'why didn't anyone tell me it would be like this?'

Over and over in my reading of personal reflections on birth and motherhood so far, I've noted a tone of surprise, bordering in some cases on outrage: why didn’t anyone tell me it would be like this? Kate Figes in Life After Birth, for example, ruefully admits that she ‘didn’t realise that pregnancy and childbirth place immense strain on a great deal more than just the abdomen and genitals ... how difficult it would be even to walk in the days after giving birth’ (7)

Following hard on the heels of surprise in such books, comes a feeling of being let down: by other women, for not telling us what it would really be like; by ante-natal groups, who skirt around what happens immediately after the birth; and sometimes even by second-wave feminism, which dared to suggest women could have it all.

Judging from the new mothers that I’ve talked to over the last year and a bit, this is not solely the preserve of writers. Women are variously surprised by the severity of the pain, the loss of identity, the loss of independence and even by not feeling attached to their new babies. In the various groups I attended just after my baby’s birth, we compulsively swapped birth stories - these stories variously conveyed shock, sometimes anger, and sometimes pleasure at the birth having gone more or less as planned. I remember one new mother saying in a still-bewildered voice, ‘it really hurt - why didn’t anyone say how much it would hurt?’

My own sense of surprise was primarily physical. On one occasion, I boldly set off for a walk in the park, husband and baby in tow, after I had been out of hospital for two weeks. After a few metres of slow walking on flat ground, I suddenly wilted, feeling as if all the energy had drained out my body. But I was determined that everything was OK, so I kept right on walking. After a few more metres, I started to feel like I was being stabbed with every step. And yet, I still claimed that I was fine, albeit through gritted teeth. When a bench came into view around the corner, I did, however, make a beeline for it and sat there trying not to move until we went home.

Cue a distraught phonecall to my midwife telling her about my trials: ‘how long will it be before I’m back to normal?’ I wailed. She sounded surprised: ‘I wouldn’t even expect someone who’d had a normal birth to be going for long walks in the park at this stage. You have to take it easy. Just a gentle walk for about five to ten minutes until you feel stronger.’ ‘Oh,’ I said. ‘I didn’t know.’ And I really didn’t. Like Figes, I didn’t realise how much of a physical toll childbirth takes (and not on the obvious parts), and when you throw in a traumatic birth or surgery too, it takes that much longer to reach a stage where you can do most of the regular things you used to do - getting out of a low chair, walking to the shops, doing the vacuuming - without really thinking about them.

Perhaps it is that sense of no longer calling the shots in your own life. Perhaps it is at least partially buying into the sentimentality that surrounds babies and children in which having a newborn is like living in an Anne Geddes calendar. Perhaps it is over-estimating how much of a panacea modern medicine and labour-saving devices can be to this most primal of experiences.

Geraldine Beddell in her review of Misconceptions for The Observer comments:

The generation that is now encountering pregnancy and new motherhood was unashamedly educated for work, equality and autonomy. Nothing in their training or understanding of themselves has prepared them for the chaos of babies, or for the way in which pregnancy, birth and infants render them weak. For the first time, young women are discovering that they are not, in fact, in control. Individuals who have previously given orders, or travelled the world alone, now find they are unable to determine what time they have a bath or get dressed. Inevitably, this throws into question formerly automatic assumptions about identity, and alters - perhaps temporarily, perhaps permanently - their take on the world.

Even though I tried, I couldn’t will myself back into physical health post-birth, even though I pushed myself on several occasions after that first walk in the park. I live on a hill and walked down a little further every day, trying to bear the smarting I felt as I walked back up, in order to convince myself I was better than I felt.

Even though I wouldn’t have dreamed of asking him to take extra leave, I was extremely grateful and relieved when my husband took dependency leave on top of his two weeks’ parental leave to look after me and the baby, while I recovered enough to at least get out of a chair without significant pain.

Even though I was pleased that I was able to breastfeed with relatively few problems, I wasn’t quite prepared to have a baby suctioned onto me for hours at a time, every few hours at any time of the day or night. And to not only feel like, but be described as, a dairy-cow.

Even though I am increasingly enjoying time spent with my baby, I miss the sense of achievement, independence and autonomy that comes with having a paid job.

