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differences between this version and the Version of Record. Please cite this article as doi:
10.1111/gwao.12486
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Clancy Annette (Orcid ID: 0000-0002-5155-8659)
Title: On mothering and being mothered: a personal reflection on women’s productivity
during Covid-19
Short running title: On mothering and being mothered
Keywords: productivity, mothering, anxiety, children, grief, Covid-19
Author: Annette Clancy, Assistant Professor of Management
Affiliation: School of Art History and Cultural Policy
University College Dublin
Belfield
Dublin D04 F6X4
Ireland
aclancy@ucd.ie
Conflict of interest: There is no conflict of interest to be reported
Acknowledgements
My thanks to Alison Pullen for encouraging me to write this piece, to Ian Miller and Elaine
Sisson for reading drafts and offering encouraging feedback and to Tess, Nell and
Meg...hurry up and apply for those passports.
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Abstract
This is a personal reflection, as a female academic during Covid-19, on how
women’s academic productivity seems primarily to be discussed in relation to a
different kind of productivity–motherhood. A recent procedure in a maternity hospital,
evoked feelings and associations of mothering and being mothered, and how these
associations hover over relationships regardless of whether wombs are productive or
not. My hope in writing this piece, is that every woman’s fear and anxiety may be
productively contained (regardless of how she is seen from the outside or momentarily
construed from within) during this time of extraordinary turmoil.
Keywords: productivity, motherhood, anxiety, children, grief, Covid-19
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I was born in this maternity hospital. On a freezing cold December day in 1962 my
mother was wheeled into an operating theatre where I arrived via caesarean at 3.50 in
the afternoon. I was a breech birth…at some point in the preceding weeks I decided to
turn back…before words, or thought, or feeling, or breath, my ambivalence about
mothering and being mothered sought expression. Perhaps this is where I arrived,
right here...where I am now. Laid out on the overbed table, in front of me from left to
right, are; 1 hospital gown, 1 hair net, 1 pair of surgical stockings, 1 pair of disposable
underwear wrapped tightly in plastic, 1 urine specimen cup and the largest sanitary
pad I have ever seen.
———
It is 1987 and I am the administrator of a London new writing theatre. My friends
(and colleagues) are actors, directors and playwrights. They have agents and
accountants…which seems advisable in this type of business. But they also have
therapists to whom they privately tell their stories before working them (or so it seems
to me) for public consumption. ‘I should get one of those too’ I say in jest. And then I
do. At 25 years old I walk into her room and when she asks ‘so what brings you?’ I
tell her ‘I’m watching a film of my life…and I’m not in it’. And so, it begins, once a
week for two years before the 20+ years that will follow…with two other therapists in
Dublin, and in New York. Initially there are questions about my childhood and my
relationship with my parents growing up and I feel the rising shame and
embarrassment of ignorance. Perhaps my thespian friends are well versed in the
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nuance of their parent/child relationships. I find it hard to remember …no warm
embraces, nothing I can pull out of me to meaningfully show how I’ve emerged fully
formed, into this room…an adult? child? Is it possible to parent yourself if your
mother has had to parent your father who, through no fault of his own, takes the place
of the child in need of mothering? It seemed logical at the time. He was ill/I became
self-sufficient. He was old/I became old before my time. He was depressed/I became
defiant. He had dementia/I forgot.
And I was supposed to have been a second child, but my brother died, at full
term…a stillbirth. Never spoken about then or now. But the expectation and
disappointment lingered of what he, and I, could have/should have been. I’m now an
eldest child, an older sister to a younger sister. And so, I cry in frustration at not
having the right answers, at not having any answers, at not knowing how to respond,
at bewilderment and anger…until I begin to grieve. I cry snot filled, red-eyed, ugly
tears and emerge from her room with swollen eyes week after week for two full years.
I chew paracetamol tablets to dull the headaches and I hide behind sunglasses as I
wind my way across London on the hour-long tube ride home. And each week I come
back into her room and pick up where we left off the previous week, piecing together
the fragments as Sue (because that was her name) quietly listens, and ‘holds’ me with
her gaze…until one day I say ‘it’s time to go back to Dublin’. And so, we begin our
parting, and I grieve again. And this time I get to tell her how much I love her and
how much her silent holding has helped me to understand what mothering feels like…
I realise bit-by-bit that grieving something I’ve never had is so much harder that
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grieving something I’ve had and lost.
———
‘And how are you doing this morning?’ Anne, my nurse, asks as she takes my
blood pressure. ‘I’m feeling a bit strange…I’ve never been a patient in a maternity
hospital’ I say…We exchange glances and Anne tells me that she is 67, ‘A Spinster!’
