Monday, December 19, 2011

natural birth in 0 A. D

‘Away in a manger, no crib for a bed, the little Lord Jesus lay down his sweet head.’


As a new-ish mother, I’ve been pondering the traditional Christmas nativity story in a whole new way this year. Leave aside for one moment the question of whether or not there was a real historical person called Jesus, or whether the familiar nativity story is not supported by what is actually in the Bible.


So the tale goes, Mary, nine months’ pregnant and nearly due, and her husband Joseph travelled to Bethlehem from their home in Nazareth to take part in the census (which, incidentally, makes you appreciate the fact that modern-day census forms can be filled out in the comfort of your own home). Unable to walk because she was the size of the house, Mary rides a donkey the seventy or so miles to Bethlehem. Poor Mary (uncomfortably bumping along on a donkey, with swollen ankles and heartburn for good measure)! Poor Joseph (walking seventy miles in the bleak midwinter)! Poor donkey (stoically carrying a very pregnant passenger)!


When they eventually arrive in Bethlehem - and how long did it take to get there, I'd like to know - there is no space available in any of the local inns for them to stay. So much for the great planning of the Roman Empire. You’d think if they were making people travel to fill in their census, they could’ve made appropriate accommodation arrangements. I hope LOCOG - the London Organising Committee for the Olympic and Paralympic Games 2012 - is doing better. However, one innkeeper, keen to maximise his profits by renting out any old nook and cranny, lets them sleep in the stable out the back.


And here’s where all the Christmas carols start skating over the business end of this business trip. Look at these examples:


Silent night, holy night
All is calm, all is bright
Round yon Virgin Mother and Child
Holy Infant so tender and mild

(Silent Night)

And then they found a little nook in a stable all forlorn,

and in a manger cold and dark, Mary's little boy was born


(Mary’s Boy Child)


Once in royal Davids city,
Stood a lowly cattle shed,
Where a mother laid her Baby,
In a manger for His bed:
Mary was that mother mild,
Jesus Christ, her little Child.

(Once in Royal David’s City)

In Bethlehem, in Israel,
This blessed Babe was born
And laid within a manger
Upon this blessed morn
The which His Mother Mary
Did nothing take in scorn
O tidings of comfort and joy,
Comfort and joy
O tidings of comfort and joy

(God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen)

Obviously, the focus of the carols is on the miraculous birth and what it means for humanity: the arrival of a saviour who will redeem us from sin. But what might Jesus’ actual arrival on earth have been like?

Mary: What do you mean, we’re out in the stable?


Joseph: He said he doesn’t have a room either, but he’ll give us the stable for cheap.


Mary: You must be kidding! I know I said I wanted a home birth, but this is ridiculous. And how will the midwife know where to find us?

Joseph: Well, there seems to be some gobsmackingly huge star right above us, so she should have no trouble - we’re lit up like Christmas Tree!


Mary: A Christmas tree - what’s that?


Joseph: Never mind. Can I get you anything?


Mary, doubling over in pain, then breathing hard: Oooooh!


Joseph: What was that? Were you having a rush?


Mary: No, I was having a contraction! Stop calling them rushes, this isn’t the story of Moses’ birth, you know!


Joseph: Okay, okay. Here, lie back on this straw. It doesn’t smell too bad.


Mary: I don’t want to lie down, I want to crawl. Oooh!


Joseph: Okay, do that then.


Mary: The cow is looking at me funny.


Joseph: I’m sure you’re imagining it.


Mary: No really. The cow is giving me a weird look. She has to go. Ooooh!


Joseph: Here, have some pine-cones to squeeze.


Mary, giving him a murderous glance: I know what I’d like to squeeze. Ooooh! Ouch, what are you doing?


Joseph: Acupressure. I’m pressing down in the small of your back to relieve the pain.


Mary: Urgh, you’ve got the wrong place, that’s my spinal cord. Move down a little bit. Ooooh! That’s better.


Joseph: Would you like some ice-chips?


Mary: Are you kidding? Ooooh! It’s the middle of winter. If you’ve got a hot water bottle, I won’t say no, though.


A large gush of sweet-smelling water flows all over the straw.


Joseph: Oh, I think your waters have just broken!


Mary: Uh, no kidding. Where is that midwife?


Joseph: Um, I think we lost her somewhere back near Jericho.


Mary: What! And you’re only telling me now?


Joseph: I didn’t want to worry you.


Mary: I’m having a baby in the middle of the night in the middle of winter in a stable with no midwife and a cow who keeps looking at me funny, what on earth do I have to worry about?


Joseph: Hey, I’m doing my best here, this kid isn’t even mine.


Mary: I told you before, he’s the son of God.


Joseph: So you say ...


Mary: Ooooh! Let’s not get into all that again.


Several looooong hours later, Mary is squatting on the ground, holding on to the side of the manger. Her sweaty head down, she focusses deeply on pushing the baby out. With each push, she gives a loud groan and then pants heavily. Finally, the baby crowns.

Joseph: I can see the head! Keep pushing!

Mary: Oooh urgh aah aarh uuurgh ooooof!

Joseph: Oh, oh, here it comes! Jesus Christ!

Jesus: Waaah, waah!

