2 w. ago
Maternity Service by Emma Barnett review – a tour of duty in early motherhood
In this valuable, brutally honest guide, the broadcaster argues that a supposedly joyful time is often steeped in drudgery and social isolation“It’s a bloody weird experience, maternity leave, and it’s OK to acknowledge that,” Emma Barnett writes in Maternity Service, her short, no-nonsense guide to surviving this curious – and relatively recent – phenomenon that can feel, in the thick of it, like a temporary exile from the outside world. For many new mothers, the abrupt severance from their professional lives and previous identities can leave them flailing in a strange and destabilising limbo where it seems almost taboo to voice any feelings of dislocation, in case these come across as a lack of maternal devotion.Barnett proposes that the whole business should be rebranded – rather than “maternity leave”, which suggests a nice relaxing break, it should be styled “maternity service”, with all the latter term’s connotations of a military tour of duty. Words such as “duty” and “servic...
Politics
