Where does intimacy fit in our m/other tongue?
Contents
Fiction: Alice 2024 1 — Rose Bush
A mother house for a m/other tongue?
Research update [including a call for suggestions]
Introduction
You may have noticed that I have not capitalised, nor run together, the terms mother, m/other or tongue in the title this month. I have withdrawn my application to register M/otherTongue as a trademark, as another company indicated they wanted to contest my application with a letter full of legal speak. I would have engaged with them in dialogue, but they didn’t respond to my email inviting this. So I have been pondering the confirmation that we really can’t dismantle, or even contain, the master's house using the master's tools.
This has renewed my determination to work out what our tools are: how we use our m/other tongue, our tacit maternal knowing, in the care of others in our practice. Also, how we enable others to change their positions to also see this knowledge as legitimate and vital to the wellbeing of people and communities.
I would argue that it is connected people in communities that are the foundation of peace and sustainability, while the pursuit of profit tends to drive the destruction of connection. So, the fiction that came forward for this month led me down a path of wondering about connection and, specifically, connection that enables intimacy and vulnerability as a way of learning to be cared about and learning to care. In a book that came my way this month (Brookes et al., 2019, 49), Deborah Stone claims that “caring for each other is the most basic form of civic participation”.
Trying to boil down what I have been exploring this month, I have identified two key points or ongoing questions:
Is privacy a necessary part of the operationalisation of tacit maternal knowing? Or has privacy been confused with secrecy to protect such knowledge and wisdom from the manstream?
If privacy is a necessary part of using tacit maternal knowing in our various practices, then how is its value going to be recognised in our current western, global north culture where visibility is an indicator of value?
Privacy, secrecy, shame, value. Those are big relational themes to be chewing over. As I share this early stage of postdoctoral Research, there is a lot going on in me, so a lot is being shared with you! It still feels in a quite chaotic state. Don’t feel you have to read every section — pick and choose, be drawn to bits, question things. Be messy! Be creative! Be my co-researchers!
Fiction: Alice 2024 1 — Rose Bush
“My eyes are dim, I cannot see, I have not brought my specs with me.”
Alice was singing to herself as she pruned the roses in the garden. True, she had to sit down for five minutes after a couple of minutes of pruning, but that was fine.
“I have not brought my specs with me,” she finished with a flourish.
She beamed broadly at the sky, remembering Marjorie telling her stories of how she and Gordon, so young and full of lust and love, had dared the curtain twitchers to look, right here, in this back garden, by this glowing rose bush.
They had mellowed together, Marjorie and her, after Gordon had gone. She felt the lack of her mother, Marjorie the lack of a daughter, and so, informally and without quite knowing it, they adopted each other. Initially, they stayed on their floors: Alice up, Marjorie down. But slowly they found themselves inviting the other for meals, accepting it was cheaper to heat just one room in the evening to sit and watch the black and white television or read quietly.
Then, of course, it was natural that Marjorie would move her bed back upstairs and that meant that Alice’s kitchen had to be taken out, so they both used the kitchen downstairs. It made so much sense when it came to buying a new gas cooker that they purchased one together. They both shared in the delight of gas central heating when that was first installed, standing in the bathroom, hugging each other as lashings of hot water came out of the taps.
At school, Alice would unwrap her lunch and find Marjorie had slipped in a treat, acknowledging a sort of daughterhood. But never too far, never too much. They fell in love with each other, nothing more, nothing less. Sororal or maternal? Who cares. Love is love.
It was only the second time Alice had gone up to the attic. The first was when Gordon had wrapped his hands around her neck. It was strange that she had never been scared of him, despite his actions. It wasn’t anything that Marjorie said — she just knew that this man was gentleness. His gentleness had been overlooked in the expectation that she and the rest of humankind had forced on him by making him go to war.
He hadn’t wanted to go to Italy. He’d joined the army young, yes, but that was for a purpose — to make it possible to marry Marjorie. He’d never have joined to fight, to see the destruction of bodies at the hands of other men. And yes, it was men. This was not his world and yet, because he was a man, he was forced into it, forced onto the offensive. When he got back, after that first spell in hospital, when they tried to sleep in the same room and live in the same spaces and be like they were before, he’d been envious of Marjorie. She’d stayed at home. Yes, she’d seen horrible things and there had been bombing and people dying, but it had come to her. She hadn’t been made to go and find it in a foreign country.