Mary: Bbbl ... mmmm

Joseph: What do we do with the cord thing?

Mary: Wmmmmph? Wanted a lotus birth ... leave it alone.

Joseph: What?


Mary: Need to .... birth Placenta.


Joseph: Oh right.

With considerable effort, Mary births the placenta. Joseph puts it aside for a midnight snack.

Joseph: Where are we going to put the baby? Did you pack the swaddling clothes?

Mary: Mmmm...hmmm. Give him here ... need skin to skin first.

Joseph places Jesus on Mary’s breast and he starts to suckle. Joseph starts throwing things around looking for the swaddling clothes. The cattle are lowing. Some men arrive at the stable door.

Joseph: Oh, hello, who are you?

Shepherds: We’re shepherds.

Joseph: I can see that. What are you doing here? My wife’s just given birth and I’m not sure she wants visitors.

Shepherds: But some angels appeared to us and we were led here by the star. We’ve come to worship the baby.

Joseph: O ..... K. Whatever floats your boat.

He calls back into the stable.

Joseph: Um, Mary, we seem to have visitors. They want to worship the baby.

Mary: Well, he is a little treasure, all right. Just let me pop Jesus in the manger and get myself decent.

Or something like that.

Tidings of comfort and joy, indeed.


As N’Sync might say: ‘Merry Christmas, Happy Holidays!’




Friday, December 16, 2011

review: Mother of All Myths

Aminatta Forna, author of Mother of All Myths: How Society Moulds and Constrains Mothers (1998), is not a mother.


I mention this front and centre because I am willing to bet a substantial sum that it was noted in nearly every review of the book, and her views judged accordingly. Some might think her childlessness is reason enough for her not to write a book about motherhood, because, after all, she doesn’t have the first-hand experience of other writers on the subject. How could she possibly tell us the truth about such a life-changing event?


This leads to the question of who can speak about motherhood: should it only be mothers, the ones who know what it’s really like, or is it the proper concern of all women (and men), particularly those who are avowed feminists? Forna comments on the dearth of feminist literature on motherhood, save for periodic exhortations for the provision of quality childcare. She singles out Naomi Wolf (obviously pre-Misconceptions) as overlooking motherhood in Fire with Fire, which only contains passing references to biology not being destiny, and not giving in to a victim mentality (thanks Naomi!). Writing in the late 1990s, Forna strongly argues that ‘the story of how feminism must tackle the issues surrounding motherhood is only just beginning.’ (11) Post-Misconceptions, which I think left a lot to be desired, I’d say there’s still a lot of work to be done.


Despite her suspect lack of offspring, Forna does have two mothers (of which more later) and, as a feminist, is concerned with the way in which the mythologising of motherhood in Western culture is detrimental to women. Her focus is therefore on myth-busting rather than truth-telling, and I think this book is much the stronger for it. It does not contain the caveats - ‘I love my child really, now let me tell you how bored I am!’ - with which nearly every mother writing on the subject feels obliged to preface any critical comments. It does not focus primarily on women’s own individual experiences of birth and child-rearing. Instead, it locates and critiques the narratives we tell ourselves about motherhood, and traces the ways in which they have become both pervasive and defining. She also sounds a warning about the erosion of feminist gains, particularly in the area of reproductive rights, that could be the cost of this sentimentalised version of motherhood.


Taking aim first at the central plank of the Perfect Mother myth - the exclusivity of the mother-child bond - she critiques the (mostly) male experts who have pronounced on motherhood from Rousseau, to Truby King, to Bowlby to Winnicott. Her conclusion? ‘The relationship between mothers and their children is special because of the work put into it, and not because of a mystical biological impetus.’ (262) That is, mothers are (self-) made, not born. Recognising mothering as work, rather than the result of a natural bond, opens the door for that work to be shared: by partners, families and the wider community.


Where Forna does draw on her own life experience is in her cross-cultural analysis. Born to a Sierra Leonean father and a Scottish mother, who subsequently separated, she was raised alternately in Britain and Sierra Leone. Her father married again, and her second mother helped raise her. Her dual childhood enabled her to experience the different contexts in which children are raised firsthand. Her West African childhood was non-exclusive: she was mothered by parents, cousins and older sons and daughters of family friends. She comments, ‘looking at a subject like motherhood from the vantage point of other cultures does not just help us towards greater international understanding ... it also tells us about our own culture, and moves the debate about motherhood on from its current stalemate by helping to separate what might be ‘natural’ from what is culturally constructed.’ (199-200)


Drawing on her interviews with women from a range of backgrounds and cultures who now live in the West, Forna traces the tensions they experience when they are philosophically - and even linguistically (some, for example, speak languages where ‘mother‘ and ‘aunt‘ are the same word) - at odds with the dominant ideology. Despite this, ‘their experience of coming from one culture while living in another has made them acutely aware of what even the so-called ‘experts’ haven’t grasped: there is more than one script for motherhood.’ (202)


Noting that the Western mother who stays at home with her children is seen, by turns, as living in luxury or being a layabout, she also comments that the conflict between mothering and working outside the home is both a non-issue and a necessity in other contexts. As a result, international feminism, dominated by white, Western middle-class women, has failed to build a consensus on motherhood as a universal, shared experience. Idealising and naturalising the mother as solely and exclusively responsible for her child, not only threatens to crush women under the weight of expectation, but also threatens to cut us off from each other and our different ways of being.


