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.

Wednesday, November 16, 2011

motherhood, one year on

My baby turned one last week. Of course, she had little, if any, idea about what it all meant, beyond the fact that she quite liked the balloons we blew up and playing with (or, more accurately, near) her friends for a couple of hours. I’d been told more than once that the first, and even second, birthday is more for the parents than the baby. I definitely felt the force of this in our case, not least because we were offered just as many congratulations for making it through the first year of parenthood as our baby was offered ‘happy birthdays’.


Given that the birthday girl didn’t register the significance of having lived for one whole revolution of the earth around the sun, what might it all mean? The day itself, beyond the event we made it into, was a day like many others: wake up, get dressed, feed, play, sleep, and repeat. Next year, she is likely to be more aware of the cake, the decorations and the presents - if only to feverishly unwrap them so she can play with the wrapping paper. Commemorations - of which birthdays are one example - are solidified by repetition: as she grows older she will start to look forward to this annual event, eventually counting down the days and looking forward to her presents in the way that I was this year.


It certainly felt like a significant milestone to me. Through the days that sometimes dragged every second, or the weeks that sometimes flew by, it really does feel like we’ve come a long way. Even though I haven’t forgotten the major details of her birth a year ago, the trauma of it all is fading from my mind. I’m reminded of a passage in Sylvia Plath’s novel, The Bell Jar, when the narrator observes a woman giving birth:


Here was a woman in terrible pain, obviously feeling every bit of it or she wouldn’t groan like that, and she would go straight home and start another baby, because the drug would make her forget how bad the pain had been, when all the time, in some secret part of her, that long, blind, doorless and windowless corridor of pain was waiting to open up and shut her in again. (p 68)


I don’t know about the ‘going straight home and starting another baby’ - good lord! - but this November it has become increasingly harder to remember how I experienced her birth last November. Forgetting is part of commemoration too. When countries stage national commemorations, that which doesn’t fit with the narrative of solemn remembrance or joyous celebration is erased or downplayed.


So what do I choose to remember and emphasise for this commemoration?


Seeing the angry bruise on her cheek and cuts on her forehead from the forceps which pulled her out of me.


Marvelling at the ease with which she latched on to feed. She had been kept waiting for nine hours while I was in surgery, so learned the benefits of delayed gratification early.


Hearing her first cries, one of which had a distinct ‘no, no’ sound to tell me she didn’t like something.


Having to call for help from the midwives to pick her up out of the see-through bassinet by my hospital bed to feed her, because I wasn't able to do it.


Being reprimanded by one of the midwives for having a messy room and not picking my baby up myself.


Feeling pleased that breastfeeding was going well, largely without me leading the way.


Feeling dismayed when we were told the she had lost 11 per cent, not the allowed ten, of her birthweight when she was weighed on day four, and being hooked up to an industrial breast pump so my ‘output’ could be ‘measured’ and ‘charted’.


Listening to my husband remonstrate with the paediatrician about the breast pump, and being granted twenty-four hours to feed from my breast to get her weight-gain back on track.


Feeling devastated when she didn’t appear to have gained any weight the next day, until my husband pointed out the scales were not zeroed properly. Then feeling vindicated when they showed that she had gained more weight than was expected.


Wanting desperately to get out of the hospital and feeling jealous of the everyday people I could hear talking and laughing outside my window.


Being granted permission to leave, after yet more checks, and a temperature scare - it had momentarily dipped, and they wouldn’t let us leave until she was nice and warm and ‘normal’ again.


Buckling her into the taxi on a beautiful blue sunny afternoon for her first trip into the outside world after six days that felt like forever, and feeling every bump and corner of that journey home.


Settling her down to sleep in our room and feeling both more normal and more petrified than ever.


Holding her head up for her.


Hearing her snuffly breathing in the night, which my mother thought would bother us. It didn’t. Instead, I felt reassured that she had lived through another twenty-four hours.


Worrying that she wasn’t feeding every two to four hours like she was meant to.


Hoping that she was getting enough food.


Sleeping when she slept.


Moving her around the house - from bedroom to living room and back again - in her bassinet on wheels.


Watching her sleep, which she did a lot.


Having visitors.


Being congratulated.


Drinking kiwi crush and dreading going to the toilet.


Bleeding.


Being threatened by the Department of Internal Affairs - with one such letter being dated 26 December - for not registering her birth the split-second after she had been born.


Feeling her sleep on my chest.


Trying to carry her in a sling, freaking out when it seemed like she might get squashed, and realising that baby-wearing wasn’t for me.


Looking at her fists curled up above her head in triumph as she slept.


Mentally running through everything from starting solids, to toilet-training, to learning to drive, to moving out of home, and feeling stressed.


Realising, finally, that all she wanted for now was food and sleep, and everything else would happen in its own time.


I could go on, but I wouldn’t want to bore you. And I’ve barely scratched the surface of her first few days.


I’ve been asked a lot in the last year whether or not I am enjoying motherhood. It’s a question I don’t really know how to answer, and am probably, knowing me, way overthinking. But I can’t quite reconcile ‘enjoyment’ with motherhood, in the way I might enjoy a movie, or a nice chilled glass of sauvignon blanc (both of which I dimly recollect from the distant past). My experience of motherhood so far has been both less and so much more than mere enjoyment. It has fundamentally challenged me on every level: physical, for sure, emotional, definitely, and even intellectual. I’m still not sure of so many things - how I will juggle work and childcare being the most pressing - and I’m starting to question some of the things that I thought I fundamentally believed - like whether I should go back to work at all.


Some new parents momentarily feel envious or dismissive of people without children. But I don’t. I just feel like they’re at a different place in their lives, and they should treasure what they are experiencing in the here and now. If motherhood has taught me nothing else, it is to focus on the present. The future will work itself out in good time.


More than anything else, I feel transformed. For better or worse, in sickness and in health, life will never be the same again. I will never be the same again. And learning who I am now, as she learns who she is full-stop, is a shared journey that I can’t imagine not taking. Am I enjoying it? No, I’m cherishing it. And missing each moment as they pass by too quickly, with only photos to look back on to try and re-capture them.


Saturday, November 12, 2011

'I'm pregnant, now what can I eat ...?'

Once my initial doctor had managed to get past the automotive metaphors, and started to engage a little more with me as a pregnant woman rather than a sprained ankle attached to a sportsperson, he started giving me the hard word on what I should and shouldn’t eat. His nurse, who was only marginally warmer than he was - at least she congratulated us - handed me an envelope full of guidelines and advertisements dressed up as information to wade through on the subject of good nutrition in pregnancy. There was specific information on the risks associated with certain foods.


With a heavy heart, I had already forsworn sushi. Not being a meat-eater and rarely having the opportunity to eat shellfish (which was also banished), I had thought I was pretty much OK with everything else. So it was with an even heavier heart, that I read through the list. Soft cheeses were out, even if pasturised, as were eggs with runny yolks (bye bye eggs benedict, it was nice knowing you). Any deli food, including salads, which had been standing rather than freshly cooked was off the menu. My work lunch options were starting to narrow alarmingly. As I read further, I was surprised to note that hummus - made from cooked chickpeas, pounded sesame seeds, lemon juice, garlic and olive oil - was out too. I realise it is about risk rather than intrinsic harmfulness, but is it really possible to catch listeria from the humble chickpea? Then I thought it must be the anaemic kind that you buy at the supermarket, and momentarily cheered myself with the thought that this was the moment to start making it myself. Not so, according to the food police, even the home-made variety was suspect.


At this point, I started to panic. What on earth was I going to eat? I couldn’t just live on biscuits (which, being thoroughly cooked, were surprisingly OK), rock-hard scrambled eggs and rice for nine months. Not to worry, however. The morning sickness soon kicked in with a vengeance and I was lucky if I could keep down some plain pasta and peas.


Little did I realise that this was the first in a slew of attempts to police my body and appetites in the guise of being ‘for the good of the baby.’ Given that most pregnant women are concerned for the health of their unborn child, what is particularly insidious about this long list of dos and don’ts is that it guilt-trips women into policing themselves and each other. How shocking is it, for example, to see a pregnant woman having a sip of wine, and God forbid, having a tasty slice of brie with it? You can practically hear the CYFS hotline number being punched into a hundred mobile phones.


But it doesn’t end there. Far from it. I have an acquaintance who is determined to breastfeed for as long as possible till her child is possibly even three or four, not, apparently, because she wants to (though I presume she does), but because the ‘World Health Organisation recommends it’. The WHO actually states:


Exclusive breastfeeding is recommended up to 6 months of age, with continued breastfeeding along with appropriate complementary foods up to two years of age or beyond (my emphasis).

So it’s hardly an edict. It seems a little over the top to continue breastfeeding because some suits in Geneva recommend it (and that’s not exactly what they say, in any case). I note that it is the World Health Organisation too: they offer best practice advice to mothers all over the world, not just those in wealthy nations. So it’s probably preferable to continue breastfeeding in places where the alternatives are to drink formula or powdered milk made with unsafe water (hang your head in shame, NestlĂ©) resulting in disease and death.

In New Zealand, we have the luxury of not having to make that ‘choice’. Given that it’s not such a life or death situation, I can’t help but feel that the food police and the breastfeeding zealots are part and parcel of the same thing: the control of women’s bodies and appetites. Of course, some expectant mothers do eat soft cheese, hummus and have the odd cheeky glass of wine, probably with the added frisson of doing something they shouldn’t. A bit like having a piece of cake when you’re meant to be on a diet: a transgression against the regime of disciplining the body into society’s expectations of it. Only, pregnant women aren’t meant to diet. So it seems that food dos and don’ts offer a replacement regime to which women should either rigidly stick or from which they guiltily fall off the wagon. It seems that there’s no escape from the beauty myth.

Of course, it is also tied up with perfect mother syndrome. Falling into line with the prevailing wisdom on appropriate nutrition for you while pregnant, or for the baby once it is born, is a way of ensuring that you are doing the right thing, even while others may not. That it’s also submitting to someone else’s idea of how you should run your life might not even enter the frame.

I have to confess that I was one of the more scrupulous pregnant women: I sadly passed the sushi counter sniffing the air like a melancholic puppy, passed on the blue cheese and camembert at work functions, and didn’t even think about wine, let alone hummus, that horror of horrors. I even consulted a book called I’m Pregnant, Now What Do I Eat?

In retrospect, I am a little surprised at my docility. At the time, however, I felt apprehensive. I was worried that something I might do, whether inadvertent or intentional would harm the baby. Of course, there are some risks, but, as I am increasingly finding, babies are more resilient than we are led to believe. Mothers I know who did eat hummus and soft cheese while pregnant delivered healthy babies, with no sign yet of their having suffered through exposure to chickpeas and processed milk in utero. So is it the baby we are protecting by being so vigilant or dominant cultural values that primarily define women according to their bodies?


Monday, November 7, 2011

'i can honestly say it wasn't painful'

Nearly a year ago, I went to ante-natal classes that focussed on natural birth and how to prepare for it. While there were many positives about this class - not least the wonderful women who I met through it - there were also some moments that I found a little difficult to process. I won’t go into them all here, but one that has stayed with me occurred during the class on the stages of labour.


We were met at the start of that evening’s class by the affirmation ‘every contraction brings my baby closer to me’ written on a large piece of cardboard. ‘O ... K,’ I thought to myself, wondering what on earth we were in for. ‘I guess that’s true ...’ My husband and I took our seats, and listened to a midwife go through the various stages of labour. After this, the course facilitators then spoke about their own birth experiences. It was during these narratives that one of the course facilitators - who, incidentally, ended up having an emergency caesarean - said of her labour ‘I can honestly say it wasn’t painful.’ My first thought was, ‘really?’ and ‘is that even possible?’ We had talked somewhat during the class about productive pain - the kind that brings your baby closer to you - and I was trying to psyche myself into managing this with only some combs, a swissball and a hot water bottle for help. And yet here was one of the facilitators saying that it honestly wasn’t painful. What to believe?


I should add that this facilitator was not making a general claim. She didn’t say labour is not painful, or that she was talking about anything other than her own experience. But, given that was the case, I was left wondering why she said that to us at all. What was to be gained by telling us her labour wasn’t painful? Were we meant to feel envious? Hope that our labours would be similarly blessed? Feel that if we admitted it was pain almost beyond belief that we were letting the side down?


