Lest anyone think I am solely obsessed with pink and blue, and the gendered nature of a baby’s environment, I thought I’d take a swerve back to some of the fun pregnancy and newborn baby moments that I’ve experienced. And when I say ‘fun’, I mean, of course, ‘hugely invasive’, ‘stupid’ and ‘downright offensive’. I’ll leave to one side the apparently common pregnancy experiences, such as random people touching your tummy without your permission, for the one incident that really sticks in my mind.
I was about seven or eight months pregnant, and still at work, when a kind of colleague (i.e. one I don’t know very well) plopped herself down on the couch next to me during a break, laughing to colleagues that she’d sit next to me because it made her feel slim. No, that wasn’t the offensive part, that was just the latest example of mildly amusing (read: not at all amusing) pregnancy humour directed at me.
Once the room had emptied out somewhat, she then bailed me up about whether or not I was planning to breastfeed. I should explain that that this was a tricky subject for me: I wanted to try breastfeeding, but I knew that my mother had not been able to do it. Feeling that snapping back ‘mind your own business’ was not really appropriate workplace banter, I decided to hedge and hope that my off-hand ‘well, if I can’ would be rightly interpreted as a polite version of ‘mind your own business’. Given that she felt that it was perfectly all right to ask me about this in the first place, I should’ve known that my diffidence would actually be interpreted as invitation to keep going on about it. And on and on.
‘Oh no you must!’ she cried, as if I’d actually said, ‘I’d rather crawl naked over broken glass, rather than breastfeed.’
‘You must,’ she insisted. ‘It’s so important for bonding with your child. You don’t get the same bond from bottle-feeding.’
Feeling more and more uncomfortable with the direction the conversation was going, namely, the increasingly missionary zeal with which I was being buttonholed about breastfeeding, I tried to close it down. Unfortunately, I had learned nothing from my opening gambit. My feeble ‘well, I don’t want to put too much pressure on myself’ and ‘it doesn’t work for some women’ had the opposite effect to the one I’d intended. Instead of shutting her up, she instead took this as a challenge, hectoring me about how I’d be short-changing the baby if I didn’t, and how the cracked nipples and mastitis were all worth it in the end (side-note: really?).
At the point someone else decided to join in, so they could double-team me, I felt suffocated enough to do what I should have done in the first place. I stood up, said I wasn’t comfortable with the conversation and left the room. For good measure - perhaps to create a teachable moment, perhaps out of spite - I added that ‘some women, including my own mother, weren’t able to breastfeed, so I didn’t take it as a given.’ Needless to say, next time I saw them they were quite apologetic.
And so they should have been. The issue here is not whether or not I was going to breastfeed - I was able to, as it turns out - but the fact that this woman felt entitled to tell me what I should and shouldn’t be doing, when her opinion was neither desired nor required.
I am not the only expectant mother who has felt under pressure about breastfeeding. It’s a tricky one, because New Zealand has low breastfeeding rates, and the Ministry of Health has been running a campaign for the last few years to turn that around. I’m well aware of the benefits of breastfeeding but I’m also well aware that I turned out OK as a formula-fed baby. So my diffident answer turned out to be how I really felt: I would try to breastfeed if I could, and, if I couldn’t, I didn’t want to beat myself up about using formula. Surely, it’s more important that the baby is not left to starve, right?
But this little incident got me thinking about more than just the personal pros and cons of breastfeeding. It happened to coincide with my reading an article about French feminist Elizabeth Badinter, who had come out swinging against the "holy alliance of reactionaries". According to the article in the The Australian (committing a cardinal sin here by not reading the book myself - I aim to rectify this in the near future), this alliance is:
pressuring women to be "perfect mothers" who stay at home to wash cloth nappies, prepare organic purees for "tyrant" children and suckle them to exhaustion ....In her explosive bestselling book Conflict: The Woman and the Mother, Badinter targets ecologists, pediatricians, breastfeeding zealots and the media for peddling a return to "naturalism" and an idealised concept of motherhood that elevates concepts of masochism and female sacrifice to unforeseen levels. The new "subterranean ideological war" is making women across the world feel horribly guilty, she says. Most dangerous, it is threatening the gains of decades of feminist struggle for sexual equality and is even slashing birthrates.
I didn’t agree with all that she was reported as saying, but this passage had a lot of resonance for me. While I felt that I wanted to do the best I could for my child, I was a little suspicious about the reification of the natural in child-birth and child-rearing. Isn’t this another way of assigning women to their ‘natural’ roles as mothers and keeping them there?
But head and heart are often at odds. I’m still figuring out how to navigate what I intellectually and politically agree with, and what I feel is the right thing to do. I also feel like I want to maintain an identity independent of being someone’s mother and I don’t want to be a drudge. So, how do I do it?! Well, I’ll get back to you when I’ve figured out how it’s possible to have your cake and eat it and throw it round the room. Maybe it’s time to dust off that Muddling Through(c) technique again ...
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