In her strong conclusion, Forna states:


Motherhood is the largest remaining obstacle to women achieving equality in contemporary post-modern society. The problem is not children, having children or the love and care of children, but the framing of Motherhood and the endurance of myths that surround it. For .... all the talk of a new post-feminist generation, women once they have children are every bit as constrained as their own mothers once were. The only difference is in precisely how.

....

Our mothers may have been prisoners in their own homes; mothers today are tangled in a web of responsibilities and conflicting, competing demands and roles. Today’s ‘problem with no name’ is the myth about Motherhood.

...

Far from diminishing, the Motherhood myth is growing more powerful and is enjoying a popular resurgence, propelled by the insistence on linking ideas about Motherhood to every social ailment from crime statistics to personal happiness. (260-61).


She closes with challenges that the whole community must face: women (beware the double-edged sword of idealism - claiming the ‘good’ bits of the motherhood myth does not dispense with the ‘bad’), men (challenge the myth of mother-centric parenting and become more involved with your children), and everyone (recognise that children are not just the individual responsibility of their parents but a community responsibility, and develop policy accordingly - and stop blaming mothers for everything).


As a mother, I couldn’t have put it better myself.


Sunday, December 11, 2011

media mamas

A perfect mother is a dead mother.


Or, at least, so the newspapers would have you believe. After exploring a series of representations of mothers in British newspapers, Aminatta Forna, author of Mother of All Myths, concludes:


Images of mothers are created by popular culture to reflect and sometimes manipulate a set of values about what constitutes exemplary mothering. Behind each individual depiction, good or bad, lies the model of the perfect mother. Private decisions about work, relationships, fertility, and behaviour become public property because women are mothers. The mothers who are the subjects of press stories are judged by that standard, and so are women in the general populace who do not or cannot fulfill society’s expectations of what a mother should be. They are all found guilty. (118)


Inspired, I decided to conduct an impressionistic survey of recent articles on mothers and motherhood on the Stuff and New Zealand Herald websites, to see whether I could trace any similarities. After sifting through more dead bodies than Hercule Poirot, I came up with the following Top Five recurring themes.


(I should add the disclaimer that I’m not focussing on what happened in the following articles - happy or tragic - but what, taken together, they might indicate about the stories we tell ourselves about motherhood. Asking why these stories are so popular and so often repeated, gives a sense of the core values that a mother must possess if she is to measure up to the perfect mother ideal.)


1. Dead or dying mothers are newspaper gold: without a troublesome, contrary, living woman around to disrupt the narrative, dead mothers can be idealised and sentimentalised as perfect. This seems to recur time and time again. Whether it’s a dying mother spending her last few days compiling keepsakes for her child, or a mother who is the victim of a tragic accident or a mother who dies with her child in her arms, trying in vain to protect him or her or even a mother who gives up her life for her baby.


Dead mothers are apparently the only ones able to achieve that elusive goal of perfection. Forna comments:


In media terms, the ultimate ‘motherhood’ story is an exclusive on a woman who has made the ultimate sacrifice: a woman who has died in childbirth, or died trying to bear a child, or, best of all, who has died so her child could live. These stories are run regularly, the prose is heavy with pathos and the picture content is high. (105)


The core mothering value that these stories collectively reproduce (no pun intended) and reinforce is that of selflessness. The perfect mother always thinks of others before herself. Her hopes, dreams, wants, needs, and fears, do not warrant attention until she has not only taken care of her child, but also her partner, her family, friends and community. And by then she is probably so exhausted that she’s forgotten what they were.


2. Following closely behind dead mothers are stories about ‘unnatural’, villainous mothers, whose chief fault, it seems, is to not be dead and therefore perfect. At the extreme, these are the mothers that abuse and kill their children. Elsewhere, these are the negligent mothers, who are uncaring or disinterested in their children, even when they’re dead.


If a dead mother is perfect, an unnatural mother is a warning. Sometimes spelled out, sometimes just heavily implied, is the moral: if you loved your children enough, you would not take drugs, you would not get stressed and lash out, and you would not resort to social media in a panic after a fatal accident. The moral applies to all mothers though, acting as a warning against their more negative impulses. If you love your children enough you will not want release from them from time to time (whether through drugs or catching a movie), you will not lose your temper ever, nor get stressed and feel overwhelmed, you will not panic or feel like you don’t know what to do ... much less admit it. Because if you lapse for one single moment, you might end up as the example held up to others in the newspapers.


3. A mother’s anguish is number three with a bullet, sometimes literally. This includes grieving over a dead or dying child or a missing child. It can also encompass rage at society giving children too much information too soon, which is usually to do with sex and family planning. Occasionally, there is the odd good news story to leaven the heartache, particularly in the case of missing children.


The anguished mother is a variation on the theme of the dead or dying mother. Not yet perfect because she is still drawing breath, nevertheless, she is utterly consumed by her child’s wellbeing. Unable to eat, sleep, or get on with her ‘normal’ life while she is grieving or awaiting news, any news, her child is her top priority. She can, however, quickly fall into the ‘unnatural’ mother category if she is seen to get over her grief too quickly, or does something that might interfere with her constant vigil.


