All This Work, This Is Love
Becoming a mum changed everything I thought I knew about work.
All This Work, This Is Love is a personal project I’m creating as part of Women’s Work, a B-Arts commission exploring how women’s labour shows up in our lives. I’m focusing on motherhood as a job one that’s essential, hugely skilled, and too often undervalued.
Becoming a new mum can be incredibly lonely. We've lost a lot of the community spaces and networks that used to naturally form around early motherhood. The job hasn't got any easier, but the support has faded. It’s time we started gathering in ways that build around mothers not just the babies.
These sessions are about offering something in return. A chance to rest, be looked after, and be heard. We’ll have an aromatherapist creating a calm, sensory space helping hold the room. You can share stories, or not. There’s no pressure to perform. Just time to breathe, maybe connect, and feel like you matter in it all.
I’ll be writing a new work song inspired by these conversations. It won’t be a neat summary more like a stitched-together offering that holds the weight of the unseen labour mums do every day. The feeding, soothing, worrying, tidying, surviving. The love that threads through it all.
And let’s be honest. There’s an economic side to this too. The unpaid labour of motherhood is estimated to be worth billions to the UK economy. Without it, everything stops. Yet it’s rarely recognised, let alone celebrated. That’s what this song is about. That’s what this space is for.
It’s really important to me that this process isn’t extractive. Any stories shared will only shape the work with full consent, and the focus will always be care, not content.
This is for every mum who’s ever whispered “I can’t do this” and somehow did. For the ones who feel invisible. For the ones just finding their voice again.
Because all this work ; this is love.