The master's toolbox is very deep (and sticky)
Contents
Chapter 2: 16:00-17:00
Forgetting, being lost, letting go, and still trying to climb out of toolboxes
Addition for the m/other-us-all
Introduction
As I begin this month’s post. I want to acknowledge the passing of Naomi Stadlen. Her writing, particularly her book What Mothers Do: Especially When It Looks Like Nothing, has been hugely influential to me. The post-fiction reflection begins with quotes from her books that came to me as I worked through what the fiction was crystallising (Ellingson, 2009) about my tacit maternal knowing.
I attended a training delivered by Stadlen in about 2004 when What Mothers Do was first published, before I began my Theraplay training. That event was pivotal: first, in helping me value my knowledge and skill as a mother; then, combined with the Theraplay model, in showing me how this perspective made my therapeutic work more effective than working from what I would, with hindsight, call a paternal framework. At the time, such a framework was just ‘normal’, mainstream - now in my new language, the manstream. As I continue to try to transform tacit maternal knowing into theory to share with others, I keep returning to her writing, alongside that of Ann Jernberg.
In June 2024, I emailed Naomi to thank her for the invisible leadership she had given me 20 years earlier. In tribute to her, I want to include a few paragraphs from her reply:
“What an interesting reply you’ve sent me! I agree with you that being a mother is intrinsically private and intimate, but it also has a powerful political dimension, and I think that’s what people find so difficult. I have just been making a study of nineteenth-century literature, and the birth of the changeover from women who were expected to become mothers to women today who are educated to join the workforce. This swing has been almost too successful, so that now mothering is belittled, as you point out, and our birth-rate has slipped down enough to alarm politicians. So now is a good time for action.
But you seem aware of what is missing at the heart of it all. Mothers do more than what is visible to an onlooker, but there are few words to describe it. It can’t be summed up as ‘childcare’ because that seems to cover only the practical side. And whenever mothers explain what they do, it misses a vital element. I hope that you and I can continue communicating, to share what we have learned.”
My ongoing communication with Naomi will now have to take the form of paying tribute to her - just as I try to do with Ann Jernberg - through this monthly struggle to produce posts with the intention of furthering, deepening and sharing my understanding of what it means to professionally live and work using our m/other tongue. Part of that is to ensure we don’t forget the leadership that these two women, amongst many others, have offered. I hope I can build, visibly and coherently, on the gifts they gave us, making their insights freely and non-exploitatively available so that we continue to see the solid foundations we build from in operationalising our m/other tongue and seeking to lead in a way that enables our world to be a kinder, more inclusive, and more humane community.
I’m so glad I took the opportunity to thank Naomi. Until now, I hadn’t connected her impact on me, my decision to contact her, and last month’s fiction. What a strange world this is – synchronicity, Jung (2013) might have called it; entanglement, Karen Barad (2007) might say. I think I want to call it Love.
For those of you who newer to these posts, for the following fiction, you need to know that Val was conceived through rape. She only discovered this later in life, after Graham gave her a DNA testing kit as a gift.
Part 2: Bliss
It was like being drunk, this immersion in playful relationship. And now play over, Val needed to stand up. It took her some time these days. She had to roll over onto all fours then lever herself upright. It was easier if there was a table to hold on to, but here, with the children tucked away as best as Daniel could manage, knowing how easily the busy environment could overwhelm them, there was nothing to grab - except her pride and dignity.
She turned away from the group slowly, reluctantly. She did miss this, this delight of nothing more than simply being with and caring for. Her walk back to Graham felt slow; or perhaps it was just that the total commitment to being with seemed to slow down time anyway. She didn’t want to look at her watch and see whether a small or large amount of time had passed. What did it matter?
Graham watched her approach. Sometimes she baffled him and he couldn’t quite name why. He had learned how to watch the animals he cared for during his time as a vet. From the moment he had met Val, that day when she brought her cat, Viking, to be put to sleep, he had found himself drawing on that same instinct when trying to make sense of her: her movement, her tone, her gaze. It didn’t matter that they often had no idea what the other’s words meant when they spoke from their own professional knowledge, they somehow just knew they were working with the same stuff: stopping the hurt in whatever way they could, enabling joy in whatever way they could. Not for an owner or a grown-up or a system but for a vulnerable soul.