4. Everyday mothers are not immune either: stories about the ways in which mothers mess up their children by basically just living their lives also feature heavily. Working is usually the top crime (if you are middle class, at least), followed by eating and drinking. If you are poor or working class, not working is the biggest crime (thank you Paula Bennett).


As a mother, working is, of course, incompatible with being truly selfless. Nothing is as fulfilling as raising a child, not a promotion, an award, nor an independent income. And don’t try to kid yourself that you can have the best of both worlds. You will only fail at both.


If you want to stay home, but you are a single mother on a benefit, however, you are not fulfilling the perfect mother ideal. You are just a bludger and should search for a minimum wage job at once. This is the only way to teach your children not to grow up to be bludgers, and is therefore more selfless than staying at home with them and passing on your own bad habits.


5. Last, but not least, is stories about celebrity mothers, both lauding them and questioning how much value they have as role models. Even celebrities can’t be perfect mothers, though, as they are only going through the motions with the aid of lots of money and an army of nannies. And who knows what special celebrity ways they might have to mess up their kids, given their unusual approaches to motherhood, whether artistically or financially motivated?


There will be articles that don’t fit these themes of course, but the overwhelming majority that I found could broadly be categorised according to my Top Five, with dead mothers well and truly coming out on top. It certainly gave me a bit of a chill to see how obsessed newspapers seem to be with this theme. And what the stakes of playing the perfection game might be.


Me? I’d rather have a life than be perfect.


Wednesday, December 7, 2011

'are you having a boy or a girl?'

I think this was the most common question I was asked while pregnant, followed closely by ‘you must be very excited’ (more of statement really, but the question is implied) and ‘can I touch your tummy?’ (this was also sometimes implied as the odd person just touched it without even asking). Asking the baby’s gender is a fairly conventional question - although it ignores the small possibility that the baby may be born with the sexual characteristics of both genders - and not one that you would think would cause much controversy.


In my perverse way, however, I felt unwilling to answer it, feeling that there were some things about the baby that I wanted to keep private until she was born (the name we chose was another). I also felt that she was - and we were - going to have to deal with the weight of cultural meanings of gender soon enough. I’m already dreading dealing with demands for a princess dress when she’s a pre-schooler, so I wanted - perhaps naively - to have some space where she could just ‘be’, rather than ‘be a girl’. I could of course have avoided the question by not finding out the sex of the baby during the scan. But, as I sometimes peek at the ending of murder mysteries or Google the winner of Project Runway halfway through the season, the likelihood of my not finding out was small.


So, how to answer the question? Being a mostly honest person, I didn’t want to lie and say that we hadn’t found out. Instead, we adopted a strategy - borrowed from a former workmate of mine - of saying that we knew, but wanted to keep it a secret. This had the advantage of being true. It did, however, generate a number of confused ‘O .... Ks’, and the odd inane comment such as ‘well, I’ll know if it’s a boy or girl when you come back from lunch with lots of pink or blue clothes.’ Apparently it had never occurred to this person that one of the reasons I didn’t want people to know is that I wanted to stave off gendered reactions and satorial choices for as long as possible, and was therefore extremely unlikely to come back from a shopping trip with either blue or pink clothes.


Such gendered colour choices are not ‘natural’, and it was not always the case that babies wore their gender. Before the twentieth century in the West, both boy and girl babies were dressed the same, usually in white gowns. Gendered clothes were not introduced until boys were ‘breeched’ and girls adopted smaller versions of the dresses their mothers wore.


Aside from one or two small pronoun slips that mostly passed under the radar (I think), my husband and I kept mum on the subject until after the birth. Until then, the gifts that we received were neutral: mobiles, toys, green or white blankets. As soon as the baby was born, and her gender was revealed, nearly every single gift we received was pink. I don’t wish to appear ungrateful, as it was obviously very generous of all the gifters to give us something, but even I was surprised by the amount of pink. My baby, however, took to both pink and other colours with a laudable lack of discrimination.


But it’s not just about an aesthetic objection on my part to pink. I’m not opposed to any other colour, nor am I particularly opposed to dresses and skirts. As a baby, my daughter has no more idea about what pink signifies than she does any other colour. What it’s primarily about is the desire to know, and, once the gender is known, to categorise and pigeonhole. Once people knew that we had had a girl, not only were we showered with pink gifts, but also unthinking gendered assumptions. Some of these included: ‘girls are so contrary’, ‘she looks like a real girl’, ‘dad’ll have to watch out for the boys‘ and so on. I’m not sure what most of these even mean, nor how age-appropriate they are (boy trouble at six months? Really?)


It works both ways, of course. I have heard people say of baby boys things like ‘he really likes trucks, he’s such a little boy.’ My daughter likes trucks too - is she such a little boy? Or, alternatively, I have heard people censure even very young boys for crying, suggesting they ‘be brave’ instead, or for liking conventionally feminine toys.