Perhaps there are some lucky women whose labour isn’t painful (and not just the ones with epidurals), but I strongly suspect for most women that natural childbirth is intensely painful. In fact, when I mentioned this exchange to my midwife - a proponent of natural childbirth, but not one to sugar-coat - she said firmly ‘it’s painful.’ Or, in other words, ‘don’t kid yourself, love - you’re in for quite an ordeal'. Her view was that ‘women can do it,’ especially with the assistance of a good, supportive midwife.


I’m aware that some women don’t like to use the language of pain - like ‘contractions’ - when discussing childbirth. Instead, they refer to ‘rushes’ (sidenote: this always confuses me somewhat, as it makes me think of pregnant women getting high on amyl nitrate or something ). I acknowledge that it certainly helps to be in a positive frame of mind when giving birth, and if this is a way that some women get into that frame of mind, well, more power to them. I just question the wisdom of foisting that on to unsuspecting expectant mothers.


It’s about this point that the Kate Figeses and Eleanor Blacks would probably start exhorting the facilitator to ‘tell the truth’ about childbirth. But, again, I’m not sure that truth is the issue. The facilitator may well have been as honest as she claimed about her own experience. I have no way of knowing that. And, as I have discussed before, women’s embodied experiences are not the same and can’t be reduced to one monolithic narrative. Positive experiences that go as mothers planned, home births in specially-bought yurts, and even orgasmic births can and do happen.


But I can’t help but feel that this unthinking comment, made not just by anyone, but by the facilitator of an ante-natal class, was in some ways setting us up for failure. By that I mean that it planted the seed (no pun intended) that labour might not be painful. That if we did experience pain at the limits of our capacity to endure it, we were somehow not doing it right, were not being brave enough, would send other expectant mothers careering into the arms of doctors with big needles. That’s a lot of unconscious baggage to be loading up on when you’re about to enter into one of the most transformative experiences of your life.


On the flipside, there are those who seem to think that the more pain you experience, the more noble your sacrifice. In this view, suffering is an essential part of the process, recalling God’s alleged punishment to Eve once she was expelled from the Garden of Eden that ‘in sorrow, she would bring forth children’ (I say ‘alleged’ because some feminist Bible scholars have argued that this is a mistranslation of the original texts. But I digress.) If we follow this thought to its conclusion, then it’s almost as if you can’t properly belong to the mummy club, or really know what it means to love your child, unless you’ve been ripped to shreds.


Both narratives position women as masochists, and buy into hegemonic notions that women are only defined by their bodies. There is nothing noble about pain and suffering, which will, more than likely, be a defining feature of labour and birth. It doesn’t make you a better mother to have suffered. It doesn’t make you a worse mother to admit that it was painful either.


My own experience was, in the end, comparatively pain-free. Because my labour didn’t progress, and my waters had broken several hours earlier, I was considered to have moved into an ‘abnormal’ labour. After attempting to ride through the artificially-induced contractions, and still remaining at one centimetre dilated after what felt like forever, even my midwife was suggesting I should have an epidural. I did have one, and ended up spending a pleasant day high as a kite, eating sandwiches with my husband and and listening to jazz. Like the course facilitator, I can honestly say that my labour wasn’t painful. As for what came afterwards, however, well that’s another story ...

Friday, November 4, 2011

review: Making Babies

I like books. My baby does too: Where Is Baby’s Belly-Button? and the collected works of Spot have long been favourites of hers. Such is her enjoyment of books that she even allowed me to read without interruption during her marathon 90-minute breastfeeding sessions. I’ve even managed to keep the reading up - though at a much reduced pace - as she has continued to grow, and become much less malleable to my will. This liking of books is not completely random - I do have a point and I’m getting to it.


There are many, many books around on the subject of pregnancy and childbirth, which I would’ve thought I would devour when my time came. Yet I felt strangely uninterested in reading them while I was pregnant. I dipped into things like What to Expect When You’re Expecting if I needed an answer to a specific question, or just wanted to check in as to what kind of fruit the baby had turned into that month. But I hardly read any of the many books on offer cover to cover.


