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The Guardian
16-03-2025
- General
- The Guardian
Maternity Service by Emma Barnett review – a tour of duty in early motherhood
'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 Delivery charges may apply
The Guardian
16-03-2025
- General
- The Guardian
Going on maternity leave? Don't expect it to be a bundle of joy
When I started to approach my second maternity leave, five years after the first, my main feeling was not excitement or freedom but dread. That low, leaden kind of panic, which grew inside me alongside my son's new fingernails and feet. I'm thinking about it again, another five years on once more, as Radio 4's Emma Barnett publishes Maternity Service, a book centred around the idea that maternity leave has never been accurately titled. Instead of the holiday it's billed as, she writes, it's hard work. It's 'a period of leave from all you know: taking leave of one's mind, body, job and relationships'. And it's a period that 'doesn't end when or if you return to work. It's just the start'. I felt, back then, if not quite shame, then certainly, a sharp awkwardness describing my fears of maternity leave as my due-date neared. Because, really, I had it good. The fact I had maternity leave at all, and a job to come back to, felt like a privilege. In the UK up to 74,000 women lose their job each year for getting pregnant or taking maternity leave, a figure (reported by campaign groups Pregnant Then Screwed and Women In Data) up from 54,000 a decade ago. In America, women get no federal paid leave, no guaranteed financial support and no universal services. But beyond the practical, there is the idea that this is meant to be a simple and beautiful time. It's talked of as a blessing, a dreamlike window of love and rest and milk, but much of my first maternity leave was shadowed by loneliness and fear and a series of identity crises that crawled over me in the night, without work, without sleep, without time to wash my hair. I found it hard to remember what I was for, or who I was – nurses insisted on calling me 'Mum'. And I know that even those who didn't scrabble through grimly like this will have had days of boredom, or anger, or pain, or insecurity, watching their colleagues become enamoured with their replacement. In the same way that it has slowly become acceptable to admit, radically, that there are parts of parenting that aren't delightful, Barnett is insisting we acknowledge that, regardless of what people regularly tell new mothers, we don't, in fact, need to 'make the most of every second' of maternity leave. That there are parts of it that are simply shit and that's OK – it doesn't make you a bad parent to say this out loud, and it doesn't make you a bad person. I recently returned to the columns I wrote about that year, my closest thing to a diary, and was shocked to realise I'd been describing postnatal depression. I wrote of the baby, 'The thing I feel for her is physically painful. It's an awful love… A bruise being pressed, continually, by a strong thumb.' I was talking about the kind of love that was, 'two centimetres from grief,' an inescapable, destabilising thing that followed me round the early-morning east-London streets and unmoored me from the person I'd been. So I was determined to make sure my second maternity leave was different. After some gruelling administrative mishigas, eventually I got an appointment with a counsellor, scheduled for the week I'd go on maternity leave. We planned to talk about birth trauma, mental health and how to populate this maternity leave, so it felt as different as possible to my first. While there were many things I couldn't plan, there were some I could – I would schedule time alone, we would ensure our care responsibilities were split more equally, that sort of thing. Shared parental leave was introduced a year after I had my first child. It was designed to give fathers a greater role at home, but research by economists shows the policy has fallen flat, so it's still on parents to structure their families in equitable ways that, at the very least, don't leave one of them seething blankly at windows. Anyway, everything was in place. The baby was due, the counselling booked and then, the day my dreaded second maternity leave began, the country went into lockdown. All bets were off, we were spitting into the wind. And, despite everything – despite the five-year-old at home, despite my mum not being able to visit – the maternity leave itself turned out far better than my first, partly because everybody else in the world was similarly unmoored, and partly because it couldn't have been more different. Barnett is right – the cultural idea of maternity leave is not fit for purpose. There are plenty of things employers and government can organise in order to make sure it doesn't feel as though women are disappearing when they have a baby, including introducing real flexibility, legally required data collection to track how they're being treated around maternity leave and an enthusiastic embrace of paternity leave. And, of course, if women's postnatal bodies were celebrated, and their conflicting feelings around motherhood and identity were understood, it might be easier to advocate for policies that protect and support them. Maternity leave takes a strange bite out of a life. You leave work, you leave youth, you leave your body, somewhere in a room in Archway. You leave a part of yourself behind and are not sure for some time quite what's left. But while it's certainly not always the dream it's pitched as, there are plenty of opportunities to make maternity leave less of a nightmare. Email Eva at
