It’s been an amazing couple of years, really. I got 35 percent famous, cut my hair short, got pissed with Benedict Cumberbatch, had two number one books, gave up heels, and finally worked out what that weird smell in the hall was. (The lightshade was incorrectly fixed, meaning the seam—fastened with glue—was near enough to the hot bulb to warm the glue, releasing its disturbingly fishy odor. It wasn’t that there was a Hellmouth opening up AFTER ALL! It was such a relief.)
But perhaps the most exciting thing was making the sitcom Raised by Wolves with my sister Caz based on our childhood, of being a huge, homeschooled family in the West Midlands. As we were writing it, we realized something: This show wasn’t, as we’d originally thought, all about the weird teenage girls in it. It was all about the mum, Della. I tried to explain why here.
“Mum” is a pejorative, really, isn’t it? I’m sorry to drop such a Downer Bomb the day before Mothering Sunday, but it is. “Mumsy” clothes, “Mum dancing,” “Your mum”—bad, all bad. “Mum” as an insult rests on the underlying notion that all mums are dull, knackered, sexless husks who—having reproduced—need to just lie down and rot so that their bodies may become useful to the world again by, e.g., helping a tree grow, or providing carrion for a passing fox.
This is odd, given that a notional “Mum Island”—back off, Channel 5! I’ve already copyrighted the idea!—would currently be populated by J. K. Rowling; Beyoncé; Björk; Tina Fey; Scarlett Johansson; the prime ministers/presidents of Chile, Malawi, Argentina, Brazil, Bangladesh, and Liberia; Shonda Rhimes; Sheryl Sandberg; and more Nobel Prize winners than I have time to count as I’m doing the school run in twenty minutes.
Mums can, demonstrably, get things done, wear the correct-sized clothing, be wildly creative, and dance in a sexy way. So why do we still think of them as Benny from Crossroads, but with tits?
I would suggest that film and TV are the problems here. Mums on screen divide into roughly two categories, thus:
Or:
Basically, popular culture has not served motherhood well. It is fascinating that the onset of male puberty has created the sublimated superhero imagery of Spider-Man (web shooting), Luke Skywalker (lightsaber), and the X-Men, but the incomparably more dramatic shift into motherhood gets the alien bursting out of John Hurt—YEAH, THAT’S RIGHT, A MAN—in Alien, and that’s about your lot.
As an exercise, I’m just going to run through, once again, what becoming a mother consists of. First of all, you casually make an extra internal organ—the placenta. Like you’re some goddamn intergalactic robot UPGRADING ITSELF.
Then you spend the next nine months being a LIVING, WALKING FLESH NEST: casually absorbing your fetus’s endless excreta while you’re busy running an international business—something which, in later years, you will find the perfect metaphor for raising a teenager. Then, at the point where you’ve grown a skull and a brain big enough to make humans the dominant species on earth—but still just small enough to emerge from your pelvis without blowing both your legs off—a homunculus will effortfully punch its way out of your “special flower.”
Here—at the point where, in a comparable exercise, a man who’d just passed a microscopic kidney stone would be wheeled onto a ward, dosed with morphine, treated like a brave hero, then left the hell alone—you magically turn your tits into a milky heaven buffet, and start cranking out fifteen meals a day into a tiny, screaming, ungrateful creature who resembles an enraged otter in a jumpsuit.
Just to, again, get this into perspective—when the most magic man who ever lived, Jesus, turned water into wine once, for one party, people went on about it for two thousand years, and formed a major man-religion around it.
Meanwhile, for millions of breast-feeding mothers every day, turning their bodies into lunch, the reaction is, “Bitch, please—don’t do that in Claridge’s.”
And then, of course, after the first year, the really difficult bit starts. The fevers and the ghosts and the sleeps that won’t come—the terrible falls, and the bullies, and the boy who breaks their heart, and the hair that makes them sad. And you have to teach them what jokes are, and what death is, and how to charm—all while putting three meals a day on the table, and money in the electricity meter, and joy between every wall in the house, and never, never, ever forgetting to try and love every minute, because suddenly, ten minutes after they were born, they slam the front door for the last time, and you are sitting there, going, “Where did the baby go? Where is my baby?”
The sitcom I wrote with my sister, Raised by Wolves, starts on Channel 4 this week, and it centers around a single mother of six, living on a council estate, in Wolverhampton. We knew we’d found the right actress for the part when Rebekah Staton walked in and said, “I’m going to play her like Clint Eastwood. Is that okay? Like a fucking glorious superhero.”
And we were like, “Yeah. How could you play a mother any other way?”