How my mother shaped my relationship to work

By Beth Vale | July 2023

My mother is a force. A potent mix of soft and fierce. Growing up, I watched and listened to her work – in adult education, and then in early childhood development, and finally in the independent press. 

For my mother, work was an extension of identity, a place to pour your effort, creativity and heart. Work was where you made your mark.

I know now what a luxury this is. For many others, work is simply a way to get by. It is often a source of resentment, alienation, and suffering. Over the course of industrial change, work has drawn many of us further and further away from purpose, community and reciprocity. 

But in my home, work was where you birthed a new world. Because it was activist work, or organising work, or intellectual work, or creative work. This approach to work has been my inheritance, and one of my many privileges. It has characterised my work in activist movements, NGOs, academia, journalism – and now my advisory work at Percept. 

Wearing my work as my identity has not been without its costs: my self-worth has all-too-often been tied to professional achievement, and boundaries are difficult to draw. But still, I am grateful to my mother for modelling to me that it is possible to show up for work, for your colleagues and for your comrades, as a whole person. Equally, she showed me it is possible to show up in your home as a whole person: even as a young child, I was always acutely aware that my mother was not just my mother. She was a woman, a student, an activist, a caretaker to many. And she wore the complexities, fallibilities, wounds, and joys of these identities on her sleeve.  

Below is a poem I wrote about my mother in 2016:

MA

They say all mothers have their remedies
Ours did too
First Tea Tree, then Aloe Vera, then that everything cream for the everything-hurt of every broken skin
I remember she used to stroke my forehead to rest
On those sleepless nights
she taught me to clench every bone and breath of my body
and I did. Until my fisted nails etched into my palms
and exhale.
I imagined her past body releasing into a prison blanket.

Those mornings before school when she buttoned my collar
Leaned my head back as the medicine, one drop at a time, hit the back of my throat
“Rock Rose to alleviate terror and panic
Impatiens to mollify irritation and impatience
ClematisStar of Bethlehem to ease shock
And Cherry Plum to calm irrational thoughts”

Ma,
She showed me first how rage can descend in tears
That sometimes there are not enough slammed doors to get the space you need
Some mornings we reckoned with the hurt we’d made in her dreams

Ma,
Who wrote all our skins into children’s books
Me with a mermaid’s tail
My brother piloting our worn denim couch through the air
His friend from down the road
Whose own mother smelt of Oros and gentle grey ruins

Ma,
Who taught me how to sit barefoot on the carpet
Head rested against the stereo speakers
and weep
Of Waiting in Vain
Moondance
And pining penny whistles
Of ‘Can’t know the fears that your elders grew by’

Ma,
Who built citadels of newspaper castles
Branding ceilings and couches and old-oak dressers with stencilled gold stars
Who conjured fairies from the flickering car lights beyond the fence
Whose wake is smoke and whiskey and essential oils
and that one perfume that Dad brings home from airports.

Ma,
Who taught me of sugar biscuits
And Fuck Off
And kaftan colour dancing in the kitchen

Ma, whose skin reached out for sand and sea and sun
Then came home raw and red to do it all over again
Bathed me in tubs of maize-meal water
“Baba,”
She said
With cold milk across our tongues
“Okay.”