After a year and a bit, I feel like I’m finally returning to ‘normal’ again, after having my world turned upside down. Aside from the baby, there are things for which to be grateful: being alive and still having a womb, for starters. And if - and, at this stage, it’s still a pretty big if - we do it all over again, I’ll have a better idea of what to expect.

But, all the same, why didn’t anyone tell me it would be like this?

P. S. I’m going on holiday for two weeks, so will be in internet-hiatus for a wee while. I’ll be back in early February.

review: The Way We Really Are

I couldn’t help thinking of Barbra Streisand (‘memories, like the corners of my mind...’) when I saw the title of this book by family historian Stephanie Coontz, and even more so when I learned that its predecessor was called The Way We Never Were. In some ways, it’s an apt reference point, as Coontz deals to memories and nostalgia for the so-called traditional family.

After having debunked the myth of the historical prevalence of the traditional nuclear male breadwinner / female homemaker family in her first book, published in 1992 in response to the ‘return to family values’ movement that dominated the political agenda around the 1992 US elections, Coontz turns her focus to the present. She was inspired to write this follow-up, published five years later, on the back of her experiences and encounters promoting the first book. While on lecture tours, talk shows and radio chat shows, she found that many people were asking her what they could put in the place of the myths and illusions about the family that she had shattered in her first book.

So the impetus for this book are the questions: are the only lessons from history negative? Isn’t there anything positive families can learn from history and sociology? (3). Coontz thinks that ‘history and social science do have concrete applications and positive lessons for people concerned about what is happening with today’s families.’ (3) It’s refreshing to read a mainstream book by a historian that not only actively engages with the political climate and makes no apologies for doing so, but draws scrupulously on the available historical research to take a long view of cultural, economic and social trends before making pronouncements (a lesson that others, such as David Starkey, could learn before pronouncing on matters in which they have little expertise). Coontz boldly avoids getting into any debate about whether or not she is - gasp! - engaging in ‘presentism’ and instead encourages people to take the long view and look beyond the authority of the individual anecdote.

I was impressed by many things about this book that still, despite the specific political and historical circumstances in which it was written, have a resonance today. First of all, it centres its discussion of family dynamics around power, specifically ‘situated social power’ (18-9) and addresses the inequality between partners in a relationship. But it doesn’t stop at the individual or couple level, and looks to historical trends to de-personalise the debate on the family.

Coontz looks back to the pre-industrial past, as Kate Figes did in Life After Birth, to argue that apart from a small period for middle-class women in the 1950s and 1960s, mothers have traditionally worked. What had irritated me about Figes’ account was that she overlooked the fact that much of women’s work was done in the home, whether it was farm-work or piece-work. Coontz does not gloss over this, but she also raises the equally important point that, in the predominantly agrarian mode of production, mothers not only worked, but fathers played more of a domestic role and were much more involved in child-rearing (perhaps not in ways that we might approve of today, but involved nonetheless).

Coontz is realist enough to know, however, that you can’t turn back the clock on industrialisation. For better or worse, since the early nineteenth century, workplaces have been located outside the home, and negotiating how to get working families to work (in both senses of the word) is dependent on quality childcare arrangements and much greater flexibility in the workplace. Both of these also involve men taking on more of domestic role, so working mothers are not saddled with ‘the second shift’ when they get home.

Elsewhere, she addresses the nostalgia for the 1950s and asks what it is that family values’ advocates find so seductive about this era. At the outset, she notes that this is primarily a white nostalgia: in surveys comparing the responses of white and African-Americans, for example, the former rated the 1950s most positively, followed by the 1960s, while the latter group, rated any other decade including the 1970s and 1980s more highly. It is also, of course, a middle-class nostalgia, and what is more, a nostalgia primarily for those from homes that didn’t suffer the effects of alcoholism or abuse.

Focussing on that fortunate group, she argues that what is so attractive about the 1950s is that, despite the fact that poverty levels were actually higher than in the mid-1990s, they were falling rather than rising, and there were fewer extremes of wealth co-existing side by side. Other factors included the existence of veterans’ benefits, building up of Social Security, mandated rises in the minimum wage, public works spending and the reorganisation of home financing. (40-1) She concludes that ‘politicians are practising a double standard when they tell us to return to the family forms of the 1950s, while they do nothing to restore the jobs programmes and family subsidies of that era, the limits on corporate relocation and financial wheeling-dealing, the much higher share of taxes paid by corporations then, the availability of union jobs for non-college youth and the subsidies for higher education (43). She also cites research that argues that the clawing-back of these programmes beginning in the 1970s may well have been an unforseen consequence of 1950s’ family values and the baby-boom.