In the fantastic Delusions of Gender, Cordelia Fine relates the heart-breaking letter of a mother of a young boy, at her wits’ end over her son’s preference for ‘girly’ clothes and dolls. While she had been inclined to let him be, her husband - not ordinarily a macho man at all - was determined that he should play football and like ‘boys’ toys’ or other people would laugh at him. Her husband actively discouraged the boy’s favoured toys and told him off when he acted ‘like a sissy’. What is so sad about this, I think, is that the father was trying, in his own way, to protect the boy from bullies and ridicule, but in doing so was bullying and ridiculing him and teaching him that it was not OK to be himself. He seemed oblivious to the fact that, as the boy’s father, his own relationship to his son was far more important than those with his peers or other adults.


This is an extreme example, and I don’t wish by any means to suggest that I disapprove of conventionally feminine things, which would just mean inverting a binary opposition: girls’ things bad, boys’ things good. But I do wish for my daughter the option to sample lots of different things and experiences, not just those that are considered ‘feminine’ and suitable for girls, and find out what suits her in her quest for her own subjectivity. After all, to paraphrase Simone de Beauvoir, ‘one is not born, but rather becomes, a girl’. By broadening out what ‘being a girl’ could mean in the here and now means less constriction for both little girls and boys.


And surely that can only be a good thing?

Friday, December 2, 2011

'it's like running a marathon'

Who said Superwoman was dead?


Perhaps the 1970s’ ideal of the mother who does everything - childcare, paid employment, housework - is down and out (and according to novelist and journalist Shirley Conran she is). But if we conceive of Superwoman more like Superman - the embodiment of physical strength and capability - maybe she deserves to be resurrected. For any woman who goes through pregnancy, birth and early motherhood well deserves the tribute.


I was repeatedly told that being pregnant and giving birth was like running a marathon. The first trimester, that anxious period of waiting for the magical twelve-week marker when it’s ‘safe’ to finally tell all and sundry, is like running one marathon. The newly fertilised egg is busy turning itself into a zygote into a blastocyst into an embryo, and zapping all your energy and mineral reserves into the process (a bit like a National government and strip-mining). And you run this marathon while probably ingesting much less food than you ex-gest (is that a word?) due to morning sickness.


There’s some respite during the second trimester, when (if!) the nausea and vomiting subsides, and you’re not yet quite the size of a house. My midwife confidently told me that I’d feel amazing during this trimester, better than I ever had before. This euphoric feeling didn’t materialise for me, but after weeks of living on the plainest of plain carbohydrates and staying horizontal for as long as possible in order to avoid an emergency trip to the bathroom, just feeling more or less normal was good enough for me.


Then the second marathon begins in the third trimester. As your girth increases, so, unless you’re blessed with the right genes, do the stretch marks, the swollen ankles, and the developing milk glands (the body parts formerly known as ‘breasts’). You begin to waddle slowly rather than walk, your pace decreasing as the weeks go by. If you’re really lucky you’ll have considerate friends, family or work colleagues who will delight in pointing this out to you, as they know you’ll never be able to get up enough pace to catch them and punch them in the arm and will have to settle for a murderous glance instead. You’ll feel more and more tired, probably compounded by not being able to sleep very well, and baby by now may well have seriously depleted your iron stores.


And then the third and most daunting marathon begins: labour and birth. During this stage, a woman’s body does some amazing stuff: the muscles of the uterus contract, the cervix thins and dilates, and then every part works to push the baby down the birth canal and out of the vagina. Spent and bloody, new mums can feel invincible (assuming they haven’t been carted off to theatre for emergency surgery of one kind or another that is). Whatever the outcome of the birth, the next few weeks and months involve the body furiously healing its caesarean sites, episiotomy incisions, perineal or cervical tears, ruptured uterine walls, or stretched and sore muscles.


So three marathons in nine months, and that’s even before you get to round-the-clock feeding (breastfeeding being particularly physically demanding), sleep deprivation, carrying the baby round, and trying to recover from the most profound physical effort of your life. As someone who had previously felt exhausted at even the thought of one marathon, let alone three, this sounds like Superwoman to me.


From the vantage point of a year later, when I have well and truly recovered from the experience, a trace of that invincibility remains. If I feel tired while swimming and unsure if I can make a few more lengths, or if I hurt my shoulder and wonder how I’m going to manage, I remind myself that I gave birth and survived.


Women’s bodies are conventionally subject to all kinds of scrutiny: too thin or too fat, too tall or too short, hips too wide, breasts too small, arms too skinny, thighs too wobbly, or tummies too flabby. But how often do we stop and celebrate what they can actually do? As Naomi Wolf argued in The Beauty Myth, women will always be found wanting when it comes to conventional ideas of beauty. But bodies are not primarily made to fit a pre-determined and static idea of what ‘beautiful’ is. Whether it’s giving birth, digesting food, lifting and carrying, producing milk, playing music, writing a book, or even running an actual marathon, bodies - women - are capable of being and doing so much more than looking aesthetically pleasing in a two-dimensional photograph.


And isn’t that worthy of being called Superwoman?

