do?’, what is it that mothers do when they come together? Perhaps not just describing what tends to happen, but also asking what potential is there to use the best of mothering when also meeting?
Naomi Stadlen’s description of ‘what mothers do’ involves no single attribute independent of the individual child being mothered, but rather the mother’s responsiveness to her own child; this is the quality I feel she singles out as, above all, the most motherly of skills.
And responsiveness is exactly the quality that has felt most necessary in the meetings I’ve attended and held. Particularly as it’s not easy. Not easy to do, not easy to sell, not easy to measure or value. Or even notice.
When I advertised a series of workshops for mothers, to explore their creativity and consider recording their experience of motherhood, I had a sense I ought to have prepared a structured course. This is what people expect, I thought. People feel reassured knowing what they are signing up for. Unless there’s a solid aim there’s no way anyone will risk turning up.
But I felt really resistant to any sort of planning.
I had already begun making my own mother record book but there was no point creating a course about how to make that; it’s the most personal thing I’ve ever made and I can’t imagine anyone wanting to make exactly the same sort of thing. And I hadn’t met any of the women who might turn up; how could I know what they’d want or need? I could no more prepare for this than I could have prepared for motherhood itself, before meeting my children.
I did buy some stuff. Thankfully not as much as I bought in preparation for having a baby. But while the glue-sticks, paper and crayons set the scene for creative endeavour, they were less important than a willingness to listen and wait, sometimes for several weeks, until the needs of those attending were ready to emerge. One mother came to the last of a 12 session course with some strikingly beautiful work, having come every week up til that point with the sense she was doing nothing. In fact she had been incubating her creativity until her unique voice found its way to emerge. And I think the provision of a space where this waiting and listening is provided for adults, is unusual.
In particular it is an unusual element in conversations about what new mothers need. We are bombarded with messages about what is, or is not, on offer – the things we are told we will need: primarily childcare. Political parties were tripping up over each other to thrust their generous childcare policies in our faces during the last election campaign. We are marketed plentiful opportunities to get our bodies back, and to re-engage with the consumer treadmill of ‘need’ being met by buying something, that will make us feel part of the worthwhile world again. But at no point are we really given space to reflect on what we might actually want, on whether being in a ‘baby bubble’ of absorption in the needs of another tiny human, a person who needs to consume very little except their mother, a closed symbiotic system, horribly isolated from the interdependent buy and sell world, is really as horrible as all that. The early years of being a parent can be lonely, but I’m fascinated by the obsession I got with buying the ‘right’ baby carrier during the period when I felt most isolated. While a new mother self was born, my self from before was dead, but her zombie returned to the online shopping malls; they felt familiar, somewhere I could go to be with fellow consumers. (And to be fair, the groups devoted to slings, wraps and carriers are all about swapping or re-selling at cost-price, they aren’t exactly capitalist success stories. But they did give me a chance to flex the shopping muscles that a life under capitalism had toned, before they were slackened by a flood of oxytocin.)
But I couldn’t make a shopping list for the things I really needed to bring to my workshops.
Luckily, these things seemed to be qualities that I’d been developing in the process of mothering. Not things I’d decided to do in accordance with a particular ‘parenting style’ or philosophy, not things I’d done consciously, while praising or chiding my expertise. Things I’d barely noticed. Things that the job of mothering demanded on a daily basis.
When I began meeting with other mothers for creative succour, the need for responsiveness became apparent. We didn’t want to be told or given what someone else thought we needed, we, like our babies, either knew already, or wanted to work it out for ourselves.
Day in, day out, we were holding space for our children to explore, to feel their way while witnessed by our presence. I found a quotation and wrote it out on some baby leggings to have in the room: it described the way children seem only to need us when we are not consciously giving them our attention; otherwise they happily pursue their play independently of us, bathed in our inobtrusive, unacknowledged supervision.
This was supposed to remind us of the (worthwhile) challenge of trying to hold a dual space for mothering while making. But it also reminded me that the invisible act of holding the mothers in my attention was an important activity, probably more important than suggesting anything for them to do. The workshops taught me about the benefits of being mothered, ‘held’, listened to, given space, supported to grow, at any age. About the rarity of this for mothers. About the value of trying to do something difficult and imperfect. Like mothering.
And the invisibility of facilitation, the stealth of it, seems often intrinsic to its success. Is this mothering, I wonder? It is not that men are incapable of behind-the-scenes responsiveness, but perhaps rather that women (mothers or no) have developed an expertise at this barely anatomised skill over so many generations that even now it is being passed on unwittingly along the female line. We have been excellently placed to cultivate a nourishment that grows best out of the light.
