Five weeks and two days

Ok, I need to amend what I wrote five days ago, I think. I just started reading What Mothers Do by Naomi Stadlen, which in its very first chapter addresses the issue of there being nothing to say about looking after babies:

a mother who has little to relate usually assumes that this is because there really is very little worth telling ... Our language can be very clear and precise about anything practical. A person who has 'tidied up' has both the word and a tidy area to show for it. It is much harder to find a word that describes the giving-up-things mode of attention a mother is giving to her baby.

At first I thought it was just coincidence that made me reach for that particular book (which I borrowed from the library before Alice was even born). But I wonder whether subconsciously I was uncomfortable about the 'motherhood is boring' trope that I'd flippantly evoked in the last post, and wanted something to counter my own words. Because deep down I know that what I do for Alice is NOT trivial and menial. It's just that it's hard to externalise the things that now feel important, because the language of the public world doesn't fit the achievements of the domestic one.

In other words, there might not be a conspiracy of silence as such, but a silence is imposed anyway through not having the right words.