As our eyes connect, I can see that she is smiling brightly behind her facemask…’I bet
you are a fantastic Aunt all the same!’ she says. She tells me that her ‘Aunt rules’ are–
‘no religion and no cooking!’ and with that, she rips the Velcro off my arm and heads
back to the nursing station.
———
When my nieces were young (aged 10, 7 and 5) I was summoned to a
meeting….’Nettie’ (my nieces’ nickname for me) ‘we think it’s ok if you get married,
but we don’t want you to have children’. When I inquire about the reason for this
blanket ban on reproduction, I am told it is because they are afraid that I won’t have
enough time to play with them if I have children of my own. They live in Wales, I live
in Ireland, and throughout their childhood I live with the constant fear that they will
forget who I am as they are growing up. ‘My’ Aunt rules are, no excessive gifts, just
time and attention. I throw my maternal energy into them…visiting as much as I can,
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and as they grow, making sure they spend time with me in Ireland. I beam with pride
at their accomplishments. As Brexit unfolds, I become a constant nagging voice in
their ears about obtaining Irish passports; reminding them that as their mother is Irish,
they too are Irish citizens. I fear I’m crossing a line…
The love I feel for my nieces is uncomplicated by messy realities…I sometimes
wonder how it might have been affected if I had had children of my own. But here’s
the thing, I have never wanted to have children. I’ve never had that gut-wrenching
deep desire in my body to reproduce. I’ve always thought that if I was in the right
relationship at the right time then perhaps, I might have wanted a child, but not on my
own. The right relationship never came along during my reproductive years. Perhaps I
spent them in unsuitable relationships unconsciously setting myself up to be
unproductive. But ticking clocks have a way of focusing the mind. I knew that I didn’t
want to wake up on my 40th birthday, childless, because I had forgotten to make a
decision. And so, I decided.
———
It’s a strange thing to be single, childless, ambivalent and in possession of (one
supposes) a productive womb. Stranger still are others’ opinions about my womb, left
languishing and idle whilst theirs refuses to produce…social codes I was unaware of
were broken, guilt trips foisted upon me. …’So, you’ve never thought of having a
child?’…..’Even on your own?’….and when I marry a man who has two older
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children from a previous marriage the commentary shifts …’isn’t that lovely…you’ll
have step-children’…as though my womb can now be decommissioned entirely…my
womanhood upgraded to step-motherhood, a role I never auditioned for, applied for,
nor want.
———
My international students struggle with anxiety and depression. Away from home
and disconnected from their social circles, their mental health is being affected by this
crisis. I know about anxiety. I also research anxiety. I know I need to be more than
their teacher. I need to do more as their teacher. Holding and containing…isn’t that
good-enough mothering, by just another name?
———
It’s now 7.45am and I’m seated in a tiny waiting room between the stairs and the
operating theatre. The shift must begin around 8 because a stream of people pass by
me as they bound up the stairs and disappear down a corridor to emerge a few minutes
later in green scrubs and clogs. A heavily pregnant woman walks slowly past me as
her partner looks around for somewhere to drop his empty coffee cup…He stands out
in the corridor, the only person dressed casually in jeans and a t-shirt…’they must be
on their way to a delivery suite’ I think to myself. ‘I’ll just close over this door for a
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moment if you don’t mind’ says one of the anonymous, green-scrubbed people…. I
can see through the frosted glass a pregnant woman being quickly rushed by on a
trolley surrounded by more green-scrubbed people.
———
I cannot think, my brain is smothered by anxiety and worry. Papers lie unfinished,
beckoning at me from a pile in the corner of my office. I want to talk about how hard
it is to concentrate, to focus and complete work...or about how afraid I feel sometimes.
But I’m not a mother. And women’s work is mother’s work in this crisis and my
unproductive womb once again excludes me from the conversation.
———
Lying on the table in the theatre, the final checks are made….’I’ll give you some
of the good stuff now’ the anaesthetist says ….my consultant talks me through the
hysteroscopy …they will insert a camera into my uterus to see why I am
bleeding…biopsy….pathology….tests…six weeks for results… As the oxygen mask
descends on my face the medical team begin their examination of my womb…
anointed by others as empty and disappointed.
My mother was in this place once. Perhaps even in this theatre. Before there was
me. My current anxieties focus on motherhood and the metaphor of mothering: am I
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good enough, when and where, seemingly overnight and by unspoken consensus, the
way I had been proceeding (like my womb) may not be good enough. Without
physical evidence of my productivity in the children to whom I must attend when
protective motherhood calls, or does it?