The Guardian
12-03-2025
- Health
- The Guardian
Maternity Service by Emma Barnett review
Something is rotten in the state of British motherhood. It starts during pregnancy: in September, a safety watchdog found conditions at nearly half of NHS maternity units to be inadequate. It continues after childbirth: last year, the UK's maternal death rate reached a 20-year high; when babies are between six weeks and a year old, the leading cause of maternal death is suicide. It carries on at work: in one survey, 52% of women said they experienced some form of discrimination while pregnant or on maternity leave. But reading Maternity Service, a slim new volume from BBC Today programme presenter Emma Barnett, you wouldn't gather that anything was seriously amiss. At least, nothing a new mother armed with the right polo neck, stretchy trousers, hip playlist and a stiff beverage couldn't gamely tackle. Off the back of her second maternity leave, Barnett has set out to document the strange period of dislocation this time away from work represents. Her aim is to give new mothers advice and companionship as they cycle between feedings and naps and the steady drip of body fluids. 'We need to make it easier to talk honestly about what the process of parenting – and specifically this initial and intense probation period – actually feels like,' she writes. She is right about this, which is why it is all the more disappointing that Maternity Service is such a meagre offering. Let's begin with the title: Barnett thinks maternity leave needs a rebranding. It's not 'leave' – it's a tour of service, a commitment to collective duty, she writes. Is that quite right? Those 12 months of employment protection are regarded as a sacred resource in the UK but, in reality, benefits vary vastly by employer. I was surprised, when I moved here from the US, to discover how common it is for women to deplete their savings – or go into debt – in order to stay at home during the first year of their child's life. 'We couldn't really afford it,' one friend told me, but, she said, it was what she felt she was supposed to do. Barnett writes with a chatty candour; this book has the easy intimacy of a WhatsApp group fired off between nappy changes. She's looking to build rapport, confide, validate, and offer survival tips. The problem is her steely commitment to the status quo. Barnett notes that social expectations around maternity leave are out of sync with the realities – financial and otherwise. But she isn't interested in what it might take to revise those expectations. And even as she acknowledges the prevalence of maternal rage, she depicts it as just one more thing to be managed. Reading Maternity Service, I was reminded of a line early in the 2023 book Matrescence, when Lucy Jones describes her initial struggle to articulate the reality of her experience of early motherhood: 'I acquiesced. I used the language I had been given: the official lexicon for talking about motherhood. I fell in line.' The pressure to fall in line is immense. But what would it take to make the experience of early motherhood a little less punitive? NHS maternity units could be better resourced. Laws protecting pregnant women and new mothers in the workplace could be strengthened. Childcare could be better subsidised. Fathers get just a passing mention in Maternity Service, but, critically, men could step up, noticing that the old models for bringing the next generation into the world need an overhaul. Barnett often interviews powerful women but, strangely, any substantive insights they might have about early motherhood are missing, save a brief reference to a conversation about motherhood's impact on the brain with writer Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. 'In the interview, we did the best we could to communicate from this far-off land,' Barnett writes, 'popping our heads above the trench to try to explain the unexplainable.' Motherhood is gruelling and awesome. But is it 'unexplainable' – or simply undervalued? Perhaps some new mothers will find succour in the brave cheer of this pointedly pink book. For me, reading Maternity Service was a bleak reminder of how far we all still have to go. Sign up to Bookmarks Discover new books and learn more about your favourite authors with our expert reviews, interviews and news stories. Literary delights delivered direct to you after newsletter promotion 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 the Observer order your copy at Delivery charges may apply.
The Independent
09-03-2025
- Entertainment
- The Independent
Emma Barnett: ‘I talk to politicians the same way I'd talk to anybody else'
'People make a classic mistake with a woman like me,' says Emma Barnett. 'They think: 'you're a career woman, so of course you didn't like maternity leave. You didn't want to stop work.'' The former host of Woman's Hour and current presenter of the Today programme on BBC Radio 4 sighs and shakes her head. 'But it's not as clear cut as that, is it? I fought tooth and nail through many rounds of IVF to become a mother. I love my babies. I think I was very present with them during the months I spent off air with them. But also, I was surprised and bewildered not to feel fulfilled the whole time, to have whole plots of time when I didn't know what to do and couldn't relax the way I would if I were on my own…' On a mission to 'reflect the reality and reframe how we think about this complicated, conflicted period in women's lives' – when they're cut adrift from the structure and identity that comes with work – Barnett has written a book called Maternity Service. Her argument is that we should stop pretending these months of 'loving service' are a holiday, and compare them to military tours of duty. 'There is no actual leave. You are constantly on,' she writes, outlining the relentless slog and hypervigilance involved in the early stages of motherhood. She notes that soldiers don't usually start such tours with battered, bleeding bodies, constantly broken sleep and brains that are going through a period of neurological reshuffling of the kind otherwise experienced only by adolescents. Talking via video from her gleaming South London kitchen (she's a bit of a clean freak), Barnett is frank and cheerful – dressed for spring in a silky, emerald frock. It's her son's seventh birthday but he's at school – 'we've got family coming over for a cake later' – and she's just back from a toddler group with her two-year-old daughter. 'It can still feel surreal to find myself in these large groups of women, all banging out 'Row, Row, Row Your Boat',' she laughs. Barnett, who turned 40 last month, thinks women seem 'programmed to forget' the strange experience of maternity leave. She notes that her own mother claims to have adored every moment with her when she was a baby and 'never really cried'. 'Our memory just skips to the highlights reel and omits the other parts,' she says. She admits that she 'wiped the slate clean' in the five years between the birth of her son and daughter, so was determined to bear witness to the 'tough and mind-numbing' moments in real time the second time around. In a bid to reassure other 'discombobulated' new mothers, her book is intended as both reassurance that they're not alone, and a survival guide. 'As a journalist, I've always been interested in how people survive the tough times, how they keep going,' she points out. She started her career at LBC before moving to The Daily Telegraph – working first on business, then tech news, then editing a new online women's section – ultimately graduating to the BBC where she says she 'continued to blur the boundaries between news and features'. She's never scared to ask a politician how they feel, or a regular guest about the hot topics of the day. 'When I moved to Woman's Hour I made sure we started every show with a reactive, newsy topic,' she says. 'I'm always looking for fresh snow – a new take on the topical issues.' This year, on Today, Barnett has already broadcast heartbreaking, inspiring interviews on that theme. One with Dominique and Gisèle Pelicot's daughter Caroline Darian about the impact of her father's crimes on her family and her mother. Another with the dignified, devastated parents of Thomas Kingston, the husband to Lady Gabriella Windsor, who died by suicide after being prescribed antidepressants. In her own life she has survived – at 23 – the shock of her father's conviction for running a string of brothels in Manchester and decades of pain caused by endometriosis (which she unpacked in her first book, Period: It's About Bloody Time). She thinks that her own survival made her a 'better' person. Addressing her challenges in public has given Barnett the confidence to 'tread quite directly into delicate spaces' in her interviewees lives, 'in the awareness that I'm quite often asking them about issues and emotions they may not have even discussed with those close to them'. Although she won't discuss her dad with me today – 'print journalists always ask,' she eye rolls – she wrote an article about the 'shame, embarrassment, sadness and anger' she felt about his crime for The Daily Mail in 2016. 'This wasn't my mess,' she wrote, 'and I had a choice – either let it break me into tiny ashamed pieces, or use my anger to fuel my passion for life, love and my work. By choosing the latter and not wallowing in a tempting state of self-pity, I picked up where I had left off in London – but with an extra sense of urgency.' She argued that she'd come out of the awful experience with 'empathy and humility beyond my years' and a greater hunger for the stories of others. 