“It’s a bloody weird experience, maternity leave, and it’s OK to acknowledge that,” Emma Barnett writes in Maternity Service, her short, no-nonsense guide to surviving this curious – and relatively recent – phenomenon that can feel, in the thick of it, like a temporary exile from the outside world. For many new mothers, the abrupt severance from their professional lives and previous identities can leave them flailing in a strange and destabilising limbo where it seems almost taboo to voice any feelings of dislocation, in case these come across as a lack of maternal devotion.
Barnett proposes that the whole business should be rebranded – rather than “maternity leave”, which suggests a nice relaxing break, it should be styled “maternity service”, with all the latter term’s connotations of a military tour of duty. Words such as “duty” and “service” are unfashionable these days, she says, but it can help to reframe this strange, formless, sleep-deprived time as a finite period in which you are performing a series of tasks in the service of keeping your newborn alive. There are echoes here of Claire Kilroy’s brutally honest novel of early motherhood, Soldier Sailor, in which the narrator is the soldier of the title; Barnett mentions that she and a new mother comrade still greet each oother as “soldier”.