She walked like a deer. The image just appeared in his mind - a deer that had just given birth, but had been startled by car headlights. Barely in control of a body still raw from the cataclysm of birthing, yet moving away from the site of birth. Putting her whole being into protecting the new life by diverting threat away from vulnerability. The bliss of mothering - the rush of oxytocin, as his profession would phrase it, mingled with cortisol. A potent saviour for both physical infant and maternal desire through the mingling of drives: to protect by love and to protect by fight. Creative, if the balance was right, but destructive of body, mind, and soul if it was not.
He moved her bag off the seat, making space for her. He’d put it there earlier to keep the seat free from the growing crowd, as more and more people, realising the road ahead was blocked, saw this as a last chance for food and drink. Entrapment here seemed preferable to being stuck in stationary traffic in the dark, for who knew how long. He looked out of the window as Val slid into the seat, aware in a sudden, intense moment of understanding that Val needed space in more ways than one. The traffic was definitely slowing across all three northbound lanes of the motorway. The far side, heading south, looked heavy but was still moving at speed.
When they built the service station—back in the 1960s, Val had suggested, because she remembered coming here as a child—they must have shaped a slight dip in the road to allow clearance for the bridge. The cars, and especially the lorries, were creating a wall of water as they ploughed through the growing puddle. The food hall was soundproofed enough for him not to hear the whoosh of the cascading waves, but surely, he thought, they would cause an accident soon.
His attention came back into the room as he felt Val exhale and relax. He widened his eyes, inviting her to speak.
Part 3: Dip
The rain just kept coming down.
The fast-food hit wore off.
The smell of drying clothes turned tart - like wet dogs who’d rolled in stagnant water.
The toilets were working overtime.
All in all, the initial Dunkirk spirit of those seeking refuge from unavoidable disaster began to fade. Optimism, never say die, look out for your neighbour - all were becoming muted under the pressure of so many people stuck together. Kindness wore thin.
Val, too, slumped. She’d shared with Graham the bliss of discovering that work she’d done more than ten years ago had had such a lasting impact - not just on Joe, but on someone she hadn’t even realised she’d influenced. He’d smiled, been excited for her, then returned to his reading. Her energy and excitement dipped.
She straightened her back in the chair, lifting the crown of her head to stretch her neck. Around her right eye, she felt puffy and tender, almost on the verge of a sneeze. Such signs, she knew, could herald a migraine - a messenger of too-much-ness. Usually, this would be the point she’d get outside to stomp and sing, her surest cure. But here, trapped by circumstance, she turned her head this way and that, muscles at the base of her neck and down the top of her spine cramping and crushing. The pain shifted to her chest, and pulling up eased it slightly.
Indigestion, she thought. Veggie burgers that packed a fatty, salty punch but left the body unable to process. Was it like that, too, with Daniel’s good feedback - too hard to digest the proof that the love she’d offered in her professional capacity years ago had been nourishing and lasting? Too sharp a contrast with how she saw herself now, her work diminished and marginalised?
She couldn’t hold her posture and sank back into the chair. This was the worst kind of light. As winter began to overwhelm autumn, the light wasn’t dark, but it loomed - not enough to see by, only enough to reveal shapes half-emerging from the shadowlands and hinterlands of inner spaces, leaving her with a persistent sense that she’d done something wrong.
Across the food hall, one of the children Daniel cared for was on their feet. Pacing. Val could see the rising tension. She felt for the young person - her own body was responding like a more and more tightly strung instrument to the growing pressure in the space, the hotting up of entrapment. She could feel it building behind her eyes—the root of the threatening migraine. The I want to be home, the I didn’t ask to be here, the how come there’s no way out-ness of distress.
Daniel was up with the child. Pacing with them. Alongside them. As the young person began to shake their hands, Daniel’s movements grew more intense. His hands stayed still, yet somehow he matched where the young person was in their throbbing overwhelm. Val could see it would never get out of hand, because Daniel was keeping pace, being with every step until the young person could look at him. Their face seemed full of surprise, as if they hadn’t known quite where they were and had just realised they were fine. They were not alone.
Daniel stood with the young person, his back now to Val, his body blocking her view. From the tilt of his head, she guessed he was speaking. She imagined melody—growing lightness, warmth. Then he stepped closer and gave the young person a hug. Arm around them, side by side, they walked back to where the rest of the group sat, using their bags and coats to soften the floor, music and talk and gaming devices shared between young people and grown-ups alike.
Val sighed, deeply. How could watching such a glorious act of mothering by a man - towards a child not bound to him by blood or genes - leave her feeling bereft? Her mind filled again with the image of herself at five years old, up there, halfway across the bridge that spanned the carriageway. Fascinated. Absorbed by the cars rushing beneath - faster than she’d ever imagined. The body-filling whoom as each one passed below, vibrating through her soft tissues and stomach. It had been thrilling - until her mother’s voice cut through, and she was consumed by shame.
She shut her eyes. To the outside world, she probably looked like a woman at rest - perhaps someone practising her mindfulness breathing. Graham could see it, though. He’d learned that the deep breathing - the pushing of air down into her diaphragm - was a ruse, a trick to divert the distress leaking from her eyes as tears.
He prodded Val under the table with his foot. Her eyes opened, and she gave that funny half-smile of hers, the lopsided one he knew so well - the look of someone caught between the two truths of her life: supremely confident and competent professional, and abject failure in the eyes of her first love, the foundation of all her future loves - her mother.
Her mother, who couldn’t face her because she was alone and couldn’t bear the shame and vulnerability of reality. She was alone in the too-muchness of trying to connect with her child, of trying to let in love for a person conceived in an unloving way - from a stranger who had disappeared forever, leaving her a shameful person.
Forgetting, being lost, letting go, and still trying to climb out of toolboxes
“A mother may need a break because she has spent an intense period on a much more focused way of ‘doing nothing’. This second sort is the process of studying her baby minutely to get to know who he is. In order to do this she has to get herself into a receptive, open-minded, unprejudiced state. All her senses are alert. This can be very tiring, so it’s understandable that mothers also need recovery interludes from such moments.” (Stadlen, 2004, 91)
“It is easy for a mother to feel like an island. If she is with her baby night and day, her timetable may be affected not so much by clock time, as by when her baby is hungry or tired…. Mothers often miss their friends and colleagues from work. At work, their efforts were part of a cooperative output. This gave every reason to contact one another. Contact is not only essential for work progress - it also gives each person a reminder that his or her contribution matters. That sense of connection is exactly what new mothers say they have lost.” (Stadlen, 2020, 236)
“How can mothers focus on their babies so much that they forget essentials like wallets and shoes? Have their brains gone mushy? Besides, it’s one thing to focus on something for a couple of hours. But many mothers say they are thinking about their babies all day and night. Are they being honest? Many mothers describe how intensely they think about their newborns. They hold them, gaze on them and wonder about them. But such intense observation comes at the price of severing out a great deal of ordinary life.” (Stadlen, 2015, 87)
I hope that by starting with these three quotes from Stadlen, I am not only honouring her memory but also the approach she took to understanding motherhood.
I suspect that Stadlen and Jernberg (1979, 1984) would have got on like a house on fire. Both were committed to ‘staying with’ the embodied, daily tasks of mothering, no matter how repetitive, ordinary, or non-linear they might be. In doing so, they laid the foundations for understanding the link between the innumerable muscular, and mental, actions of mothering and the tacit knowing that arises from deep engagement in the pre-verbal, non-verbal, and social process of enabling vulnerable infants to flourish from dependency to interdependence. Both Stadlen and Jernberg also had the desire and capacity to transform this process of knowing into knowledge. In making that process into a product, a book or a model of work, they made it available for others, mothers and therapists, to use in the world for the good of others.
Applying these insights to the caring professions, I see m/othering as establishing the theoretical framework that supports an intense period of using one’s power in the service of the other. This use of power is offered at the appropriate developmental level of the less powerful other, as a necessary way to engage with dependence to enable it to flourish into interdependence.
The challenge lies in how we do this? As therapists, therapist educators, researchers, and managers of organisations that care, within the cultural climate we currently inhabit, what does m/othering look like? And do we need to explain it? The climates we occupy can feel hostile as we speak our m/other tongue which might lead us to say: well, I just know. Extracting the authentic operationalisation of our m/other tongue from the toolbox of the manstream can leave us feeling discombobulated.