'My husband says I'm always, inescapably myself,' she says today. 'So I'm the same on air. It's important, as a broadcaster, to have a strong sense of who you are.' She puts some of her success as a political interviewer down to the fact that she never worked in Westminster and 'talks to politicians the same way I'd talk to anybody else'. Last month she cornered Reform UK leader Nigel Farage live on air, pointing out: 'You keep saying what we shouldn't do, but what is your vision Nigel Farage, specifically? We're not mates in a pub – can you commit to something?' Today she says it's only recently that she's realised that her tendency to find the point where the personal meets the political dates back to her time at Nottingham University. There, she wrote her dissertation on the personal relationship between British prime minister Harold Macmillan and American President John F Kennedy. 'The files had just been declassified so you could go and read them and I really geeked out,' she grins. 'That personal connection was key to the 'special relationship' [between the US and UK] being cemented in the way it was in the 1960s, in the way we secured nuclear deterrents. It's not as simple as: 'those two guys got on so this happened'. But there were several quite key examples of how important that human connection was, away from the cameras.' When my son gets in the car after school I do ask him for three 'headlines' from his day Indeed the two men swapped remarkably candid correspondence. JFK once began a letter to McMillan with the lines: 'I wonder how it is with you, Harold. If I don't have a woman for three days, I get a terrible headache.' Barnett doesn't comment on the precarious state of the 'special relationship', and how it might hinge on the relationship between Donald Trump and Sir Keir Starmer. She admits still finds the transition between her role on Today and her role as a mother to be a 'jagged experience'. 'Slowing down or speeding up can be hard,' she says, cracking up when I admit that my own children (now 13 and 15) occasionally accuse me of interviewing them. 'When my son gets in the car after school I do ask him for three 'headlines' from his day,' she says. On her first 'maternity service' with him, she admits she pushed him around the park listening to podcasts about world affairs and occasionally shared her views with him. 'A man walked past me once, overheard what I was saying and joked: 'Wow – that's high fibre!' He said he missed hearing me on Five Live and I said, 'I think you can tell I'm missing it too at times. But I've got a regular live show here in the park!'' It was during these days that Barnett developed her survival guide. She always aimed to be out of the house by 9am; she found a practical uniform to keep her comfortable and she forged powerful bonds with the women she met at antenatal and toddler classes. 'I talk about sisters in arms, walking in lockstep,' she says. 'I bonded with the women I met then in a way I'll probably never bond with people again. I still refer to the woman I befriended during my first pregnancy as my 'Mat Leave Wifey'. I found a video the other day of us both pushing prams together and laughing so hard… I couldn't have done it without her. I'd have gone mad.' Barnett points out that she has to remind her husband, Jeremy Weil, with whom she now runs a colouring book business called Colour My Streets, to try to hook up with friends while he's out with their children, because companionship makes things so much easier and men can be less likely to seek that out. In her book, Barnett is honest about the release she found in finding a local wine tasting group. Although some women disapprove of the 'Mummy Needs Gin' memes so often shared online, Barnett says she has 'always worked hard and played hard.' 'I love food,' she says. 'I love having a drink. Socialising. A great boozy Soho lunch is regularly in the diary. We put so many drugs in our bodies. Nine million people in the UK are on antidepressants. I don't actually drink a lot but when I do get to have a couple of drinks it's great. I have no shame about that.' She notes that her adjustment to all the nights of broken sleep with her daughter made it easier to take the Today programme job, for which she has to rise at 3am. 'An actor friend pointed out my sleep was screwed anyway, I might as well lean into it!' She also points out that she's been 'gaming around chronic pain, IVF, a body full of hormones' for a decade. But Barnett is also happy to be shedding her old fertility uniform at last. 'For years I wore big floaty dresses, because I was so bloated from the IVF and bruised from the needles,' she says, pointing out the fact those dresses 'allow you to be pregnant. Or to lose a baby. Or to breastfeed'. But eight months ago she brought herself a pair of jeans for the first time in years and is thrilled to feel her edges more clearly defined. She's a woman who believes her comrades in motherhood should go into their own maternity leaves with their 'eyes and hearts open' aware that things will get wild and they 'may never be the same again'.