That had been the only time he’d cried. Sitting on the edge of the bed they shared, sobbing. It was probably the only time Marjorie had ever walked away and left him. Neither of them knew how to manage it. Marjorie had told Alice it haunted her; it had so shocked her to see a man, her man, cry, but she also knew the horrific grief her man, a man, was carrying. Her sensitive connection to him was overwhelming. Together, they decided it wasn’t possible to lie alongside each other and not be wracked by guilt: her in feeling his pain, him in showing it. They needed space. He retreated to the attic, she to the shed to paint.
“There were rats, rats, big as blooming cats,” Alice sang as she stood up for another round of rose cutting, pulling herself out of her rambling, half connected memory and thought process.
He’d said there were rats at the hospital. She’d been shocked when he returned. That was his second time in hospital, the aftermath of her going into his attic. He’d been gone six weeks, and in that time he’d become emaciated, his hair long and matted, and he’d grown a beard. His face was caked in mud and his feet sore, his shoes cracked on the soles. His clothes didn’t fit him: the jacket too small, the trousers too big.
“I didn’t know he was coming home,” Alice said to Marjorie when she called her down.
“Just help me,” Marjorie replied. She’d sat Gordon on a chair which was in the middle of a large sheet. “He ran away. He couldn’t take it.”
Gordon just sat there. He was humming the tune of the Quartermaster’s Stores.
Marjorie used her dressmaking scissors to quickly cut away his matted hair. They noticed the red marks on his temples, his tremor and shuddering as they came close. He opened his mouth, and they saw his teeth were cracked and broken. Alice was about to ask if he’d been in a fight, but was quickly silenced by Marjorie: “Just hold that bowl.”
So she did. She held the warm soapy water as Marjorie carefully washed away the dirt and grime. She kept the towel over her arm, and every so often left to get fresh water, a clean towel. When she was out of the room, Marjorie would strip off yet more of Gordon’s clothing. Gordon just allowed himself to be cleaned. It was taking Marjorie so long, and she was looking so distressed, that Alice put the bowl down on a chair close by. She took another flannel and Gordon’s other arm. She gently and slowly cleaned him. Never in her whole life had she been close to a man's body like this. She drew her breath in when she cleaned his wrist and saw the marks of restraint. She made eye contact with Marjorie.
“He’s not going back,” she said.
Alice didn’t really understand what had happened, but she could see that Gordon was now so differently distressed than before. He’d slumped. His silence was more profound. There was no sense of seeking expiation, just childlike singing.
“In the quartermaster's stores.”
Alice clipped the rose. It had been a favourite of Gordon's, Marjorie had told her. She didn’t quite believe the same bush had lasted all these years. If it were true, the bush would be 80 years old. Gordon had loved the fragrance and the soft yellow. Before, before they took him away, he’d loved them.
She recalled washing the grime from the palms of his hands, from under his nails, following the gentle lead of Marjorie. They had frozen when the doorbell rang. “Keep him quiet,” Marjorie had said, calmly but with force. Alice just stood there, holding Gordon's hand to her cheek. He didn’t resist, he didn’t even seem aware.
Alice heard the muted voices
“Is he here? He absconded.”
“No, I’ve not seen him.”
“You’ll let me know if you do.”
“Of course.”
“Mrs Allen, I’m sorry.”
“Thank you officer.”
“Good luck, be careful. He’s a good man, I know.”
Gordon never left the house again. He only stayed up there in the attic.
Until one day, Alice hadn’t heard his footsteps and went up there to find him lying on the bed, eyes open but gone, forever. Heart attack.
“Natural causes, my foot”, Marjorie said. His good heart had been broken.
Alice never knew how Marjorie squared it, having her dead husband in her house years after he’d disappeared without trace from a hospital treating him with electric shocks across his brain that tried to drive out the traces of the man they’d made him into, along with the man he had been.
Alice sat down again. The rose had caught her with a thorn, and a small bulb of blood gathered on her finger until its skin broke and the red trickled down. She put her finger in her mouth, tasting the iron of her blood, and didn’t know if the sting brought the tears to her eyes, or the memory of a man who should be gentle, broken.
A mother house for a m/other tongue?
In my growing realisation that the master's tools can’t be neatly locked away, two experiences stand out: withdrawing the trademark application, and the rejection of my academic paper as not even fit for review (despite my efforts to narrate how and why I was subverting usual academic writing practice). On both occasions, I hoped for dialogue, and invited dialogue — but none came. On both occasions, I experienced strong emotion. Fear when faced with the legal framework of the trademark process. Frustration with an academic journal unwilling to engage with my work, even when it seemed directly relevant to their focus on therapeutic theory and women’s experiences. Sadness that there didn’t seem to be any space to connect across different views of what may be important.
These events left me questioning what our ‘house’ truly is.