Val had a lovely time playing with the children. It was a moment of bliss for her – a peak experience, as Maslow (2019) might have called it. It was an intense reminder of how she had once functioned as a successful therapist. In that peak moment, there is a loss of a sense of time and space. Then, for Val, the melancholy sets in.
When I reread what I had written back in November 2024, I had no memory of writing it. I felt the heart-sink and post-peak grief far more than the joy Val experienced in being with the children. And of course, I wondered: what has this got to do with my desire to create theory that helps us function as professionals using our m/other tongue? That, after all, is the whole point of all this thinking and writing.
When I did my original research (Peacock, 2023), I identified three components of tacit maternal knowing;
• Dependence/interdependence
• Not knowing/letting go (which contains a large amount of forgetfulness)
• Faithfulness
Cognitive knowledge and knowing rely on a metacognitive awareness: I know that I know because I can express what I know in words and recall it when needed. Semantic memory, putting together themes and patterns, is an essential part of this form of knowledge (Radvansky, 2021). Tacit knowing, on the other hand, depends on a felt sense – an implicit, kinaesthetic memory. To access that, we have to let go of knowing that we know and allow our not knowing to take precedence over knowing.
You might need to slow down and read that again.
This way of thinking is so different from our usual expectations of what counts as the most reliable and trustworthy form of knowledge that it may take some time to disentangle the knowings and the knowledges. It takes even more time and disentangling from long habits of living, to allow not knowing to be more powerful than knowledge and then to become a lived perspective. This goes against the grain in a world that actively supports the alternative view via an intellectual and practical framework that giving primacy to knowledge, rather than knowing, as ‘normal’.
I feel as though I should be saying that there must be something wrong with Val. I think I should say she shouldn’t crash like that after the peak experience she feels when playing with the children. She should be fulfilled. She should be buoyed up. She should be full of confidence in what she does. She should be pleased with “product”. But she collapses, and Graham sees a huge vulnerability in her – a vulnerability and fragility that makes him see her as if she were a deer. Yet he also recognises the fierce and brutal strength that can come with being a mother: the instinct to protect the vulnerable infant, no matter what the cost to the mother herself.
I know that whenever I hear myself using the word should, I am tapping into an inner position shaped by someone else’s worldview of what is right, rather than one that truly feels right to me – feels right deep down in my rooted and grounded self. But those shoulds are so hard to shake off. The shoulds close off the space where our m/other tongue might become clear and heard.
This is where the deep stickiness of the master’s toolbox comes in. Remember, we can’t dismantle the master’s house using the master’s tools (Lorde, 2018), nor will they build an entirely new and distinctly different one. This research endeavour is about building an alternative house using appropriate tools – not as a rival, but as a partner to the master’s house. To carry those tools, to apply them in other realms, we need a suitable toolbox – or another kind of receptacle for the instruments of our craft. Even new tools in an old toolbox can feel incongruent.
The master’s house is the one that has left me with a particular, non-conscious knowing that is different to my tacit maternal knowing. One that places me in a position of shame because I am a woman and a mother. Remember all those ‘leadership’ words from last month and how they are prioritised in the white supremacist capitalist patriarchy (hooks, 1994) at the expense of the ‘followership’ words? And if the world is organised around dichotomies, how can leadership ever accommodate the reality of the mother’s vulnerable strength – on their last legs yet still moving to protect their infant – without imploding the patriarchy? Weak can’t be strong! Followers can’t be leaders! Vulnerability can’t be tolerated! Divide to conquer – because finding common ground means relinquishing power, and that is death to the system.
Those of you who have read many of these posts, or who have been taught by me, know that I tend to critique neurobiological understandings of human behaviour and relationships. It’s not that I disagree with understanding human phenomena through a scientific route. Rather, seeing people through the lens of science in our culture carries the risk of us becoming trapped in the master’s toolbox because science doesn’t wear its ontological and epistemological heart on its sleeve. I choose those words carefully – wearing your heart on your sleeve is generally not seen as a positive thing (in the eyes of the manstream).
