Maternity Service by Emma Barnett review – a tour of duty in early motherhood

The Guardian

16-03-2025

'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'.
This may sound rather a grim and brutal depiction of what is widely supposed to be a joyful time, but Barnett's mission is to separate maternity leave as an experience from the new mother's feelings about her baby. Even when the child is adored and longed-for (both Barnett's children were born after gruelling rounds of IVF), these early months can leave women feeling cut off from the wider world, their partner and their former selves, and her aim is to offer ways to navigate this rupture.
By her own admission, she is not the first writer to attempt a warts-and-all rendition of the physical and psychological demands of this life-stage. Over the past decade or so, an increasing number of women have articulated, in fiction and memoir, the ambivalence, drudgery and isolation that attend new motherhood and were once considered unsayable. For this freedom to be candid, Barnett says, 'we owe a debt to those who initially transgressed and sometimes paid a price for it. First mention goes to the important writing of Rachel Cusk, starting with her searing A Life's Work.'
If Barnett's book lacks the poetry of Cusk's 2001 memoir (my life raft during my own maternity leave, 23 years ago), it is written with a different purpose: less a literary and philosophical inquiry into the inequalities and conflicting emotions inherent in motherhood, and more of a practical how-to guide.
Barnett explains that she is writing in real time, during her second tour of duty – thoughts jotted down in snatched moments between feeds or while her infant daughter naps. In an encouragingly breezy tone, she offers advice on how to adopt a practical uniform or build a semblance of a daily routine, as well as the importance of connecting with other 'sisters-in-arms' and being honest when you are struggling, to relieve one another of the pressure to look as if everything is under control. This frankness is also essential for future generations of mothers, she explains: 'And when they do ask us, the women who have gone before them, for an honest account of maternity leave and beyond, we struggle to explain it. We partly gloss over the truth out of loyalty to and love of our own beautiful babies.'
There are, inevitably, limits to the applicability of these lessons. Barnett is careful to check her privilege at every step, but she is writing principally for women from a similar demographic to her own – middle-class professionals, who find their work stimulating (more so than wiping up poo, anyway) and who miss their autonomy and the previous sense of equality in their relationship.
These caveats aside, Barnett is a sympathetic and cheerful companion, and in writing this book she has provided valuable dispatches from the front line, the better to enable a more honest transmission of hard-won wisdom to her own daughter and all the mothers yet to embark on this bloody weird journey.
Maternity Service: A Love Letter to Mothers from the Front Line of Maternity Leave by Emma Barnett is published by Fig Tree (£12.99). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply