I’m standing outside the local café, face raised to the weak sun, cradling my oat capp. I’m nervous. I’m meeting a prospective employer I’ve respected for a long time now. And it’s going well. I can feel myself sparkling; my experience showing; my jokes landing. But then, inevitably, he asks “the Question”.“next”
“So what do you do all day?”
I stiffen. My mouth dries up. Please, not now.
It’s not that I’m offended by it. I’ve heard variations for a long time now: what are you up to?; how are you keeping yourself busy? I know these come from a good place—they’re a bid for connection.
No, the problem isn’t that I’m offended. The problem is that I have no idea how to answer. One of the most basic questions of all time, and yet it stumps me—someone who has built a career in communication.
There was a time when I wouldn’t have felt this way. Scroll back a year and I could reel off the dot points: the campaigns I’d worked on, the half-marathons I’d trained for, the dates I’d been on. I’d list them breezily, confident they proved not just my output but my value. Back then, what I did was easy to summarise.
But then Ruby was born.
And the thing about motherhood is that it resists summation.
It evades it like Schrodinger's cat. And it’s not just its ambiguity that makes it hard to explain. I have a sinking suspicion that mothers don’t describe motherhood honestly, because it’s uncomfortable. It doesn’t immediately put the person being asked at ease. So instead, we lean on clichés—pram walks, baby classes, breastfeeding snuggles. But none of that is an accurate reflection of early motherhood.
So as I approach the end of my mat leave, I’m going to try to answer the bloody question. Even if it gets my (large, postpartum) knickers in a twist.
What do I do all day?
One hurdle to answering is that I’m not sure the answer is in the doing at all. It’s certainly a lot of work—one study estimates the average mother's unpaid labour is worth a whopping £103,000 per year. But talking about it as work sells it short. I’ve never done more but listing my “jobs”—the feeding, clothing, playing and comforting – makes my day sound small, mundane and repetitive. Which isn’t wrong. But it also isn’t right.
Lucy Jones describes this tension in her book about matrescence*: “the closest I’ve ever been to death, to birth, to growth, to rapture—was, according to the world around me, boring”.
So if the answer isn’t in the doing, maybe it’s in the being. Matrescence structurally alters the brain, and I can feel it. I feel it in the way my body reacts to her cries—ears homing in on the baby monitor, milk gathering at my nipples, hands already searching for her. I feel it in the eye growing at the back of my head, continuously scanning for threats and anticipating needs. I feel it in the new skills I’ve gained; learning to both plan at speed (aka nap maths plus meal prep) and react to inevitable (aka illness plus sleep regressions). I feel it in my new respect for time, especially time alone or with both hands free.
And make no mistake, none of this is completely intuitive. The brain may be undergoing a physiological change but coming to terms with it requires enormous patience, trial and error. You wouldn’t expect an adolescent whose brain is developing to be totally in control of it, and nor are new mothers. Puberty is both powerful and painful, and so is matrescence. As Dame Rebecca West put it, “motherhood is the strangest thing; it can be like being one’s own Trojan horse”. It breaks you from the inside and changes you forever.
The other way to approach the question is in hindsight. Because the most interesting parts of my day are never the plans themselves, it’s the small moments they sparked. Two mornings ago, as I once again gave in and let my one-year-old brush her teeth herself, she grinned, stood up, and took her first steps. I stopped breathing. Time slowed down. And then she collapsed, giggling, into my partner’s arms. I’ll never experience that moment again, but I’ll remember every detail until I die. The pride in her eyes. Her shaky penguin legs. The toothbrush we all forgot about, lying on the bathroom floor for the rest of the day.
As you may have noticed, I never did answer the question. At least not directly. And maybe that’s the point. Maybe we need to stop viewing it as a literal question and more as an invitation to new mothers to share their stories. Otherwise we’ll never find the language to bridge the gulf between people’s perceived understanding of motherhood and our lived experience of it.
And believe it or not, I think we’re the right people to find that language. We may use different titles, but we’re communicators through and through. We make groups of people feel uniquely understood. We find the specifically interesting in what others deem generically mundane. In a world that increasingly relies on shallow research, our ability to deeply connect is our superpower. So take this as a sign to keep asking us mums what we do all day.
*Ironically, the word that best describes early motherhood isn’t even “real”: matrescence still isn’t included in the dictionary. So if you made it to the end of this, please sign this petition to legitimise it.
Melanie Eckersley is a freelance strategy director