Many lessons of motherhood were directly relevant. Already mentioned: the pointlessness of detailed preparation. (Anyone who has ever made, then tried to stick to, a Birth Plan, will have an excellent insight into what good planning entails.) Also, a new familiarity with the wisdom of not-knowing. My increased confidence that a blank but connected openness was a great place to start from. I also noticed that the less I appeared to be doing, the better. In other contexts, it can be useful for a facilitator to announce their contribution: a teacher may tell you what they are going to teach, then later show you that you now know it; this can be useful for your sense of achievement and your trust in them. But this felt different. Something more akin to my general approach to being a parent. Show up. Do your thing. Intervene if you really have to.
I did question whether it was wise to try to cultivate an immeasurable quality, one that would hardly open any doors for funding applications, many of which rely on the need to demonstrate ‘value added’, having recorded a pre-intervention baseline at the point when the need for intervention was apparent. But this isn’t how motherhood works. No mother records her baby’s cry so she can later prove to them how well their need has been satisfied after a feed; she leaps into action at the first sign of hunger. Milk is already pricking at the nipple, it does not require an initial assessment – it would not wait for one but is already there; in fact, once milk production has settled into a pattern, it is there expectant of need before the infant’s cry. And many useful social projects follow the same pattern, arising out of a desire to satisfy an urgent need, a need which then appears, according to the stats, not to exist, or not to the degree it had before help was provided. And there are terrifying dangers inherent in expecting doctors and police officers to answer to measurable targets. The most important acts cannot be announced or assessed, they are simply done. Accept this and suddenly it’s obvious; we fail to value the immeasurable at our peril.
The lining pages of mother record book made from the growth charts out of my babies’ red books.
But we’re not talking about answering a 999 call here. What’s so good about domestic, everyday responsiveness? Why practice it? Why nurture the hotbeds of it that mother/child friendly spaces might be? Ok, so it’s necessary for pre-verbal people and those who nurture them, but once we learn to ask for what we want, why might it still be beneficial to all of us?
We live in the hashtag MeToo age. And this encompasses not just the no-means-no part of that; there is increasingly a perception that other things might also mean no, and that in addition to raising people who can give clear signals about their wishes, we need to raise people capable of reading these more subtle cues. People who see responsiveness to the needs of another human being as a practice that enriches me that can give me pleasure, comfort, health, humanity.
I love the illustration of consent that uses the analogy of offering a cup of tea; it has clarified a lot about acceptable sexual behaviour. (Not to mention giving some pretty clear guidelines to certain English folk over keen to force a cup of tea on a woman.) However, sex is not a cup of tea, and here the analogy falls down. You couldn’t, for instance, notice a cup of sex left out for you on a wall and help yourself. To be fair, this rarely happens with tea, sadly, but it is at least conceptually possible. Sex is not an object on offer. It involves (at least) two people, with separate needs, responding moment to moment.
Whoever does it, regardless of gender, it seems that mothering – if that means a responsive moment-to-moment listening, a willingness and ability to be fully present and emotionally available, a degree of emotionally honesty that I hadn’t even had with myself before having children (babies see right through you better than you can), an activity that treats its object as a person, not an object – is something we all need more than ever; a skill to respect, to promote, to emulate, to reciprocate.
And responsiveness is a skill more fundamental than a tool for preventing sexual assault. It has an impact on relationships between people, because it arises from the relationship within a mature adult self. I cannot be responsive to another, without first being responsive to myself. The ability to attend to the needs of another with sensitivity and agility comes from the ability to listen in to my own flawed, needy humanity; from that compassionate connection there can unfold a tumbling flow.
If that first self-meeting is interrupted by fear or a lack of care, a habit of disconnection is begun, and responsiveness becomes near impossible – there is no spark, no tinder to be lit. Mothering, good enough mothering, is the guarding of that tiny flame of a self held, a flame that can become the torch to be passed on from one generation to the next. When the fire goes out, when the baton is dropped, the consequences are devastating. I feel surrounded by stories of the light of humanity snuffed out in people, whether in individuals’ acts of violence, mass violence, or reflected in a world organised so that day-to-day survival depends on destruction. On the other hand, every time I see a mother with her baby, or a mother inspired by her experience of maternal love to reach out to and for others, I see that the light of mammalian tenderness still smoulders in hearts all around me and I believe this passion can be harnessed to great effect. If shepherded well it is the antidote to overwhelm-induced apathy – it will not respond to being whipped into panic nor driven from its source, a fiercely hopeful connection with a loved infant. It is rooted in the connection of flesh to flesh, the links that build empathy and society, the desperate clinging of our monkey selves to what feels real and tangible and worth dying for.
Mothers. Meet, mother your children and one another. Notice. Value. Take what you need to. Give what you need to. Repeat.
What’s this then? A mothers’ meeting.
