Of all the recent commentary on the Middle East, what has been flickering irritably in my peripheral vision are the twinkling, pastel-coloured Marian devotions on the many Instagram accounts I follow of groups set up by and for Catholic mothers.
I have stumbled onto these groups in the early hours, seeking help, support and solace in the ultra-marathon that is raising three children while trying to earn a living, keep a marriage alive and retain a tiny part of my pre-matrescence self.
But this is Motherhood with a capital “M”, and these Catholic Mothers are absolutely not my friends. In every saccharine, italicised cutie-pie affirmation, each retreat day with punishing schedule and competition to “Win a Mantilla!” – interspersed with photos of enormous families – is every confirmation I didn’t need that I am getting it all wrong.
Here are “Five simple ways you can celebrate the feast day of Blessed Carlo Acutis with your loved ones”. Here is an All Saints’ Day party with an invitation to bring your child dressed as their favourite saint (Catholics being po-faced about Halloween and denying their children the one night of the year they can get tanked up on Haribo and run amok is a whole column in itself).
And here’s the real kicker: a Catholic Nursing Mothers account to “encourage, support and educate breastfeeding moms”, setting out the inferiority of formula milk alongside Leonardo’s portrait of the Madonna Litta. Ten years after putting my screaming, starving two-day-old son onto Aptamil, the implication that I just didn’t pray hard enough to Our Lady has me clenching my fists.
By contrast, I feel that I am doing well at family mealtimes if I’ve got my children to cross themselves before they stick their snouts in the trough. If I can get them to Mass more than twice a month, I feel I deserve some sort of papal medal. And it’ll be Mass at the church in Cromer because then I can bribe them with a trip to the arcades afterwards.
Of course, the ministrations of Instagram’s Catholic Mothers come from a good place. But every post of a Catholic Mama, stretchy dress straining over her bump – “This account will be taking a break while I birth baby number 7!” – reinforces the insidious view that a woman is only a proper Catholic if she’s as fecund as a stable cat, passively pastel and devotes every waking hour to her children.
When women group together – and it pains me enormously to say this – they will, invariably, seek to compete, compare, undermine and undercut one another. The most dysfunctional place I’ve ever worked (and I spent 10 years with the BBC) was a magazine with an all-female editorial staff. And at the intersection of women and motherhood, it’s exceptionally vicious: the Big Table and the Little Table in the café in the comedy series Motherland; the NCT group that ostracises the woman who had the elective caesarean; the “Breastapo” bottle-bashers.
Catholic Mothers profess to support us in the “vocation” of motherhood. I love my children fiercely, but I don’t feel I have any particular vocation for this business – no more than I have vocation for teaching or nursing, or being consecrated to God. Most of the time I am merely winging it, winning if I’m the “good-enough” mother championed by the psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott, his theory designed to protect women from the dangers of idealisation.
“Where have you been going to Mass?” asked one Catholic Mother beadily, the last time I saw her in Walsingham. Later, sitting by the river in the grounds of the Abbey, my formula-fed son suddenly said: “Mummy, I think God is in the river.”
I was received into the Church towards the end of my chaotic twenties, a decade which began with the death of my mother, and at a time when much of my salary was going up my nose. I was brought to faith by those who’d be considered bad Catholics: the gay Marxist I met in freshers’ week who became one of my best friends, by the novels of Graham Greene and the decadent world of Evelyn Waugh.
Many of my friends happen to be both Catholics and mothers with a small “m”: they are fun and sparky with a glint in their tired eyes – grown-up versions of Marmalade Atkins of The Convent of the Blessed Limit by Andrew Davies. Joining the other sort of Catholic Mothers on Zoom to pray the Rosary is about as appealing as going on a date with someone from Guardian Soulmates.
I got angry about the Middle East. I donated to Save the Children’s Gaza-Israel emergency fund and a Jewish charity recommended by a friend who also happens to be a liberal rabbi and a mother (also lower case). I knelt at the shrine of Julian of Norwich, wept for peace and then I unfollowed the unhelpful accounts with their twinkling pastel prayers.
If God loves a sinner, then I reckon He has a soft spot for a struggling Catholic mother. And I’ll raise an illicit cigarette and a dry martini to that.
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