“Mum” is a pejorative, really, isn’t it? I’m sorry to drop such a Downer Bomb the day before Mothering Sunday, but it is. “Mumsy” clothes, “mum-dancing”, “Your mum” – bad, all bad. “Mum” as an insult rests on the underlying notion that all mums are dull, knackered, sexless husks who – having reproduced – just need to lie down and rot, so that their bodies may become useful to the world again by, eg, helping a tree grow, or providing carrion for a passing fox.
This is odd, given that a notional “Mum Island” – back off, Channel 5! I’ve copyrighted the idea! – would be populated by JK Rowling, Beyoncé, Björk, Tina Fey, Scarlett Johansson, the prime ministers/presidents of Chile, Argentina, Brazil, Bangladesh and Liberia, Shonda Rhimes, Sheryl Sandberg and more Nobel prizewinners than I have time to count, because I’m doing the school run in 20 minutes.
Mums can get things done, wear the correct-sized clothing, be wildly creative and dance in a sexy way. So why do we still think of them as Benny from Crossroads, but with tits?
I would suggest that film and TV are the problems here. Mums on screen divide into two categories, thus: 1) sensible dullards like Mummy Pig in Peppa Pig, whose job it is to appear in front of Peppa, Daddy and George and say, “Are you having fun in here? Well, I’ve come to end that! Come on – everyone wash their hands and put all the good times away!” Or: 2) mums just as buzz-kill as Mummy Pig, but lent “humanity” and “character” by constantly complaining about what drudges they are, while allowing the children they raised to treat them like dirt. Watching this, I’m like, “Hey, screen mom – you’re a formative influence on that kid’s life. When did you skip the bit where you teach them some freaking manners? How am I supposed to like you when you raised such hateful, misogynist trolls?”
Basically, popular culture has not served motherhood well. It is fascinating that the onset of male puberty has created the sublimated superhero imagery of Spider-Man (web-shooting), Luke Skywalker (light sabre) and the X-Men, but the incomparably more dramatic shift into motherhood gets the alien bursting out of John Hurt – YEAH, THAT’S RIGHT, A MAN – in Alien, and that’s about your lot.
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As an exercise, I’m going to run through, again, what becoming a mother consists of. First, you casually make an extra internal organ – the placenta. Like you’re some goddamn intergalactic robot UPGRADING ITSELF.
Then you spend the next nine months being a LIVING, WALKING FLESH-NEST: casually absorbing your foetus’s excreta while you’re running an international business – something which, in later years, you will find the perfect metaphor for raising a teenager. Then, at the point where you’ve grown a skull and a brain big enough to make humans the dominant species on Earth – but still just small enough to emerge from your pelvis without blowing both your legs off – a homunculus will effortfully punch its way out of your “special flower”.
Here – at the point where a man who’d just passed a microscopic kidney stone would be wheeled onto a ward, dosed with morphine, treated like a brave hero, and left the hell alone – you magically turn your tits into a milky heaven-buffet and start cranking out 15 meals a day into a tiny, screaming, ungrateful creature who resembles an enraged otter in a jumpsuit.
Just to get this into perspective – when the most magic man who ever lived, Jesus, turned water into wine once, for one party, people went on about it for 2,000 years, and formed a major man-religion around it. Meanwhile, for millions of breastfeeding mothers every day, turning their bodies into lunch, the reaction is, “Bitch, please – don’t do that in Claridge’s.”
And then, of course, after the first year, the really difficult bit starts. The fevers and the ghosts and the sleeps that won’t come – the terrible falls, and the bullies, and the boy who breaks their heart, and the hair that makes them sad. And you have to teach them what jokes are, and what death is, and how to charm – all the while putting three meals a day on the table, and money in the electricity meter, and joy between every wall in the house, and never, never, ever forgetting to try to love every minute, because suddenly, ten minutes after they were born, they slam the front door for the last time, and you are sitting there, going, “Where did the baby go? Where is my baby?”
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The sitcom I wrote with my sister, Raised by Wolves, starts on Channel 4 this week, and it centres on a single mother of six, living on a council estate, in Wolverhampton. We knew we’d found the right actress for the part when Rebekah Staton walked in and said, “I’m going to play her like Clint Eastwood. Is that OK? Like a f***ing glorious superhero.”
And we were like, “Yeah. How could you play a mother any other way?”
Raised by Wolves is on Monday, 10pm (Channel 4)