Monday, November 28, 2011

review: Misconceptions



In the early 1990s, perched on a log by a remote lake waiting for a limnologist with whom I had a love/hate relationship, I started reading Naomi Wolf’s The Beauty Myth. With incongruous waders over his grungey flannel shirt and faded cargo shorts, the limnologist scooped up hundreds of microscopic animals in a huge net, while I read about how patriarchy fought women breaching its power structures by pushing impossible standards of beauty to which they could never measure up. For women entrapped by the beauty myth this meant that instead of working out how to finally smash that glass ceiling, they were more interested in just working out. Finding myself both persuaded and frustrated by her writing, I also started to develop a bit of a love/hate relationship with Naomi Wolf.


Some weeks later while watching Oprah - ahem! I mean, of course, studying for exams - I saw Ms Wolf hawking her book on the show. I felt just as vexed as I’m sure she did when Oprah’s audience offered the radical insight - to profound applause - that she didn’t need to worry about the beauty industry because she was so beautiful already. To her credit, she tried to alter the terms of this response and point out that it didn’t matter what people thought of her relative attractiveness, ‘beauty’ was not an intrinsic value but a normative culturally-constructed standard against which women were measured and found wanting. The audience remained skeptical.


I duly read her next two books as they came out: Fire with Fire: the New Female Power and How to Use It and Promiscuities: the Secret Struggle for Womanhood (or a Secret History of Female Desire). Once again, they contained interesting material and provocative arguments. But once again, I came away somewhat unsatisfied, not least because of her increasing use of purple prose to make her points. My abiding memory of these books is cringing over a sentence - I forget from which book - where she proclaimed that male sexual attention was ‘the sun in which she bloomed.’ Presumably meant as a riposte to the spectre of 1970s radical feminism, it just felt embarrassing.


So Naomi and I parted ways from the late 1990s: I went to Japan, she kept right on blooming and eventually became a mother. Her book on that subject, Misconceptions: Truth, Lies and the Unexpected Journey into Motherhood came out in 2001. A decade later, as I too have followed in her footsteps and become a mother, we have met again for a catch-up. So how does Misconceptions measure up?


Her writing is still a mix of the purple, the personal and the political. Not that there’s anything intrinsically wrong with that, of course. There were passages I vehemently agreed with, particularly those relating to the medicalisation of birth, and the shifts in identity of new mothers. But there were also many I found superficial, anecdotal (not in a good way) and untheorised. The sections on work and childcare were particularly thinly sketched: her survey of a handful of other mothers she knew (i.e. white, upper middle-class, urban professionals ... in her neighbourhood) gave an extremely skewed picture of how women negotiate (or not) the return to work. This basically boils down to having a nanny.


In a a couple of brief sentences, she mentions that other middle-class woman use day-care, and the working-class nannies themselves rely on low-paid babysitters for their own children, but these experiences are not really explored. While Wolf acknowledges the racial and class divisions between the nannies and the ‘working mothers’, she only narrates her discussion with one nanny, and this feels a little like a guilty afterthought. In a book that is so avowedly personal as well, she does not discuss her own work and childcare arrangements, nor put her own marriage under the spotlight in the way that she does those of her friends (spoiler: all the so-called feminist husbands are really bastards. From her descriptions, it sounds a bit to me like they were bastards all along. Here’s a sample:


‘Here’s the secret, Naomi,’ he said. ‘All the husbands I know are good guys. They honestly want things to be fair in their relationships. They are hands-on dads, and they want their wives to be happy and fulfilled. But when it comes down to it, there is no way they are going to sacrifice a career opportunity .... Bottom line? We know they won’t leave us,’ he said. ‘A: They love us. B: Because of the kids.’ (p 225)


But I digress.)


More powerful were her sections on pregnancy and birth. Here, she does examine in detail her own experiences of birth and what they showed up about the high intervention rate of births in the United States (scary!) and the way in which births can be manipulated for the financial benefits of the hospitals and medics in attendance. Hospital protocols, rather than the woman and baby, stipulate how long women will labour for, and the alarmingly high rate of caesareans (accompanied by epidurals, and other interventions) is a nice little earner for all concerned in a user-pays health system (big cheer for socialised medicine!).


After her first traumatic experience, Wolf sets out to explore the other options, talking to natural childbirth advocates, midwife practitioners, and women-centred obstetric practices. For her second birth, she takes the middle route: an obstetric practice with hands-on midwives who work in partnership with doctors to deliver babies. Avoiding the highly medicalised and de-personalised route she went the first time, and eschewing a drug-free birth as overly masochistic, she argues for a middle way between medicalised hospital births and natural home births, with midwives and doctors working together to provide the best outcomes for mother and baby.


This cri-de-coeur - ‘why can’t they all just get along?!’ - struck a chord with me. Throughout my pregnancy, I felt like I was in an invisible tug of war between the medical profession and midwives focussed on natural childbirth.This is partly because a) I had a stupid GP who told me midwives were dangerous and b) I chose a midwife who practised, and was an advocate for, natural birth. I have written before about how I didn’t appreciate being treated as an object (a car!) by my initial doctor, nor was I that thrilled about hearing repeatedly how midwives had won a law-change so they could practice autonomously from my midwife. After having read about Wolf’s experience (women still giving birth on their backs ... and in stirrups!), I now have much more understanding of what the midwives had fought for, and am grateful they did manage to get that law-change. At the time, however, I couldn’t have cared less. Like Wolf, I wanted the focus to be on me and the baby, with both doctors and midwives working together, and not feel like I was having to choose the winning team (and hoping like hell I picked the right one).


