Mothers

Soon, social media may be banned for under-16s. But the real addicts are mums. I was a sitting duck for the doomscroll as I fed my baby through the day and night. I was firmly pulled into the orbit of the ‘mumfluencers’: content created by and for mothers. Instagram has been a faithful companion through my whole pregnancy, birth and post-partum period. The algorithmic gods sent me helpful videos for late-pregnancy back pain, which were sorely needed, and less helpful videos of eight-week-olds sleeping through the night, which sent me into despair. At every stage, mumfluencers offer an endless loop of advice, warning and encouragement — difficult to resist when you are tired, isolated and up at 3am.

Scout’s honour Thousands of teenagers were evacuated from the World Scout Jamboree in South Korea as flooding, a heatwave and then the threat of a typhoon affected the event. What exactly is a ‘jamboree’? – Lord Baden-Powell adopted the word for the first gathering of scouts at Kensington Olympia in 1920. But the word itself can be traced back to the mid-19th-century American West, when it was used for a drunken revel – presumably not what Baden-Powell nor subsequent heads of the scouting movement would encourage. – The first documentary evidence for use of the word is in the report of a murder trial in the New York Herald in 1868, when two of the accused were described as indulging in a  jamboree before the crime was committed.

I’m used to waiting for the Catholic church to make sense. I’m a convert to Catholicism, and Catholic ideas sometimes take a while to become clear. I start from a position of suspicious distaste, but if I sit tight, I’ve found, the strangest things come right. It’s in this spirit of patient confusion that, since the beginning of the year, I’ve been waiting for the Catholic bishops of England and Wales to speak out in defence of the word ‘mother’, and to state the simple, unremarkable fact that only biological women give birth. Out of America, out of universities, from the HR department of every big business has come this push against ‘gendered language’.

Our daughter Clementine, 5, has just decided what she wants to be when she grows up. ‘A cleaner .... and a mother,’ she says, in that order. Her mother, my wife Taffeta, winces at Clemmie’s ambition. Middle-class rules dictate that we should try to knock such traditional notions out of little girls’ brains. It’s not feminist and therefore bad. But why? If this health crisis has taught us anything, it is that cleaning is one of the most important things human beings can do. And even in our horridly secular age, we all know deep down that motherhood is sacred. We need mothers now more than ever. The most key workers of all are parents — and mothers especially It’s odd.