Excerpt from DOING IT ALL: THE SOCIAL POWER OF SINGLE MOTHERHOOD
Eight weeks after her birthday, six weeks after mine, Imogen and I are finally enjoying a treat we’ve been promising each other. We stretch out tired muscles in a pool of artificially salinated water. Through the steam, I’m rattling on at her about collective childrearing and Hadza grandmothers, who upend the idea of fathers as nature’s providers and protectors. But Imogen knows all this. She’s done ethnographic research for NGOs all over Africa, including for European social enterprises bringing the wonders of renewable power to remote, off-grid communities—and tearing apart their social fabric in the process.
As an environment journalist, I’m familiar with these initiatives’ claims of liberating African women from the burden of collecting firewood. But, Imogen says, collecting wood is when women get together away from their menfolk and organize. Gathering is a site of female power. ‘They love having an African woman collect the data,’ she says, ‘but they aren’t interested in my analysis.’
And Imogen knows the power of extended family because as a single mother in her younger years, grandparents, other kin and as-kin, made possible her work as a trade union leader in the antiapartheid struggle.
‘I’ve always thought this. Mothers aren’t supposed to look after children. If we’re fit enough to make babies, we’re fit enough to be out working, gathering firewood, organizing strikes—it’s the oldies who should be stuck home with the kids.’ It’s the single mothering she’s doing in northern Europe, confined, cut off from real life, in constant conflict with her child’s father, battling the job center’s paper abuse, that Imogen finds shocking.
‘When I was a mother the first time, the struggle was political. There was an incredible sense of community—but also of hope. I was bringing my son into a world we believed we were making anew,’ Imogen says. ‘Mothering in capitalism is shit.’
Enveloped in the heat of fossil fuels gouged from the Earth and burned conveniently out of sight, I gaze at a mute wooden Buddha overlooking the pool. Made by Indonesian hands, transported across the globe in hydrocarbon-powered ships, so we can pretend that incinerating the planet’s future is spiritually enriching.
As I write, my phone goes off and I reach to silence it, but seeing Ginevra’s number, I pick up. She asks if she can put me down as her daughter’s next of kin. I’m touched, because I love her daughter, S. Her wise little face. How gravely she holds my gaze when she nestles in for a cuddle. But I also regret she doesn’t have a stronger bond with anyone but her mother.
Next of kin means in an emergency. I wish I could claim the honorific of othermother. But we hardly see each other. Sunday afternoons, sometimes. A glorious, wet camping trip last summer. Breathing spaces when the rush of life stills for a moment.
Months can pass with only intermittent WhatsApp messages, trying to fit each other in between work, school, therapists’ appointments, playdates with school friends, schedules with fathers.
Next week? Next month?
Conversations run parallel on my phone. Sometimes, they loop and intersect. More connections should strengthen a network. But add another mother, and a date we can all keep only becomes more elusive: our threads through cyberspace a cobweb in the wind.
Imogen, Ginevra and I first connected over the dream of a different kind of family. Imogen reached out through our single mums Facebook group with a kind of manifesto. She was moving from Cape Town to Berlin with her nine-year-old daughter and a mission to set up a single mothers’ co-living project. The first time we met was a few days after she arrived, at a community center with a couple of dozen other women and children, scribbling dreams of home and family on rolls of packing paper.
We wanted to make co-living the physical infrastructure of single mothering as a site of collective care. Spaces to work and play. Mothering shared, siblings multiplied. And when they left, we’d still have each other, a disorderly collective for that special, female phase of life. More to draw our fledglings back to the nest than poor old Mum, more bets on grandmothering than the life choices of each of our daughters.
Now, I’m swotting up on the history (and prehistory) behind our dreams of motherly solidarity. But it’s become an intellectual project, not an embodied one.
If my dream of a perfectly balanced two-parent home failed because mother and father turned out to be more different, less compatible, than I’d imagined, I believe living with other mothers would work because we speak shared language from shared experiences. Our responsibilities clear, mutually understood and articulated: not a matter of silently ingrained assumptions.
But I won’t get to test my conviction because we’re each struggling just the same. Separate lives, locked into identically overburdened routines. Identically exhausted. Running parallel, we yearn to converge. So we can othermother one another and one another’s children. Or just so we don’t each have to cook our own dinners every damn day.
