When a child is born

As part of The Future Is Female in 2017, Islet member and festival curator Emma Daman Thomas organised a panel entitled More Baby In My Monitor Please, which saw her joined by Gwenno and Lisa Jen Brown of 9Bach. The result was an engaging, thought-provoking and often eye-opening discussion of motherhood from a musician's perspective.

Three years on, and the topic remains something of a taboo. Credit, then, to Jude Rogers for her recent piece for the Quietus, for which she spoke to music-making mums Gazelle Twin and Saint Saviour (or Elizabeth Bernholz and Becky Jones, as they're known to their own mothers). Like the festival panellists, Bernholz and Jones talked frankly about the enormous impact that having a child has had on their lives, their mental health, their creative processes and their music.

What was perhaps most striking was Bernholz's admission: "In my naivety, I thought I'd start to make really nice, gentle soft music after having a kid. Actually, I became noisier, and more aggressive and more mad. ... It was a shock to me how much rage motherhood ignited in me." Interestingly, Jones experienced the exact same thing, attributing it to "the resentment that my freedom as a person had been taken away". For Bernholz, "it was something about control. You're suddenly faced with this new person and you have no control over what happens to them and how they behave." Both sentiments are, I would imagine, familiar to many if not most parents, musicians or otherwise.

I use the word "parents" deliberately. As Gwenno, Daman Thomas and Brown pointed out, how often are male musicians subjected to the same lines of questioning? It was refreshing to read Peter and David Brewis of Field Music talking about not only the songs that fatherhood had inspired but also the significant challenges that it posed, precisely because it's so rare. If these issues are only ever raised with female musicians, then there's a risk of perpetuating the damaging notion that parenting is primarily a woman's responsibility. Here's to more men being quizzed about how childcare impinges on their creativity and put on the spot about whether they feel guilty or judged for jetting off on tour and leaving their little ones behind.