Somehow, in the white supremacist capitalist patriarchy, there’s a deep mistrust of ‘hearts on sleeves’ and ‘just knowing’. They’re seen as too feminine, too touchy-feely. But remember the paper last month (Goel et al., 2025): one needs to be securely attached in order to be a follower; a felt sense of security is essential for trust. Without trust at a deep level – at the foundation of ontology – all humanity has to fall back on as a way to create an illusion of safety, is the desperation for known, provable ‘facts’, summed up as ‘science’. One truth, immutable, applicable in all realms. Safe and predictable.
‘Science’ – as a metaphorical concept rather than a practice – sits firmly in the master’s toolbox. It can shortcut all that messy human complexity because, of course, it is ‘rightest’, ‘newest’, ‘quickest’, ‘fastest’, ‘most provable’, and all those other words my contemplations this month have unearthed from the dust and fluff at the bottom of the toolbox. Words I can’t sign up to, because the children I’ve worked with are all individual and non-standard. As I feel myself to be. And so, when a peak moment arises from the delight of human connection, the crash follows, because there’s no intellectual, academic, or practical infrastructure to hold or sustain that experience.
I am not criticising science. I am critiquing those invisible, unexamined orientations that classify fixed, easily accessible knowledge as ‘good’ knowledge at the expense of messy, hard to articulate knowing. ‘Science’ has become a shortcut to achieve the desired emotional safety – but only if one complies with the white supremacist capitalist patriarchy, the manstream. The way that form of knowledge is given precedence in both academia and practice, over the fluid and messy place of knowing and creating knowledge, put me in mind of the experience of birth in western cultures. I’d argue it is within that fluid, maternal mess – where the art of relationship can flourish through not knowing, interdependence, and the faithful belief that we are all in this together – that a portable felt sense of safety is developed, one that can move from one realm (or house) to another.
The imagery of ‘ordinary’ birth undermines the idea of being in conscious control of action. I don’t want to use the term ‘natural’ because that, too, has become politicised. Ordinary birth happens (McKay, 2018, 2023; Thompson, 2010). The body does it. Again, I want to emphasise that I am speaking in idealised or theoretical terms. I am deeply grateful for the work of scientific and medical communities who have achieved magnificent progress in reproductive health and family wellbeing through research into conception, high-risk pregnancy care, safe birthing practices, and the treatment of unwell infants. Yet, I also think many would agree that there is still a long way to go in ensuring that women’s and mothers’ health are valued equally to those of men or even the infant. That tool from the master’s toolbox creeps in again, carrying the unspoken assumption that a woman’s primary role is to produce the heir who will sustain the white supremacist capitalist patriarchy – the WEIRD (Western, Educated, Industrialised, Rich, Democratic) world – and its ongoing WEIRDness.
Here is where the depth of the stickiness and fluff of the master’s toolbox comes in. The white supremacist capitalist patriarchy and the Global North are built on individualism. Individualism, in turn, rests on a lack of trust in the goodness of others and a fear of losing power. This creates a fearful way of life disguised as fearless – a worldview that treats binary and hierarchy as natural: light skin over dark skin, wealth over lack of wealth, men over women. I would extend that further – to Homo sapiens over other species, and over the planet itself.
I suggest the master’s toolbox is designed to ‘fix’ perceived ‘problems’. Anything or anyone that does not fit the powerful perception of rightness is classified as ‘other’ – sometimes labelled as ‘illness’ requiring treatment, at other times as ‘rebellion’ requiring correction.
This also implies that the individual can ‘hack’ their own system to be better at fitting the expectations of the dominant white supremacist capitalist patriarchy, or WEIRD normality. And when they cannot – when they don’t feel safe doing female-assigned work such as deploying tacit maternal knowing within a patriarchal context – it is framed as their failure.
The fiction led me to question Val’s post-bliss dip, not as failure but as wisdom. To reach that understanding, I had to climb out of the master’s toolbox once again. My first reading of the story left me feeling sorry for Val. But that supposed empathy came from an unspoken ‘tool’ that insists depression, withdrawal, and sadness are not right. They are seen as a burden in the world of work, a drain on productivity that should be privately managed and never shown.