During my doctoral studies, I wrote about "finding my place" as I developed my ontological and epistemological stance — what I believe is real and how I interpret that reality. Now, a shift has occurred. With ethics approval, this work is no longer a “small r” research or a hobby; it’s formal Research. With this, I feel the tension between the introspective nature of heuristic inquiry and the pressure to justify it as legitimate Research. Somehow it still feels not enough to just let this be, let myself be and take that position that I suggested in my doctoral thesis: what if I start from the point of embracing that what I do is magnificent?
Imagine if we all started from the premise that mothering is the most magnificent act one can perform for another. I know that the word ‘mother’ will have all sorts of values attached for each of you as you read, just as I attached all sorts of value to the word man. This tension is why I am working to theorise tacit maternal knowing — giving it shape through words so that others can look at it from our own lived story and say ‘oh, no it’s not like that for me, for me, it’s…’.
From such intimate sharing grows trust and interdependent relationship. The mother/infant share a body space in gestation, birthing, feeding, nappy changing, bathing, and the many other innumerable muscular acts (Polanyi, 1973) that lead to tacit knowing being cultivated, a specific intimate knowing that is unique to that relationship. That is where Theraplay is so brilliant because it recognises that each dyad is unique, even within the same family.
With my capital-R research head, I want to say I conducted a literature review. In reality, it becomes a smash and grab raid of research processes when I have a moment between chores. I have to Research this way because my life is taken up by the daily muscular acts of caring with little time to think and reflect (I am writing from both the actuality of my life now juggling different job roles, but also recalling the relentlessness of being a mother to small children).
It’s a form of literature review I haven’t seen in academic literature, one inspired by the universe providing what’s needed when it’s needed—perhaps a reflection of maternal knowing that comes with just accepting help when it comes wherever it comes because otherwise you feel on your own and not able to keep going.
How and why did Past Caring? Women, Work and Emotion (Brookes et al., 2019) suddenly enter my realm of vision? Does ‘why’ matter? Thank goodness it did! I felt hugely emotional. Look! Look! There are other women in the world who are having the same thoughts as me! I’m not on my own!
In the chapter The Ethics of Care, I was introduced to so many new writers and I feel embarrassed that I didn’t find them when I was doing my doctorate — but that is what happens. There is so much more in the world to know than you possibly can know. Sometimes, you have to go into that maternal space and just focus on the baby in front of you, regardless of the messages of others that say ‘this is the right way to do it’. We go beyond caring about how we will be judged/seen in order to devote the energy needed to care about what/who we care about. Marjorie focuses on Gordon despite the ‘law’ coming to the door. It feels right, even if it seems wrong. Such is the mother house where we can speak our m/other tongue. It is our tacit maternal knowing forged from the innumerable muscular/bodily acts that create our house.
So what if an approach to reviewing literature is about experiencing it from the realm of the tacit? Then it is about inspiration and trusting the universe to provide you with the material you need at a time that you need it to further the unique relationship that is being cultivated between yourself and the focus of your inquiry. In my case, I am seeking to make new tools by struggling to find a way of articulating how I want to care about others in all areas of my work. Yet, I’m mindful of the fear that this ‘woolly’ and ‘emotional’ approach might undermine my credibility.
How do we find an outside eye that protects and enjoys the unique maternal intimacy and enables such moments to become theory that can be used professionally in multiple realms? Is privacy a necessity of tacit maternal knowing, our m/other tongue? Or is it a necessary way to protect it in our current business, legal, and research cultures? While Brookes et al (2019) don’t focus solely on maternal aspects of care, I found others who are thinking in this same territory.
Okin has also challenged the justice tradition of politics, along with those who are concerned that ‘moral theorists fail to take seriously the actual desires of women’. Okin wanted women to be taken seriously as individuals and citizens. Her work on justice highlighted the way in which a focus on justice between households made injustice within households invisible. (Brookes et al., 2019, 50)
Marjorie lies to Albert, the police officer. Gordon saw the most destructive of human acts in his war experience and then, in a manner I am still trying to make sense of, violated the care of the other (and in doing so violated himself and his gentleness). At some point I should share that part of the fiction with you. It is ambiguous, although also undoubtedly a rape. It’s not violent, it’s confusing; two confused people…but that is for another time. This month is about the challenge of enabling the world to accept the legitimacy of tacit maternal knowing and so let us freely and openly speak our m/other tongue. It is, I think, working towards taking the / out of m/other, so mothering is just settled and accepted as a way of taking care of others in therapy, in research, and in our work and learning places. What mothers should be taken as magnificent and as undoubtedly high order knowledge.