From this distance, it reads kinda like denial, and maybe it was, in a way. But throughout most of my pregnancy, I had a strange sense of calm and an unusually upbeat frame of mind. On some level, I seemed to have intuited that reading a lot about all the many things that could go wrong during pregnancy and birth - and encylopaedic books like What to Expect ... usually cover everything, no matter how rare - would just be a massive downer. Of course, I didn’t give up reading all together: I decided that I would collect all of Agatha Christie’s murder mysteries - my literary equivalent of comfort food - and read them all again for about the twentieth time. Mercifully, I managed to find out who murdered Roger Ackroyd before I went into labour.


This long preface about my pregnancy reading habits is by way of introducing novelist Anne Enright’s essay collection - is that what it is? - Making Babies: Stumbling into Motherhood. This is one of the few books that I did read on the subject - and read from beginning to end - while I was pregnant. I think the reason that it proved an exception to the ‘everything you needed to know from ectopic pregnancy to pre-eclampsia’ type of book is that it was a) witty, b) personal and c) made no claims to be talking about every woman’s experience. I was beguiled from the first sentence of ‘Breeding’: ‘Growing up in Ireland, we didn’t need aliens - we already had a race of higher beings to gaze deep into our eyes and force us to have babies against our will: we called them priests (p 5).’ How could I not be won over by a first essay on the parallels between pregnancy and alien abductions?


Each piece is a little different. ‘Nine Months’, for example, mimics the What to Expect ... month-by-month narrative, and lyrically details the first nine months of her baby’s life. She tells us what her baby’s stage of development is that month, paralleled with her own ‘regression’. In the eighth month:


The baby is in flying form, lying on her back and just laughing and kicking for no reason. I don’t know what she is laughing at. Is this a memory? Is she imagining, for the first time, tickles, even though there are no tickles there?

She may be the only truly happy person on the planet. I look at her and hope she isn’t bonkers. (p 62)


‘Babies: A Breeder’s Guide’ contains several mini-topics: idiosyncratic thoughts on everything from God - ‘all religions ... prize and praise the figure of the mother ... which makes up, in a way for being skipped in shop queues and looking like a heap‘ - to Buggies - ‘pushing a buggy makes you look like you’re on the way to the methadone clinic’ - to Poo - ‘often, when a mother is whispering to her baby, she is whispering about shit’. (pp 111-35)


Looking at the comments on the back of the book, Enright has received praise for her ‘truth-telling’, giving the ‘true facts’ and being an ‘effective contraceptive’ (presumably because of that truth-telling). While these commentators may be picking up on the same intimate tone to which I responded, or the many pithy turns of phrase, these comments also seem to echo the obsession with ‘truth-telling’ that marks many other books about pregnancy and birth. I should also add to my growing list that I am currently reading feminist Naomi Wolf’s Misconceptions at the moment, and she is another ‘truth-teller’. I’m wondering why we need so many truth-tellers when it seems like every new mother with a pen is telling it like it is.


But I digress. Back to the book at hand. While Enright’s recounting of the birth of her first child sounds horrific, and the maternity care she experienced somewhat appalling, it strangely didn’t act as a downer in the way that those other ‘truth-telling’ books seemed to threaten. Part of the reason is because it wasn’t patronising, in that she never implied that because something was a certain way for her, then it would be like that for anyone else. I wouldn’t go so far as to say it was uplifting, but it felt considered, and, in a strange way, intimate. By that I mean, it felt almost a privilege to have someone share such a personal experience and give a ‘warts and all’ account of it. Like a friend who trusts you enough to tell you something that they’ve never told anybody else. Except, of course, she had told anyone who cared to read the book.


I say ‘account’ deliberately. These pieces may have been crafted in snatched moments while her baby was asleep, but they are most definitely ‘crafted’ narratives in the way that her short stories, in particular, are. Perhaps what sets this book apart, then, is that it pays tribute to the singularity of Enright’s embodied experience. The tender descriptions of her daughter’s development are not those that another mother could, would or should give. And, in my view, the book seems to be just as much about exploring how to write a new life - both hers and the baby’s - as well as how to live it. The mix of styles offers a patch-work approach that doesn’t attempt to represent the totality of pregnancy, birth and parenthood. In recognising the limits of representation, but also pushing those limits, Enright doesn’t so much ‘tell the truth’, as write herself into being in the subject position of new mother.