What if you are doing all the right things?
What this dad makes of the complex world of motherhood
Windows on the World
Welcome, to another opening of my mind vault. A meandering, but honest look around planet earth from my tiny windowsill.
Whilst it might be ‘my’ windowsill, if we’re able to look through the glass, and not with the glass, my hope is we can all revel in a shared landscape.
What I mean by looking *with* the glass, is looking with our filters still in place; our innumerable preconceived ideas and notions that we carry around.
Looking through the glass, in contrast, is more dreamlike and less analytical. Like the proverbial school child stuck in class on a sunny day, looking out the window, yearning to be outside and free. There’s an absent-mindedness to all of this. A letting go of direction.
School teaches us to read critically and with discernment. Bizarrely, I’m asking you to read without reading. Can we allow ourselves to dreamily drift into the world of writing as the child drifts off into the playground and fields beyond?
Maybe we can use René Magritte’s art to inform how we can read our favourite Substacks’ from a less certain and more relaxed, open viewpoint?
Magritte often uses frames, and frames within frames, to reveal…expose I guess…how our minds default to a certain way of thinking.
In reality, the whole painting is conjured from Magritte’s head, and yet we perceive some elements of the painting to be more real than other parts. The beach and the sky we take to be real, yet items we don’t expect to see on a beach, like the large white stone, throw us off. The fire somehow reflected in the painting stops our immediate assumptions of what’s going on. The easel depicts the landscape that it is obscuring…except it’s not obscuring anything- there is nothing behind that easel…the easel is not there to look behind; it doesn’t exist as something separate from the rest of the painting.
Like sticking a stick into a bicycle wheel, Magritte is sticking an easel, a pipe, or an apple into the cogs of our thinking…hopefully sending us clear over the handlebars in the process!
Magritte is not saying the painting is like this and makes you think this way. He’s saying the whole world and the whole human experience are like this. The human condition is one of tricking ourselves into seeing things which don’t exist outside of our expectations of them.
Even now your mind is probably trying to grapple with and understand these complex ideas. To understand them in a way it can make use of them. When we realise the mind that wants to understand is the same mind that is providing the illusion we begin to understand that the whole ambition is fruitless.
Better just to hold childlike wonderment and contentedness in our hearts as we look through the glass.
But first, Comfort
For the new folks here, Welcome!
My name is Manos amongst my yoga friends but I’m David, or annoyingly Dave, to the family. Like a lot of folks here on Substack, I’m trying to convince myself that I’m a writer.
When I’m not writing, I’m generally facilitating a return back to the body. Whether that’s through yoga, bodywork, or guided meditations.
This is my invitation to you to come back to your body if indeed that feels like a safe place to be right now.
The body isn’t always a safe space - it’s as vast and complex as any cosmos. Often when I’m feeling dysregulated, my body is the last place I want to be! At times like this I find it more reassuring to connect to the feeling of the support of the cushions or whatever I’m sitting on. I might also visibly look around and consciously check that the room I’m in is a safe space...no sabre tooth tigers, a nice solid roof and four walls, a houseplant happily growing away…that sort of thing.
If I let myself roam freely, eventually my eyes tend to settle on an object, or maybe specific patterns in the grain of my bamboo flooring. I find there is some co-regulation happening when I do this. Almost like, ‘if the bamboo is doing OK, I must be doing OK’. There is a sense of harmony that is greater than my sense of the world and I can relax into that.
Are we safe?
Are we comfortable (eyes rested, necks’ supported, diaphragms unscrumpled, bellies and jaws softened)?
A bathroom break was taken.
We may gently begin…
Where do Thoughts come from?
Today, I thought I’d share some thoughts which have been bouncing around the old noodle before diving into an ‘essay’ on motherhood…motherhood as seen from afar…motherhood as seen by a far-ther.
A very powerful and beautiful image of mother and child. It was one of only a handful of photos in Substack’s ‘motherhood’ gallery which I felt was a sincere attempt at observing motherhood. By far the majority of photos were attempting to define motherhood. Judging by the clichéd images, motherhood can be boiled down to precious moments, tenderness and a Disneyesque version of love. Everything else is off-limits.
Given that motherhood is such an epic journey, what words would you broad brush across this canvas?
Random Brain Worm; Updating our Relationship with Social Media
Instagram has just 450 employees servicing over 1 billion users.
How can 1 billion customers possibly have a positive user experience with so few people gainfully employed to look after them?
The answer isn’t hard to figure out, but it should still stop us cold in our tracks.
It’s ‘Us’, we’re now voluntary employees of Instagram Inc!
Posting a photo back in 2012 is a far different user experience than that of today. Back then it was akin to a personal photo album. Today it feels like running a gauntlet; a gauntlet of adverts, fake accounts, bots and ‘fluencers.
