Today. At my workplace

a man saw fit to say the following: “I met a pyscho while we were having breakfast. She was at the hotel, and she had this tiny thing- this baby- and two normal ones, aged about three and six- who were oblivious. And the tiny one was screaming. She I asked her, dyou need any help there? And she said she was ok. And I said wow, it looks like hard work”. A colleague interjected and asked him “What were you doing talking to a woman with three kids?” “Well”, the man said “ I thought she might need help”. He continued, “and then, she told me her husband lived in Zurich and she lived in London, and she looked after those three kids all on her own, and she was a lawyer, who works for Allen and Overy”. Silence. Awe. I (obviously me), saw “and?” And the girl next to me says “wow, that sounds horrible” and the man on the other side says “yeh, how does she manage it? Without her husband there?” I say she’d have child care, and be on maternity leave. They enter into this trawl about people they anecdotally met or heard of who had kids. I tell them “well, at least she’s a lawyer, and her husband’s some private banker. She can afford nurseries and cleaners” and they say yes, but people can afford them, some companies have in-house nurseries. I ask them which ones (I wouldn’t be wasting 50 hours a week with them just to have enough to scrape by with the rent if they existed). They say, you know, Google in Berlin, universities. I say universities still charge you, and Google is an exception, especially in Berlin. They start to praise all the mothers they know who answer emails at 1 in the morning and again at 5 am – even without bags under their eyes! That screams expensive makeup and regrettable economic conditions or obsessions to me.

This disgust, this incredulousness at child bearing is something I find offensive. This obsession with the appearance of women after they have done it.

Class consciousness is far too played down, and I rarely feel communal solidarity with other “mothers”, but that is generally because I feel the category of a mother, when conceived in the sterility of cyber space, is too narrowly defined.

My daughter has a sticker by her bed of a sailor’s girlfriend. Pointed heals, sloping calves, red lips and young lashes, make me wonder, what is it about a spike at the bottom of one’s feet that attracts? Does it morph the foot into a tool rather than an organ? Is that the function of commercialised sexuality? The need to attribute a mechanical, reliable, and un flesh like appearance to the body, whereas in essence, it is really is whole, and not just a sum of its parts.