In the end, I did see a lot of doctors, and had a range of interventions. But, throughout, and afterwards, I had the support of my midwife, who was fantastic. I only wish I hadn’t spent nine months feeling so pulled in different directions, not really knowing what was what nor who to properly trust, before I was actually pulled in different directions by my own birth experience.



Friday, November 25, 2011

memoirs of an invisible woman

One day I woke up and I was invisible.


There was no flash of eerie light, no potential nuclear catastrophe, and no attempts to blow up a cat. Just eyes that slid past me, spaces that didn’t accommodate my buggy-wielding self properly, and even friends and workmates who more or less forgot about me unless I, rarely, met them in public spaces or attended their events. I encountered a new world populated by other mothers of young children, one that had been invisible to me before I had a baby. Between nine and four, when others are at school or work, they emerge, gathering in cafes, at the library, in the park, at the playground. Like a certain invisible man (and, just to be clear, I’m not being so crass as to compare my situation to that of Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man), I had to re-negotiate how to live life as one of them: an Invisible Woman.


The Invisible Man in Memoirs of an Invisible Man had to re-learn how to live his life in his newly invisible state: how to dress, how to drive, and how to work. Similarly, I had to figure out when I could shower and dress (before my husband went to work? while the baby had her morning nap?), what I needed for the baby in order to get out of the house (practically everything) and where to hang out in the days with so many minutes to fill (see above). Inhabiting my previous life as an autonomous subject in control of my own destiny, it was a new challenge figuring out how to structure the day when there was no particular place I had to be, and a small person with a large appetite and no control of her bodily functions to look after.


And then there was the outside world to navigate. Like most new parents, I can tell you the exact location of the small handful of decent parents’ rooms in the CBD are, I know which cafes to avoid due to their cramped space and appalling bathrooms, some of which were unfortunately old favourites, and my first check on entering a new place is whether there is a change-station and a debris-free space for uninhibited crawling. Thanks to helpful websites like City Wrigglers, this information is now available online, before you need to venture out. There may be a dearth of such facilities, but at least knowing where the half-way decent ones are makes venturing out a little easier.


So much for accommodation of my new priorities. But what about my personal feeling of invisibility? Until I made it back into the outside world after the baby had been born, I was not aware how much of my sense of self was dependent on having a job and earning my own income. I have been financially independent since my late teens, and didn’t even let my first date pay for a movie ticket on my behalf. Now, aside from a small weekly allowance that I had saved up for myself over the preceding nine months, I had to look to someone else to pay the bills and provide. For someone accustomed to paying her own way, it felt very retro, and not in a good way.


Despite the adage ‘every mother is a working mother’ the message that a mother’s (unpaid) work is as of much value to the economy and society as those in paid employment just hasn’t become a reality. In New Zealand, new mothers who intend to return to work are entitled to receive fourteen weeks’ paid parental leave. This is a relatively recent, and welcome, development. Yet the amount received is less than the minimum wage, sending a clear message that looking after a new-born baby has even less economic value than the most poorly-paid positions available in the job market. It’s better than a poke in the eye, but not much.


Feminist Naomi Wolf writes about her ‘demotion’ on becoming a mother in Misconceptions (2001):


As my life slowly resumed, I received one tough lesson after another in my sharp demotion of status .... From both men and women, from young baby-sitters to plumbers to cable installers, I noticed a new flippancy in relation to my time: it was newly valueless. People who would never take for granted that my husband should sit around waiting for them seemed to assume that I had nowhere to go, and nothing important to do. (179)


Carrying her analysis further, she describes how the geography of cities, as navigated by women with small children, makes clear how little their role is valued: she encounters bathrooms with limited or no change facilities, and playgrounds without shelter from either the sun or the rain, some even without fencing and gates, or bathrooms.


I can certainly relate to this after my trip to the supermarket this morning: the only trolleys that could carry a child were the absolutely massive ones for which there is virtually no room in the aisles. When I went to pay I had to manouevre awkwardly between the checkouts, knocking my legs and hips painfully several times as I had to squeeze back and forth to get my shopping out. Why couldn’t the space between the checkouts be wider? Or the smaller trolleys have child seats? Occasionally, help is offered - and gratefully received - by those without babies. But it feels frustrating to be dependent on help for things you know you could do yourself if the environment had been built differently.


Wolf observes:

The message you receive from your work environment about how valuable your work is affects your psychological well-being. Every day I was getting the message that the work the women I knew and I were doing had little value: the needs of people sitting in bus shelters and municipal lobbies ... were more carefully met than were the needs of moms and kids in the places in which we gathered. (178-79)


We are repeatedly told that looking after small children is the most valuable job there is. And yet where are the policies, and structures in place to make this an economic reality as well as an emotional and moral one? By this, I mean extended paid parental leave that is more than a token amount (including paid leave for fathers of newborns - this is currently unpaid), more actual rather than merely nominal flexibility in work places (so many new mums I know who have tried to return to work have been told it’s full-time or nothing - facing such a choice most have opted to resign), and easier public spaces and services to navigate (this is slowly changing, not least because of such things as the Accessible Public Transport Inquiry).