As of January 2023, reporting bots, scams, and scrolling past endless adverts feels like an administrative job more than a recreational pastime (Did you know that practically 10% of the 1 billion users are fake bot accounts)?
Over the last couple of weeks, I’ve noticed a big uptick in bot activity. I’ve had almost daily messages/followed by, what I’m calling, ‘Solicitation bots’. They’re virtually identical; a profile pic of a young woman in a provocative pose, a name followed by a bunch of numbers and a bio that reads ‘Boyfriend needed’ or just straight-up sexual services. Credit where credit’s due, the more artistically creative ones feature a dripping water emoji.
A friend in the tech industry told me that AI is now scanning our profile pictures identifying our gender and using that to target specific bots at us. We’re told by Tech companies to be more tech and security savvy, but if the level of sophistication of scammers keeps going up, we’re all going to need degrees in cyber security!
If you see me change my profile photo to a beautiful sunset or somesuch, you’ll know I’m running a Solicitation Bot experiment!
Apart from actively doing Instagram’s security and administration for them (without pay), our main duties are all things, ‘content ‘creation’.
Instagram’s Ungainful Employment
We show up to work every day… which, as far as rush hour traffic is concerned, is conveniently only as far as the phone in our hand. We clock in and ⏰ out. We put our efforts freely into making ‘content’ that grabs an audience’s attention. This precious mineral known as ‘attention’ is harvested by Meta and sold at the market rate in the form of advertising revenue.
Advertising is a murky world and maybe we could all just do without it full-stop, but that seems a long way off. For now, just consider the money and effort going into traditional advertising (billboards, TV, magazines) and how that same effort has been outsourced to us. Consider that, apart from being mildly annoyed at seeing more and more adverts, like the proverbial boiling frog, nobody has noticed.
I just don’t remember signing up to be part of Instagram’s creative advertising team.
Advertising skullduggery isn’t a social media phenomenon. It’s been with us as long as there’s been shit to sell.
I remember having a gold and black toy car as a kid. It was a replica of the John Player’s Special (JPS) one pictured above. JPS is a well-known cigarette brand, at least in the UK. Even more iconic than my beloved Black & Gold JSP car was Marlboro’s red & white Ferrari F1 car. Marlboro ended their (a reported $350 million a year in the 2000s) sponsorship with Ferrari only last year. That’s a 50-year advertising association with Formula 1 racing. Dig deeper and you’ll find Marlbor’s parent company, Philip Morris International (PMI) is still in partnership with Ferrari. So close is their relationship that board members are interchangeable; the former CEO of PMI was named the CEO of Ferrari in 2018.
Smoking of course is just one example of an industry where the public’s best interests are not way down the agenda, they’re not even on the agenda! And I think that’s what we’ve got to conclude about Instagram at this stage.
This means, of course, we have conscious choices to make. Consciously choosing not to be an employee. Consciously deciding how many hours you’re going to dedicate to this app. Consciously nourishing other creative outlets…like Substack!
Of course, many of us rely on social media for letting our students and clients know what we’re up to and offering and how we can help them best. I don’t see that as a problem. I just think we can maybe be a bit cuter in how we make Instagram work for us, and not the other way around.
Motherhood; What if you are doing all the right things?
Amongst all the ‘front’ in Instagramland there are still moments of beauty to be had.
Like most deep moments of connection, it requires vulnerability on our part. Moments of beauty like a mum commenting on a post with the heartfelt question “What if you are doing all the things right…(but it’s still not working)?”
The comment was in response to this Reel pictured below which was saying just pour love into your child and everything will work out just fine.
It was a simple and powerful analogy, and like many simple analogies, it stirs up our emotions (which of course equates to thousands of likes) without leaving us anything real (reel?) to suckle on.
Of course, I’m on board with pouring love into our children, as opposed to coercing them into adulthood, but we can’t overlook the complexities and nuances of parenting in a world that doesn’t value the role of parenthood.
So I added a reply to the mother asking for answers that hopefully pointed out that we were also parented at some point and that parenting didn’t always match and meet our own needs.
I was surprised by how many likes that comment received and deeply touched by some of the replies. Replies, like the one above captures better than I ever could, the isolation of being a mother in this unforgiving, violent world.
So this is how I got to thinking about mothers and motherhood.
Clearly, I’m not a mother but we all have mothers. I guess I’ll never truly know what motherhood is, I can only say this is how motherhood has touched my life.
I’m one of four boys—the youngest of four.
Add my father into the mix and you’re talking a lot of male energy in one semi-detached house in suburban England.
In 2013 (the year my wife fell pregnant) I invented a gratitude practice I called ‘Love Before Breakfast’. The Instagram post above, was Day 9 of I think a 30-day challenge.