My inward searching, held alongside the third quote from Stadlen, makes me wonder whether that reaction stems from patriarchy’s deepest embedding – the message that says: woman, you are here to serve ME, the man; anything that takes you away from that is wrong, and if you allow yourself to be taken away, YOU are wrong.
If, however, you put your heart on your sleeve, the hidden becomes visible, and people can see the values on which you are basing your life. And if you can see them, you can critique them. And if you can critique, you can choose whether or not to ascribe to those values as pertinent to the life you wish to live and the vocation you wish to embody.
My heart on my sleeve is that I approach my vocation, my professional life, from the place of conceiving, gestating, birthing, and feeding dependent infants as a mother. I believe that this is the knowledge we need to use our power in the service of the less powerful other, just as Jernberg (1979) reminds us that all we need to know about Theraplay is in how a mother responds to her child. Wearing our hearts on our sleeves allows us, in the professional realm of using our m/other tongue, to address the aloneness that Stadlen evokes in the second quote at the start of this post.
My clever tacit wisdom, seeking to illuminate tacit maternal knowing as the foundation of our m/other tongue, has written male characters. Through these characters, the aloneness and perceived wrongness of seeing the post-bliss dip as failure is transformed into understanding it as part of the work of using our m/other tongue. Graham brings me back to the birthing process by associating Val with the strong weakness of a deer that has just given birth: wobbly from the process, yet prioritising the needs of the less powerful over her own – leading danger away from the fawn. Birthing is intense; attending to your child is intense. Rest is required. Graham sees that Val needs space and rest. Daniel leads himself and the child to a place of rest. Rest is work in our m/other tongue because of the attention it requires for the other. And if there is threat to the vulnerable infant, the mother sacrifices rest and connection to protect the infant. That will come at a cost to both mother and infant.
Such a perspective will get lost in the hard clanging metal of the master’s toolbox. Hence, we need to find our own tools for our craft and a way to transport them. Using the notion that we are trying to speak our m/other tongue in our professional and vocational spaces, I suggest we carry changing bags, not toolboxes, to ensure we have the range of equipment needed to support us in our service to others.
You take something out of a toolbox to fix a perceived problem. You open the changing mat, wherever you may be, because it’s needed now, and lay your infant amidst everything required to maintain and make connection. I am sure there are people for whom mechanical care of their cars is a dialogue in love and joy, and I am sure there are nappy changes that are purely mechanical – fixing the poonami. But metaphorically and theoretically, do you see what I mean?
That is what it is like for me, is it like that for you?
In our theory world, each nappy change is, without memory or desire (sorry, Bion), a new discovery of delight in you and your infant growing together.
Peak moments require recovery time: down or plateau times are an essential part of m/othering. We need to change from toolbox to changing bag to prevent the descent from the peak being overly filtered through the grasping, individualistic lens of the white supremacist capitalist patriarchy. Rest moments, daily life moments, plateau moments, routine moments – these are part of the flow and are bigger in our lives than moments of peakness. Plateau times are the structural times that make safety possible. They are the boring, maintenance bits that lay the foundation for peak moments. Peak moments are no more or less valuable than plateau or dip moments – they are all of equal worth.
While this may sound esoteric, it seems fundamental to operationalising our m/other tongue: entering the space without memory or desire, letting go of the product to focus on the process, forgetting the painfulness because the vulnerable infant must be protected. As a m/other, this must also contain time to regroup, recover, and rest, in order to do it all over again in the service of the other.
Addition for the m/other-us-all
And … rest. It’s your job to do so. M/othering – especially when it looks as though you’re doing nothing – is hard work. Without rest and regrouping, the interdependence of m/othering is quietly reclaimed by the master’s toolbox, and we find ourselves once again serving the master. When we are exhausted, we are more likely to Other.
So let’s swap our toolboxes for changing bags – with integral theoretical changing mats to support the process of transformation in comfort, wherever it is needed; emotional Sudocrem to protect from irritation and chafing; psychological cotton reusable nappies to recycle so they keep returning to contain the mess; and cognitive, environmentally sound wet wipes that won’t destroy the planet’s future. All ready for action. And lots of time and emotional contact to enjoy, because we are well rested.
Allow others to make the space for you to rest. Receive the space. You are allowed to enjoy m/otherhood.
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