And in the meantime? The Invisible Man had to learn to live with his condition, as I have to live with mine. He managed to make it work for him though, eventually becoming a millionaire through fraud.


As for me, I’m still buying Lotto tickets.

Monday, November 21, 2011

review: Buy Baby Buy

Our house is slowly being taken over by Stuff. Baby stuff. And, as she gets older, the more stuff we seem to accumulate. It doesn’t help that I have a bit of a hoarding tendency anyway, can’t resist the many second-hand baby sales in our suburb (‘it’s for a good cause!’) and find one way to alleviate boredom is to have a look around the shops. I’m in two minds as to whether to get rid of the clothes and toys she has outgrown, as I am in two minds as to whether there will be a Babe: the Sequel. If there is, it would be a shame to get rid of these things. Just in case.


But babies don’t really need much: you can wash them in the kitchen sink or existing bath, carry them in a sling, and even tuck them up in a drawer (open, of course) as an alternative to baby baths, buggies and bassinets. You can entertain them with empty tissue boxes, stones in empty plastic bottles and found objects from around the house. And yet there is now a huge market aimed at babies: not just for ‘essentials’ like cots, buggies, clothes and the like, but also for toys, books, games, DVDs, you name it. The marketing of such things is aimed at parents, and aims to harness their desire to do - or, in this case, buy - the very best for their child.


This dramatic increase in consumption is the subject of American journalist Susan Gregory Thomas’s book Buy Baby Buy: How Consumer Culture Manipulates Parents and Harms Young Minds (2009). How’s that for sub-title?! It sounds like it will sternly ‘tell us the truth’ about consumer culture and exhort us that ‘we must do better.’ This moralising tone is something I have noticed with other books by journalists (such as Natasha Walter and Robert Fisk): due to their ‘investigative’ work, the journalist ‘uncovers’ something that is not all it first appears to be, and ‘exposes’ the giant conspiracies behind everything. I’m not against this in principle - this is the role of the fourth estate, after all - but where it works in headlines in a paper, it can seem simplistic in a book-length study, bypassing the structural in favour of the anecdotal. Which is not to say that there isn’t some very interesting material in this book.


I was particularly interested in the way that virtually everything that is marketed at babies and young toddlers, whose parents will be making choices on their behalf, is now presented as being educational. So a simple stuffed toy, which in days of yore would just be for a baby to snuggle with, is now festooned with ABCs and numbers and different textures and so on. Interesting, but I don’t really see that there’s too much wrong with that kind of thing (other, perhaps, than it’s being used to hike the price-tag.) I was even amused the other day to see a brand of baby food being marketed as ‘educational’: not only will my baby enjoy the goodness of gooey alphabetti pasta, she will also learn about texture and her ABCs at the same time. Talk about multi-tasking.


What Thomas described that was more insidious, however, was the marketing of educational DVDs - such as the Baby Einstein range - to babies and toddlers under the age of three. Thomas cites medical research to show that this material, far from being educational, can actually impair a child’s cognitive development. Even more disturbing, in the US context, was that such material, branded with anything from Sesame Street to Clifford the Red Dog, was being used in daycare centres, provided free of charge by the companies that make them. Centres were using these free materials to keep children entertained and to ease staff shortages and augment dwindling budgets. Another triumph of free market capitalism. I was heartened to note that the various daycare centres in New Zealand that I have visited in the past few months in my attempts to sort out childcare before I return to work, did not appear to even have a TV, let alone a DVD library.


These sections were where the book was strongest. I was less convinced by the section on brand recognition, in which Thomas traces how toddlers can recognise characters - which adorn everything from nappies to number charts - from the age of two. Presumably this recognition means that a toddler’s ‘pester power’ kicks in earlier than it previously did. As the plastic prime minister might say, I’m ‘relaxed’ about Spot books and Winnie the Pooh nappies, and I’m under no compulsion to buy anything else that has their image plastered all over it. Although characters are becoming more pervasive, character-free alternatives exist. What Thomas does not recognise is that whether or not to consume a branded product or a non-branded one is a somewhat false choice. In a a capitalist mode of production, the only choice is that we consume, not what we consume.


Thomas’ book and my own tendency to sometimes alleviate boredom with buying stuff put me in mind of sociologist Maria Mies’ theory of ‘housewifization’ from her 1986 book Patriarchy and Accumulation on a World Scale. In it, she theorises that capitalism usurps the labour of women and de-values it as ‘subsistence’ work that has no cost-value and hence no economic benefit. She goes on to argue that that ‘first world’ women - the ‘house-wives’ - and ‘third world’ women - who are, on the contrary, being exploited as docile, low-paid and powerless factory workers to produce consumer goods - are integrally linked by the international division of labour. One produces, the other consumes. And consumes.


On an individual level, it’s hard to see a way out of this relationship. But focussing solely on structural relationships at the expense of agency seems to lead only to paralysis. So, after all, is it then about making responsible choices: toys made locally, or through fair-trade initiatives, or through companies that have social engagement programmes? Using sustainable materials? Buying second-hand goods? If our role is to consume, then making informed choices about how we consume may mean better outcomes for those on the sharp end of the international division of labour.


Maybe you can have Stuff and play with it too.