Coontz then moves on to argue that working mothers are here to stay, largely as a result of long-term economic and social trends which mean that most families simply can’t afford to do without two working parents. She also argues, compellingly, for the institutionalisation of divorce, as well as re-marriage. What she means by this is the social recognition that divorce is here to stay, with the attendant development of norms to ensure that the severance of a marital union causes as little damage to the family members - particularly children - as possible. Similarly for re-marriage, clearer norms and expectations of the role of new step-parents would ease adjustment and provide for more enduring relationships (108)

Single-parent families, often the butt of conservative ‘family values’ rhetoric and the target of welfare-to-work initiatives (still, unfortunately, an ongoing trend), are also shown to be neither the result of increased permissiveness nor increased welfare in the 1960s and 1970s. Instead, Coontz shows that crime and deliquency figures, which disproportionately include children from single-parent families, are, in fact, more closely informed by class and economic deprivation (i.e. single parenthood in these figures is an effect rather than cause). Drawing on sociological research, she argues that in many cases there are benefits for single-parent families, particularly those with access to wider networks of family and friends, in terms of emotional maturity and school results.

After having exhaustively taken apart the rhetoric of family values conservatives - and showing that, indeed, it is primarily rhetoric - Coontz moves on to discuss solutions. She argues that for all kinds of families, cultural norms need to shift: to adapt to the diversity of families (a simple example about the way different homework assignments benefit the arrangements of different family types is instructive), moving forward instead of looking back to ‘the way we never were’ (I’m hearing Streisand again) to develop norms, policies and supports for the array of family types we have now, and working to remove the long-term causes of child poverty.

I guess that requires a lot more commitment than just scapegoating single parents, gay and lesbian parents, and working mothers.

thanks for the mammaries

The last time I breastfed my daughter was about 6.25 pm on 3 December 2011.

She was twelve and a half months old, and she fed for a mere five minutes without much enthusiasm. ‘This’, I thought to myself, hardly daring to believe it, ‘is it.’ After a year of breastfeeding, she had more or less decided for herself that she no longer needed it. And so I decided to dispense with this evening feed the next day, and see how she coped.

She didn’t seem to miss it at all.

And, to be honest, neither did I.

While I was glad that I was able to breastfeed her, and in the blurry days following her birth there was some concern that I might not be able to, there’s no denying it can be a chore. As my midwife told me while I was still pregnant, the main thing to know about breastfeeding is that you will be doing it A LOT.

She wasn’t kidding.

In order to try and give ourselves the best shot at successful breastfeeding, my husband and I had gone to classes (it could be our motto: when in doubt, go back to school!). Donning a pair of giant rubber breasts, one of the lactation consultants at the local hospital ran two morning sessions to teach expectant mothers how to perform this ‘natural’ process. Presumably, these were lessons that were once passed on by midwives or other female kin, but are now having to be re-learned.

In any case, there was much useful information amongst the knitted breasts, scary baby dolls and cringeworthy ice-breaker games (sample: the group was split into men and women and each group had to come up with as many synonyms for ‘breast’ as possible. I did not contribute). We learned that babies’ feeding cycles vary, and they can feed anywhere between every two and four hours (my baby, however, sometimes went as long as five or six hours, prompting us to be concerned that she might lose weight again); that babies can feed for between 5 and 45 minutes a side (my baby fed for forty minutes in total - at a short session - and up to an hour and a half - at a long one); and babies have a range of non-verbal cues that they use to tell their mother that they need to feed before they resort to crying (suckling motions with their mouth, head-butting and so on). Using a newly-purchased soft bear - I refused to buy a scary baby doll - we practised how to latch on and tried not to feel ridiculous.

Of course, all this useful information went out the window as my anaesthetic wore off, and I woke up in a haze of powerful painkillers with a small red and bruised bundle to feed. Hospital midwives turned me over and put her to my breast, and even had to position her to latch on. Fortunately, she seemed to know what to do when she was pointed in the right direction. Once I had recovered my senses somewhat, I found the helpful breastfeeding chart that was monitoring our progress: we were rated by letter as to our performance: she was doing well in the ‘time spent feeding’ category; I was scoring abysmally for independent latching on. ‘Must do better,’ I thought to myself, strangely feeling neither humiliated or angry. It must’ve been the drugs.

