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?
