Between the Screens by Jam Westwood 2023
Six stoneware tiles with mishima and hand painted decoration.
Back when I did full-on mother work on top of my full-on day job, I remember one day waking up with the feeling that I had somehow lost myself. At some unidentified point I had simply become my day job and his mum. I wasn’t me anymore. Time doesn’t allow for working mothers to be anything other than what they do: Full time, two jobber, fulfillers- of-duties-for-others. Now that I have come out of the other side, I still see it in working mothers everywhere and I wonder if they too wake up with that same sense of identity-loss.
Future societies depend upon successful parenting more than anything else – a heavy burden that is still mostly shouldered by women; working women who are undervalued, unrecognised and unrecognisable. But the woman those mothers really are is still there, somewhere between the alarm clocks, the school runs, the meetings, the emails, the routines and the box sets. Somewhere there, in between those screens.
Let her out!