Once I was released back into the wild and we took the baby home, my days, as my midwife promised, were filled with breastfeeding. Aside from a couple of minor blocked ducts, I was fortunately spared some of the more gruesome side-effects of breastfeeding: mastitis, cracked nipples, painful breasts. Some mothers I know went through considerable personal trial and discomfort to successfully breastfeed their babies. It maybe be natural, but it often doesn’t come naturally.

Rachel Cusk pithily summarises her breastfeeding attempts:

The word ‘natural’ appears in a sort of cartoon bubble in my head. I do not, it is true, feel entirely natural. I feel as though someone is sucking my breast in public. (A Life’s Work, p 95)

And Naomi Wolf describes the sheer physicality of breastfeeding:

When our daughter nursed it was as rough-and-tumble, as purely animal an experience as a human being can have. Some unfathomable instinct hardwired into her sent her into a rapid panting, her small heart racing, when her face with its buttery skin came near the nipple. Guided - who can say? by the scent of milk, or perhaps the sight of the darker areola at the outer field of her primitive vision, she would suddenly go into a small frenzy, shaking her head back and forth, quickly, desperately, searching with her whole face for the nipple brushing against her mouth. when the nipple came in contact with her lips, she would lunge onto it for all the world like a cat pouncing on a mouse. her concentration - no, let’s face it, her savagery - was so acute that she leapt with the force of her whole small body, emitting a soft guttural growl. (Misconceptions, p 227)

It is most definitely an odd experience to get used to, particularly if you like your personal space. Cusk describes these early moments of motherhood as creating a new unit of being called the ‘motherbaby’:

In this moment, I now realise that a person exists who is me, but who is not confined to my body. ... What she needs and wants will vie with, and often take priority over, what I need and want for the forseeable future. (A Life’s Work, p 95)

This formulation reminded me of psychoanalyst Julia Kristeva’s account of the abject. Breast milk, like blood, comes from within the body, transgressing the boundary between inside and outside. It nourishes a new body, that was once part of the mother too, but is now outside it. The relay of exchanges of what is internal and external between a new, nursing mother and her baby is a process of abjection, initiating the process of separation that will eventually enable a child to become a discrete subject of his or her own.

I’m not sure how formula-feeding fits in with a psychoanalytic account, however.

Certainly, formula-feeding offers more flexibility in childcare than exclusive breastfeeding does (unless you get the hang of expressing, which I never did). Some, such as Elizabeth Badinter, argue that this flexibility is crucial for women’s advancement. Others argue that breastfeeding is the best possible start that you can give your baby, and, even if you only breastfeed for a short time, there will be benefits.

I’m glad I did my time as a ‘motherbaby’, but I am equally glad it is over. I’m enjoying my baby more and more as she becomes a discrete and separate person - with a fondness for cow’s milk - all of her own.

review: A Life's Work

Rachel Cusk is a Novelist with a capital N.

I can tell this because in her memoir A Life’s Work: On Becoming a Mother (2001) she intersperses moments of genuine insight with dreadfully overwritten prose. Here’s a sample:

I long for my child, long for her as a sort of double, a tiny pilot boat winging young and certain up the channel ahead of me, guiding the blind, clumsy weight of me through. (211)

In my humble opinion, the only thing blind and clumsy about this passage is its use of metaphor. But I’m being merely subjective on aesthetic grounds: others may find narrative like this moving; for me, the only thing moving is my stomach.

More interesting to me were Cusk’s confidences on the vexations and trials of new motherhood: the shock of becoming an unequal partner, the awkwardness of playgroups, and the decidedly un-natural feeling of ‘natural’ processes such as breastfeeding. Every so often, I thought she really crystallised a feeling or an experience that I shared. Like Cusk, I too chafe somewhat at the invisible bonds of motherhood, and sometimes wish for the freedom to just to do my own thing (even if that thing is nothing much at all). Like Cusk, I feel somewhat irritated by responses to this feeling along the lines of ‘yes, but look at what a wonderful baby you have!‘ (as if that was the problem: you can love your child, but still feel constrained by the constant responsibility of looking after them). Here is how Cusk summarises the problem:

