Being raised by a politically active socialist feminist single mother, as a child I didn’t get the impression that if you became a mother that would be the sole defining feature of your existence and identity. I never viewed motherhood as a bourgeois cop-out, or a voluntary retreat from full participation in the real world (rather than the reality of being excluded from it)—but perhaps through my child’s idealised eyes I saw motherhood as a role that made you tough; that love, and work and struggle co-mingled together in a heroic figure of *the mother as worker*. To me this figure had a 1980s perm and denim dungarees—in short, the image of my own mother.

Obviously, I’m well aware that mothers, like fathers, are capable of being awful, toxic and abusive, and that this role can function as capitalism’s handmaidens—our mothers are often our first teachers and the common lessons for daughters are still that our value as people rests on our appearance, being considered feminine and attractive, and mastering the performance of ‘good manners’ and service to others. By dismantling these lessons that teach us hierarchical power structures as the natural order of things, the hope is that less women will be taught to accept their place in the world as lesser, who won’t tolerate exploitation from romantic partners or within the workplace.

In Britain, being a mother is difficult. We have some of the worst maternity pay rates in Europe, our society is not organised in a way that supports women who become mothers, and in fact will likely face blows to their earnings and opportunities at work. As a labour force, mothers are not being represented or supported by our current political parties. Being a mother is the very essence of ‘the personal is political’: mothers face complex layers of practical and emotional challenges, and bear the brunt of society’s devaluation of work done in the home. Then there’s the treatment of mothers who work outside of the home, who face some of the highest childcare fees in Europe, which leaves many women feeling torn in two between two impossible positions—to stay home with the children or work essentially to pay nursery fees with little to take home at the end of it.

The task of the Motherhouse Studios in Catford, South-East London, goes some way to mending this split between having to choose between your kids and your work—a particular issue in the early years before starting school—by incorporating the first of its kind integrated childcare space within the artists’ studios. Motherhouse Studios provides a space for all self-identifying women and queer artists, with or without children or whose children might already be in fulltime education; a space to work, but also to be part of a community—particularly vital for parents with very young children who are often isolated within the home. I visited the space during the summer with my daughters, at the time two years old and five weeks old, when they were holding a studio open day, including workshops such as a Maternal Journal event.

I sat on mats alongside a den-like structure made from wooden branches breastfeeding my baby, chatting to artist mothers, many of whose art practices had to shrink into spaces carved out inside the home, while later my older child got involved with the interactive children’s theatre performance that was being staged that afternoon. It’s a highly stimulating space bringing nature into the upstairs space of Catford Mews, previously the old indoor market built in the early 1970s, now a community hub and cinema. The layout of childcare space encourages children’s imagination to flourish rather than being confined or dictated to. The setting is spacious and airy, with interconnected studio and childcare areas run by qualified practitioners, employing a child-led approach where parents and children have the freedom to move between the spaces.

Motherhood in itself can be a highly creative process: not just growing and birthing new life but learning with your child and being part of making a new world together. It can be a radical site where instead of instilling the socialised lessons which so often amount to being taught obedience above all, we have the option to allow children’s integrity and natural critical thinking to be celebrated rather than erased.

There has been a tendency of women on the left until recently to view motherhood as something that diminishes women, that takes away power and possibilities. This, of course, is because politically it does—women are paid less on average after having children and women that take extended leave to raise their children are penalised in the workplace. But why should the experiences of pregnancy, birth and childrearing be seen as something degrading? The attitude that motherhood makes you less plays into reactionary misogynistic arguments about why women should be paid less, that women with kids are unreliable and less committed to their jobs, and so on. Although I’m not calling for the adoption of my childhood idealisation of the mother role, whether in the workplace or at home, mothers are always engaged in labour; a creative, challenging, rewarding, banal, exhausting and exhilarating care-work. Raising children is a job that deserves respect, rights and remuneration.

The pressing issue of the crisis of childcare in Britain is currently being taken up in campaigns by Pregnant and then Screwed and in the ‘March of The Mummies’ demonstrations happening around the country, of parents protesting the lack of government funding that makes childcare prohibitively expensive, and early years practitioners being underpaid and overworked.  Having a model of work which allows both spheres to coexist together, i.e. workplaces with onsite childcare, of being able to breastfeed your baby during a break, or your daughter coming over to help you with your weaving (as told to me by one of the artists at Motherhouse Studios) moves the work of raising children out of the shameful space of ‘raising kids as if you don’t work, and working as if you don’t have kids’ and acknowledges the existence of children in our lives as an everyday fact, and makes space to celebrate that reality.

In a decent workplace we should be free to bring our particular humanness with us, whether that’s our caring responsibilities, mental health or physical requirements in spaces set up to respect our needs. An artist’s studio is a place not just to work but to think, and to dream up a better reality. And with this space I think they have.