Motherhood, lockdown and Basic Income
Original image by Jimmy Conover
Write something about motherhood and basic income, they said. Two topics that have occupied a significant amount of my mental energy for the last few years - and somehow, when I sat down to write this during the biggest global crisis of my life, I was choked by having so much and yet so little to say.
Because how can you possibly convey the reality of motherhood in lockdown? The thousand giddy triumphs and crashing failures that propel you through days both endless and far too short to ever achieve anything. The mountains your kids have climbed that are meaningless to anyone but you, impossible to recreate for anyone who wasn’t there, which is now everyone. The sheer impossibility of being unable to face another day staring at the same four walls, but equally unable to face trying to explain social distancing to a two year old. Trying not to think about the potential traumas taking root in a blossoming brain. Trying not to cry when your son’s favourite game is ‘delivering parcels with my mask on’. Actually, trying not to cry full stop. The skittering panic when you think your toddler might be trying to talk to someone outside your household, or rampaging through his father’s Zoom call while you feed the baby, because that’s my bedroom, daddy, why can’t I come in? A constant looming fear for your vulnerable loved ones that grabs for you unexpectedly and often. The discordant feeling of loneliness although you are quite literally never alone.
Eventually, of course, you find yourself ticking off yet another of the things you thought you couldn't face, and even more eventually, it's bedtime, and another day has passed, and you are skewered between utter exhaustion and a vague sense of surprise that you all made it. Everybody fed, nobody dead! in an extremely apt phrase coined equally aptly by some woman whose name nobody can now remember.
Original image by Anthony Tran
Original image by Nathan Dumlao
Among all these bizarre, fast flowing emotions are moments of supreme and blissful joy and love in its purest form that you know you would have missed if the apocalypse had not dawned one week in March, and - because you are a mum now - you feel horrifically guilty about this.
All this is underpinned by a constant bubbling conviction, not unique to global pandemics, that everyone else is doing it better than you. A fear that you are somehow failing to enjoy this precious time enough - becauseyou'llnevergetitback! screeches the woman in the post office whose opinion you didn't ask for - and lose enough weight and provide your children with enough and keep your house clean enough despite the fact that everyone is bloody well in it, all of the time, indefinitely. Deep breath.
All this would be no more remarkable than any other demographic’s struggle in this unprecedented time, but for the fact that - and this is where the idea of Universal Basic Income is about to be shoehorned clumsily in - we appear to have been completely forgotten by the state we are quite literally labouring to bring forth.
I was lucky, my second baby was born pre-lockdown, at full term, completely healthy, so although I was on maternity leave when lockdown started, I did not have to go though pregnancy and birth in the Covid era and I had a couple of months' normality with her. A friend was told at 18 weeks pregnant that her baby son had died, with no hand to hold but her own clenched fist. Parenting Facebook groups exploded with frantic questions about home birth. Not because women particularly wanted one, but because they felt it was the only way they would not have to enter the hinterland of childbirth - where lavender and candles segue seamlessly into life altering surgery - alone.
The situation around maternity leave demonstrated, if anyone was still in any doubt after the last decade, just how much trauma the government are prepared to put their tiniest citizens through. Parents whose maternity or shared parental leave ended were expected to leave their child with strangers they had never met, in buildings they were not allowed to enter. Many have been unable to use the family childcare they counted on, unable to find a childcare place at all and so forced to take unpaid leave and expected to be grateful that their employer allowed them to do so, giving up their job completely because they couldn't make it work, trying to stay positive as their relationship skewed into yawning and unplanned financial inequality.
The furlough scheme did not make provision for people on maternity leave and very little clarity was given as to whether people on maternity leave were eligible for furlough when they returned to work. The request to extend maternity leave by 12 weeks was repeatedly met with "the UK is already one of the most generous countries in the world to new mums- " (false however you measure it) " - so we have no plans to extend leave". This week the petition was finally refused by government, after months of tireless campaigning. We watched as other groups and sectors received apparently bottomless bail outs and support schemes at a much higher cost and a much greater disruption than mothers and newborns were asking for.