Months after the birth I still found myself affronted and incredulous ... by the fact that I could no longer sleep in or watch a film or spend a Saturday morning reading ... The loss of these things seemed a high price to pay for the privilege of motherhood; and though much was given back to me in the form of a daughter it was not payment in kind nor even in a different coin, was not in fact recompense of any sort. My loss and my gain were unrelated, were calculated without the aim of some final, ultimate balance. (144-45)

Of course, in the great scheme of things, losing sleep-ins is not really a huge loss (as compared to, say, the loss of a home, job or life), but it is true that motherhood means that your time is not really your own, unless the baby is asleep or with trusted carers. What I found perceptive about this passage was the idea of loss and gain being unrelated, that they don’t balance out. This formulation highlights that while much is gained that is valued and important - a child, a new experience, new insights and so on - much is also lost - a former self, a former way of life, independence, a career - that is also of value. And it should be okay to mourn that, and cherish its significance. Not to do so, in my view, risks trapping women in the myth of sentimentalised motherhood, and denigrating the experience of women who don’t become mothers.

Cusk gestures elsewhere to broader issues of sexual inequality and motherhood. She comments that ‘childbirth and motherhood are the anvil upon which sexual inequality was forged’ (8) and ‘the biological destiny of women remains standing amidst the ruins of their inequality’ (19) (sidenote: ‘ruins of their inequality’? really?) But these remain cursory gestures at best. Cusk’s persona in this memoir may be ill-at-ease with the narrative of motherhood pre-constructed for her, but her critique remains resolutely at the level of the individual. Rather than take Arminatta Forna’s approach - and that of poet Adrienne Rich, before her - of critiquing the myth and institution of motherhood, Cusk only detours from her anecdotal approach to reconsider literary works such as D H Lawrence’s The Rainbow and Edith Wharton’s The House of Mirth from her new perspective.

Not that there’s anything wrong with taking an idiosyncratic approach: Anne Enright does that too in the fantastic Making Babies. Where Enright and Cusk differ, however, is that Enright does not attempt to offer ‘the truth’ of her individual experience (and she avoids the purple prose too). Enright holds the reader at a distance even as she delves into her most personal experiences. She also avoids the troubling habit that Cusk has of resorting to imperialist and xenophobic metaphors to explain her experiences: Cusk’s newborn baby is likened to ‘a colony’ (95), and her affront at her loss of independence is seen as the result of ‘some foreign and despicable justice’ (144). Similarly, Cusk’s sardonic tales of tried-and-found-wanting babysitters from Brazil, Spain and Slovenia (143-58), appear oblivious to the national, ethnic and class dimensions of the relationship, and appear to position the reader as sharing her privileged exasperation.

This reader didn’t.

Fortunately, a copy of Rich’s Of Woman Born (1972) has arrived for me at the local library. Perhaps that will offer both the personal and political account of motherhood that Cusk so conspicuously lacks.

'nothing changes on new year's day'

Another year, another post.

This will only be a brief ‘salut!’ to greet the New Year and try and re-mould my brain into some semblance of functionality. Christmas came and went, as did New Year. Hamley’s toystore in London stopped gendering its floors. There were more aftershocks in Christchurch, newspaper tales of dying mothers briefly gave way to stories about birthing mothers, specifically the first babies of the new year, and the occasional bit of good weather. There was overeating and the odd night out, year in review articles and a toddler who started walking.

A lot can happen in two weeks.

Before I marshall my thoughts and start tackling that stack of freshly-accumulated reading material, I’d like to take this opportunity to make some resolutions about forthcoming blog posts in honour of the new(ish) year:

1. I’ll likely be blogging on such topics as ‘motherbaby’, the reconfiguration of public and private, truth and experience, the language of failure and of choice ... you know, the fun stuff.

2. I’ll be reviewing some of my holiday reading and searching out new resources (I’ve just found a great-looking website for the mothers movement, for example).

3. I’ll also be thinking about some changes in my own mothering life: no longer breastfeeding, finding childcare, and returning to work.

4. And, courtesy of Myers-Briggs psychometric type indicators and Janet P. Penley, I’ll be working out my Motherstyle and solving all my problems! (actually, not so sure about that last one...)

Of course, I hope to go better with these than my other resolutions (um, day four of the new year and still have not done any particular exercise...)

So, Happy New Year and I’ll be back soon.