Side-Note; it might sound strange in this day and age where we’re supposed to be creating user experiences for others, but this was for me and me alone. It was way before followers were even a thing. 1 like at a time we weren’t conditioned to stalk each other and freely giving our input. I was simply interested in documenting my journey.
The idea was simply one of spending a moment with that strange force we call Love. A moment before getting sucked into anything else in my day. A moment to fill my heart with Love and observe what was speaking to me.
On this particular day, the voice that spoke said, “Go and have a dance with your mum”.
And so, I did.
It’s not something we’d ever normally do but I put Mumford & Sons on my second-generation iPod and shared a special dance with my mum. What I didn’t know at the time…what no one knew at the time…was that my mum was in quite advanced stages of cancer. It was the last dance we ever had.
They say you don’t know what you’ve got ‘till it’s gone and I felt that. Before my mum’s death, she was to me as water to a fish. That is to say, the relationship is so close you don’t notice it…and when you don’t notice something you just take it for granted.
It’s a paradox to me that my very first glimpse at motherhood came only after losing my mother. A force in the world that is so giving and yet so unassuming we don’t even see what it is doing for us can only be born out of Love- with a capital L.
I wonder if this unremitting generosity, this eternal pouring of Love is indeed the root sacred force of the Universe. I wasn’t holly enough to see my mother’s devotion because it was so much purer than I was. I just wonder if this blindness to Love is why the modern world is so profane.
The Brothers
Because I was the last of the brothers to be born, I was my mum’s last shot at having a little girl. Nine months of fingers and toes crossed.
As she would later recall, she was desperate for a girl. I wouldn’t say she was bored of endless Newcastle United FC (soccer) chat, but she yearned for Sunday afternoons baking in the kitchen with a daughter and for evenings learning to knit by the fire.
She even went as far as having the name Sarah picked out for me.
Alas in the summer of 1977, David and not Sarah blessed the family with his arrival.
“Hi!” (I should probably have included a baby photo of me here but I’m not sure if there are any…not newborn photos anyhow??)
Sarah’s Life
Anyway, this isn’t a story of how my mum used to dress me up as a girl because she was so disappointed that I was a boy à la Ernest Hemmingway, but I do wonder whether the arc of my life still had something of Sarah’s life etched in it.
You’ll be pleased to hear my mum was eventually blessed with a little girl to bake scones with. Not in the form of a daughter, but a granddaughter some decade and a bit after my arrival.
My Mum
My mum was a badass. Although my mother and father had traditional gender-split roles typical of their generation - my father worked shifts and my mother ran the house- if I needed a garden shed moving it would be my mother I’d send for and not my dad.
I know this because I did need my old garden shed moving and that’s who I called…and she was in her 70s then! The two of us put lengths of timber straight underneath the shed and lifted the whole damn thing before walking it 20ft across the uneven muddy garden. Like we were trialling out a new event for World’s Strongest Man. Of course, she thought nothing of it and proceeded to pick up a broom to sweep up whilst I sat down and demanded a beer for my outstanding manly efforts.
When I look back, apart from being amazed by most of the things she did on a daily, for her family, she did them without a single complaint. The grind of motherhood she somehow made her own.
Apart from all of that, I also look back and wonder a lot about the heart strain of having four children. Kids, you’re never, not connected to. Since becoming a parent myself, I look back and think “Wow, did I put my mum through the mixer!!”
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
This is the bit I appeal to my readers. Where I explain how important it is for me to write and have a sense of nurturing energy out in the world. This quote from Substack’s page summed it up for me.
“A reader is not a passive vessel, but a consciousness that is being nourished.” Sophia Efthimiatou (from the recent Substack Reads)
My Substacks take a long-ass time to write. My life has unfolded in many difficult, and often contradictory ways, and to distil it into anything that remotely resembles useful advice takes a lot of time and even more care.
I think my voice is important. Not more important than anyone else’s but I’m saying the most important things I can say.
In a time where compassion is regarded as weak - especially by men and young men have zero role models in this area - I’m committed to not putting a paywall between those young men or anyone who might find some succour in my writing.
So I ask those who can pay for a subscription to support the work that I do here. And by paying you’re paying not just for yourself but for those who aren’t in a financial situation to pay just now.
And if you can’t pay for a subscription, don’t worry about it, enjoy the writing knowing that someone out there has been gracious and heartfelt enough to pay for a stranger’s space at the table.
Isn’t that a lovely thing for us all!
My mum is a "move the shed" mother too. Growing up my dad had one leg so she did a lot of the "manly" things AND all the typical housework and child rearing. I wonder how much that shattered my perception of gender roles.
So incredibly beautiful and well put together. Some of these messages are light bulbs, others are going to take years to work out and mull over.
I can’t believe I didn’t notice your lovely Dad in that pic I’ve seen loads of times - such a perfect one to digitalise in this discussion - prob will never be another quite like it. ✨💫