But we’re too busy to make any of this happen. We’re each too focused on our own needs, the needs of our own children. And time is ticking: not our own biological clocks but those of our children, who are growing up and running out of use for our fantasy family.
The metabolisms of our atomized domestic spaces work at a furious rate. The smaller the household, the more it costs to run. In motherly labor, rent, fuel, groceries, the replicated collections of stuff each of our homes contains.
People say the climate crisis is hard to grasp emotionally. You cannot relate to a disaster on this scale until a tidal wave washes away your village or your family goes hungry. But I feel ecological collapse in my muscle. The speed at which money slips through my fingers. The constant struggle to keep pace.
We’re living in a machine spinning out of control, a growth-based economy that’s failing if it doesn’t literally double in size every two or three decades. It’s exhausting the planet, but it’s exhausting people too.
I feel it when I pay someone on a fossil-fueled scooter to bring an expensive, high-energy processed meal wrapped in indestructible polymer foam to my door. When I wonder how long the man on the scooter must work to pay for his own dinner. I feel it when I can only get a grip on my domestic space by tossing out waste biological cycles can’t cope with. I’m dissipating my own exhaustion into global social, economic, ecological and atmospheric systems. Here, you decide what to do with this shit.
If Ginevra, Imogen and I did merge our three little families we could quantify the little difference this would make to the planet as a whole using a carbon footprint calculator. Go online, tap in the kind of home you live in, what you buy and eat, how you travel. Out comes a number that represents your own personal share of responsibility for a global economy run on fossil fuels. And then, if you’re an ecologically responsible citizen of the world, you can chip away at that number. Give up meat, ride a bike, have your holidays at home.
These calculators were dreamt up by Big Oil. Not to help us design gentler, more communal futures but to shift responsibility for the climate crisis from systems onto individuals. Or from BP onto mothers. Because when responsibility is personalized, it’s also feminized.
Cooking from scratch with local produce, persuading your kids to go vegan, sorting trash, doing the school run on foot, changing energy supplier, hand-washing laundry, are domestic duties. Women’s work.
Reducing the challenge of reshaping capitalism’s interaction with the rest of biosphere to a matter of personal lifestyle choice is a supremely neoliberal illusion. But shifting responsibility from industry to the domestic goes right back to the Victorians. It’s the same story that blamed infant mortality in toxic slums on mums not breastfeeding properly.
Now, we’re told if we just kept house better, a vast capitalist-industrial system of extraction and production wouldn’t have to keep trashing the planet. It’s not BP’s fault. Women made them do it. Because we’re lazy and we love shopping.
And because we have babies.
In 2017, a study came out comparing the impact of various ‘individual lifestyle choices’ on carbon footprints. It made headlines with the news that the biggest thing you can do, as an individual, is to have one less child. But none of the articles I saw under these headlines pointed out how stupid a statement this is.
All else being equal, the carbon footprint of two people is bigger than the carbon footprint of one person. Obviously. But then we’re not taking about personal carbon footprints anymore.
As ever, the notion of the free individual with personal rights and responsibilities unravels with motherhood. As ever, the boundaries of the female self are blurred. And as ever, everything is our fault. As if, because humans are doing bad things to the planet, it’s women’s fault for making all these bad humans. The crisis doesn’t just originate in the home, but in the female body. Eve is still responsible for the sins of humanity.
Of course, F did not ask to be born into an economy run on coal, gas, oil and neocolonialist industrial agriculture—a system that has exploitation programmed into its drive for expansion—but nor did I.
We vilify consumerism among the worst of late capitalism’s great ills. But the insane levels of production we have today aren’t a response to insatiable consumer desire. Consumer desire was, and continues to be, manufactured to keep economies expanding.
When mass production first exploded, women—housewives—were the ultimate consumers. Consumerism was productivism’s goodly wife. And if there’s any doubt whether these two halves of the capitalist machine are still gendered—why does no one expect production to stop making more of me?
Why does consumption have to restrain herself? Take responsibility. Go on diet. Exercise that most Victorian, motherly impulse: self-sacrifice.
Excerpted from Doing It All: The Social Power of Single Motherhood by Ruby Russell. Copyright © 2024. Available from Seal Press, an imprint of Hachette Book Group, Inc.
About the Author
RubyRussellis a single mom, environmental journalist, and author of Doing It All: The Social Power of Single Motherhood. Originally from London, she currently lives in Berlin, Germany, with her kid and their cat.
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