Intimate care is often a very private action. The fiction flagged up to me that when intimacy is exposed as vulnerability in the public realm, it leads to judgement and, for Gordon, incarceration in a hospital for ‘treatment’. This possibility that exposing intimacy can lead to negative consequences creates a tension when I am trying to theorise it and make it visible. An essential aspect of developing the tools to build our mother house is, therefore, elaborating the ethics that underpin maternal care.
Such ethical exploration might help us feel safe in using intimacy well in our work. I was going to call the post ‘what is m/other tongue for man’. Words, though, get imbued with individual feeling-meaning. Man for me is always a loaded word that takes me straight into the white supremacist cisheteronormative patriarchal, misogynist, and capitalist construct of reality that I am trying to dismantle within myself so I don’t bring such Othering inadvertently into my care of others.
This is the inward journey of deconstruction that I share with you in this post-doctoral research, on the basis that what is personal often has, according to Moustakas (1990), universal importance and interest. Because I’ve grown up in a culture where the embedded ‘norm’ is heterosexual connection, male power over females, white over every other shade of skin colour, money over poverty, this public deconstruction of intimate experience (such as the writing of these posts and using my maternal experience) exposes me. It leaves me with a vulnerability which challenges all those aspects that were/are part of my identity — being within the white, supremacist, cisheteronormative, patriarchal, misogynistic, and capitalist construct of what is ‘acceptable’. Intimacy asks me profound questions about my experience of the dependence/interdependence aspects of tacit maternal knowing I named in my doctoral work.
But then, just as I feel vulnerable, wondering if this is okay to do, along comes Brookes et al (2019) saying what I want to say, giving other words to what I tried to give words to in my doctoral writing. There are many of us across the globe who are finding the land we stand on as mothers — the bodily giving of one’s self in the service of the other.
My critique of the second chapter, The Ethics of Care, which mostly made my heart sing, would be that it refers to women. It does not specifically identify the task of mothering and how we make that generative way of being central to the way we theorise, the way we make decisions about how we navigate the world. That is what Marjorie is doing in her care of Gordon, and in that she educates Alice into this form of maternal care. Past Caring? is saying, like this month’s fiction, that the role of the man who cares also needs to be examined.
I now have so much more I want to read.
Our dependence makes us vulnerable – in particular, our emotional attachment to certain people. It is this vulnerability and attachment that Kantians and contractarians fear because it prevents us from acting in a dispassionate and detached manner. Baier argues that emotions have a positive influence on our judgements, involving the need to trust, which is important for our continued interrelationships. (Brookes et al., 2019, 43)
In this world where things are valued by possession, that somehow speaks to me. I’m not sure how yet. The next quote was an ah-ha moment — so that inner narrative of ‘emotion = bad’ comes from somewhere, some theory! It’s not an absolute, I don’t have to be fearful of being emotional. I can challenge it!
Both Lawrence Kohlberg (1981) and Erik Erikson (1968) associated moral maturity with detachment and independence, subordinating relationships to rules. When women were measured against a hierarchy of ethical progress – with six levels of moral development from infancy to adulthood – they reached only level three. This stage was at the level of adolescents and early adults according to Kohlberg’s moral development theory, and was related to the development of good interpersonal relationships. The conclusions were that women were either deviant or deficient in their development, which was often attributed to their being overly emotional. The later stages – identified as relating to maintenance of social order; social contract and rights; and decision-making based on universal principles – were seen as being beyond their grasp. (Brookes et al., 2019, 40)
Inconvenience. What does the world do about inconvenient people? The manstream renders them ‘less than’ themselves, it Others them. The connection between adolescents and this manstream view of women lacking moral maturity makes me think about what neuroscience is illustrating about the brains of adolescents (Blakemore, 2018) and those of mothers (McKay, 2018).
Those of you who know me, either in person or through these posts, know I am not a fan of neuroscience. Not because I don’t see its value or agree with it, but because scientific knowing — right and wrong positioning, that hierarchy of knowledge — is so dominant and the pressure to be able to ‘generalise’ is so prevalent in research, it can obscure the tender intimacy that I am trying to grapple with here. I want a mother house as a space where I can verbalise our m/other tongue so it can be a useful grounding theory for those of us who don’t have a brain imaging device in our pocket when we see children and families or are teaching students or managing our organisations that seek to provide care. The use of neuroscience can be too quickly put into the master's tool cupboard as women and children are told it is too complicated or dangerous for us because our emotions might mess it up!