Original image by Jonathan Borba
It you wanted to go to Nando's, the government would split the bill; but if you just wanted another couple of weeks with a baby who had only ever been held by her own parents, you could get stuffed. Tory MPs relentlessly toed the party line, including Andrea Leadsom, who once claimed she should be allowed to lead the country based on motherhood having given her a better insight into people's lives, and now leads the government's commission on the first 1,001 days of life.
Aside from the world of work, many women had postnatal checks cancelled, or done by phone. Among other things, this is where signs of postnatal depression are supposed to be spotted. In my area, 1 and 2 year child development reviews were all cancelled - hitting both my children. Nobody I know resents this, and it is a small sacrifice in the scheme of what many have suffered. But no answers have come from government about how this backlog of unmet needs and unseen problems will be dealt with, or funded, when circumstances allow. The silent message is loud and we have all understood it: you don't make us any direct cash, so we're not really bothered about what happens to you. Wetherspoons was shown more nurturing, care, and understanding than this country’s children, and for that alone, we should neither forget nor forgive.
It is clear that in each scenario above and plenty more, UBI would have been transformative. UBI may not have meant face-to-face support was any more available in the context of lockdown (although this country’s comparatively dire response was undoubtedly worse as a consequence of poverty, inequality, and austerity) but it would have damn sure meant that women weren’t frantic about losing the roof over their head while they waited for it.
The circumstances around a return to work would not have been so desperate for anyone that they needed to go through a traumatic separation with their newborn, or make parenting decisions they detested in the interests of not starving in 21st century Britain. I have been that woman sat at a desk tormented by thoughts that my baby was crying for me, and let me tell you now, it is utter fucking torture. And I returned to a job I loved, a supportive employer, with loving family care for my baby. Having to do this abruptly, knowing you have no other option, after weeks and months of being the only face your baby has ever seen, is an unthinkably cruel scenario for everyone concerned - apart from those in whose interests your labour is being exploited. Of course, a positive choice to return to work is just that and should be celebrated. But this was not the reality for many or even most women whose leave came to an end during lockdown.
UBI in this context is the power to say no; the freedom to walk away; a choice made in the interests of your baby rather than your boss. It is the utterly basic honouring of the closest tie two humans can have.
What this pandemic should have taught us is that our entire economy is built on sand. Any one of us can have the whole structure of our lives swept away through circumstances beyond our control - and if you think coronavirus is bad, wait till you hear about the climate emergency, it's a doozy. We frankly should have more self respect than to accept another day of the appalling insecurity our current system engenders.
The pandemic should also have taught us what is concrete and enduring: namely, our dependence on each other. Universal Basic Income offers us the chance to prioritise human connection and the infinite threads that connect us all, rather than feeling pathetically grateful when a nameless corporation allows us three weeks a year to cram in as much 'quality time' as we can. (If you're on a zero hour contract or three, you should be grateful if your own waking hours and your kids' overlap by half an hour at weekends, but I digress).
In the context of the many and varied crises facing our species, this is not a privilege, but a necessity.
Original image by Hollie Santos
I will end on an observation. When I have spoken about UBI with plenty of people (read: men) who believe they understand the issues of the day, many are unable to think beyond the traditional - disproven - objections.
Yet when I mention it even in passing to mothers of young children, the reaction is often an immediate recognition of how it would give their children not just a better life now, but a better future, and a better social inheritance. In the context of coronavirus and how we rebuild, this is priceless. Our world in a generation's time is already living and breathing - but those with power in this country expect us to leave it sobbing uncomprehendingly in the arms of strangers.
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More about the author
Erin Hill - @ErinBHill14
Kirklees, UK
Mum of two. Labour Councillor for Crosland Moor and Netherton , Huddersfield.
Founder of @UBILabKirklees, member of @UBILabWomxn.