Our m/other tongue creates a safe space for the inconvenient, those who are so often Othered. I don’t want that safe space to have to continue to be defended by lies to protect the compassion and inclusion that I see at the heart of speaking our m/other tongue in our practice, in our education of caring professionals, and in our management of services that care. I am wanting to bring it into the light of day and praise it so the invisible work that mothers and m/others do is seen and valued. This is the unearthing and rebuilding of a model or theory that enables operationalisation of tacit maternal knowing. Our models are the mothers who enable infants to thrive, and m/others are the professionals (whatever their gender or birthing stories) who choose to use those skills and attributes in the service of the work they do to enable other people to thrive. That is also the foundation of Theraplay. Ann Jerberg was truly visionary.
Get real! That’s all fancy researchy stuff and interesting insight into your funny mind — but what does it mean for me doing my work?
How can we change the world if we don’t become visible? This is political — Brookes et al (2019) helped me frame that. This isn’t just me and my client. It isn’t just me and my research. This is about all the children out on the street thinking it is okay to be pushed by social media to riot and hurt the bodies of people who have been Othered.
Brookes et al (2019) pose the questions: What would happen if caregivers withdrew their labour? How many children would be wandering the streets? How many disabled people would be stranded in their beds? How many elderly would starve? As I watched the UK news in August 2024, especially the distress of children being killed in Stockport, of incitement to unrest via social media, of the ongoing awfulness of Gaza and Ukraine, I have to question, if we let ourselves feel, would this keep happening? If we really cared and felt the inconvenient pain that comes with the messiness of care, if that was seen as the highest order of moral development, wouldn’t that change the world?
Our mother house could be where we can speak our m/other tongue, develop our maternal tools, and not be secret about our care.
Gilligan constructed a model of moral development that considers appropriate caring as a moral strength and recognises the primary interdependence of self and other. Her three-level development sequence traces how women’s moral judgements proceed from an initial focus on the self, to a second level where the good is equated with caring for others, to a third level where the self integrates caring for both oneself and others under the moral principle of nonviolence. (Brookes et al., 2019, 40)
Sometimes I have so much I want to say to you and so little idea how to put it on paper that it reduces me to tears. What is so wrong with wanting the world to be a kinder, more welcoming, a more generous place to everyone regardless of colour, wealth, status, gender, and so on? Surely all our heads are saying that is what we would like? So unless we do get to grips with this tacit knowing stuff - the how to see, hear, smell, taste, and touch the homelands, the ontological securities, the felt sense of safety, that drive people's behaviours (in lovely or in ugly ways depending on your viewing platform) — how can we create a play space where real transformation could be possible? A place where it's not just verbal stuff about change, policies that never quite happen in practice, but deep, heartfelt, emotional change that allows for intimacy, connection, and love. My homeland is a mother's bodily offering to her infant.
Research update
What I’ve done this month
I have withdrawn my application for M/otherTongue to be a trademark. They are just two words with a / in the middle.
I counted up the number of ‘reads’ for these posts over the last year. I did this because I was asked what the ‘reach’ of the blog might be. When I looked at the figures, I had 199 people subscribed, 430 views in the last 30 days and, 4142 views in the last calendar year. I looked on Research Gate, and they reckon a good science paper would have 992 reads and I found this which suggests 1000 reads for an academic history paper would be good. So I think we are doing okay in terms of impact and reach!
I’ve also written a new blurb for the blog. Please do read it here.
What you can do
This is my first invitation to you to participate in this ‘research’.
If you are writing papers, please cite You Do Know and give a rationale as to why — although it is a blog, it is solid academic writing and has impact.
I am starting to contemplate my next big data generation project, NaNoWriMo, in November 2024. You will see I have started to title these posts ‘what is…in our m/other tongue?’ or similar. There will be 30 days of writing and 50,000 words to produce during November 2024: what would you like me to contemplate and generate fiction about in relation to operationalising our m/other tongue?
If you collectively come up with 30 different foci, I will see what my non-conscious produces through generating fiction that will illuminate further and deepen our theorisation of how we use tacit maternal knowing in our professional practice. You can anonymously add your suggestions to the Padlet here.
I have to say that it is a pretty scary prospect turning the foci over to you, but if I want to operationalise tacit maternal knowing, then it has to be about what is useful to all of you. The focus on my own curiosities has got us started. Where might we go now?
Bibliography
Blakemore, S.J. (2018). Inventing ourselves: The secret life of the teenage brain. Doubleday.
Brookes, B. L., McCabe, J., & Wanhalla, A. (Eds.). (2019). Past caring?: Women, work and emotion. Otago.
McKay, S. (2018). Women’s Brain Book: How Your Life Shapes Your Brain and Your Brain Shapes Your Life. Hachette.
Moustakas, C. E. (1990). Heuristic research: Design, methodology, and applications. Sage.
Polanyi, M. (1973). Personal Knowledge: Towards a Post-Critical Philosophy. Routledge.