'Hello Wembley!'

In September last year my baby was nine months old. We had just come through a rough patch with her waking in the night. I had more or less physically recovered from the birth and was starting to adjust to daily life with a baby. And it was starting to dawn on me that a part of my former life was missing, namely, having my own interests and activities. Last September, I realised that I needed to do something for myself each day. Otherwise, I could go crazy.

Two of the things I liked best to do - reading and writing - were not ideally done with a baby around. Unless of course I was content to read and re-read the collected works of Spot. So I had to find something else to pass the time. That was then I decided to learn to play the guitar. Actually learn it this time, that is. I had tried on two previous occasions to learn it and, after a burst of initial enthusiasm, had quickly let it slip. This time was going to be different. Not least because, as my husband commented, if I was keen for my daughter to learn an instrument in the future, then having had me, rather than just him, role-model that, might help. The gauntlet had been thrown down.

It seemed the perfect solution. I already owned a guitar, a legacy of the last time that I had tried to learn it. I could keep one eye on the fret board and one eye on a crawling baby, as I tried to manipulate my fingers into the right chord shapes. My baby seemed to approve of this plan, and graciously allowed me up to 45 minutes a day to make strange noises with the funny-shaped object. She also liked to crawl over and pat it, leaving trails of smudged tiny prints in her wake. With the guitar sitting up on its base, she’d also happily pluck at the strings and try to eat the plectrum.

Encouraged by her delight at making sounds with her own hands, I kept to my practice each morning. The amount of practice I could do - while not a lot on any given day - did add up over the course of a week. I could soon make all of the basic chords and play some simple songs (i.e. ones with three chords that were not too fast). Over the next weeks and months, I built up my repertoire of songs, upping the difficulty level and aiming to increase the number I knew by heart. 

Nearly a year has gone past, and I still practice every week, although a little less often now that I have returned to work. But, as she is able to amuse herself a little more than when she was a baby, I’m able now to practice for a bit longer when I do. Learning more difficult songs, and trying to play along with them to work out the strumming pattern has increased my enjoyment of the music and made me appreciate in a different way the skill that goes into it.

But why is my new-ish hobby featuring in a blog on feminism and motherhood you may ask? Certainly not to show off - I may be better than I was a year ago, but there’s still plenty of room for improvement. And I haven’t even mentioned my singing yet!  Rather, it’s to reflect on how patriarchal constraints work in leisure activities, as well as in work. There are many reasons why I didn’t properly learn the guitar the last two times I tried, and the main one is that I didn’t commit enough time and energy to it.  

But why didn’t I do that?

Part of the reason is because I received over and over the message that, on the whole, girls don’t make the kind of music I like. Their main role is to listen to it, support the guys who play it, and - if they’re really lucky - feature in the lyrics. Sure there are exceptions: in my hometown, for example, there was an all-female band, and a few bands who had one or two female members. The first time I tried to learn the guitar was also the moment more widely when Riot Grrrl received a lot of attention, and - contrary to the retroactive mythmaking - Britpop produced a range of female-fronted and female-dominated bands. But it’s hard not to conclude that these amazing women received such attention because they were (and are) exceptional. As Dr Johnson might have said, ‘a woman’s guitar-playing is like a dog's walking on his hind legs. It is not done well; but you are surprised to find it done at all.’  More conventionally, women are meant to be the object, not the subject of art. Or, put another way, women are supposed to inspire it rather than make it.

Let me give you one example of the kind of gate-keeping that put me off in the first place. 

Feeling very enthused about my decision, I told one of my male friends at the pub one night that I had just taken up the guitar. I thought, mistakenly, that he would be similarly enthusiastic and maybe offer some words of encouragement. Wrong. 

Instead, he said, ‘Give me your hand.’ 

‘Huh?’ I thought. Mystified, I held out my hand. 

Grabbing it, he dug his fingernails sharply into the soft flesh on the tips of my left hand. I looked at his grinning face a bit blankly and wondered what he was doing. 

‘Can you handle this?’ he asked. 

‘Handle what?’ I said.  

‘This,’ he said and dug his fingernails in more sharply. 

‘What are you doing?” I said, snatching my hand away.  

Satisfied to get the reaction he wanted, he said, ‘That’s what you need to handle if you want to play the guitar.’ 

The fingernail test stung a little, but not as much as the clear message that I was trespassing somewhere I didn’t belong. 

Thinking back on this incident, I wish I’d had the wit to say something like ‘Every month my body of its own accord subjects me to way more pain than this could ever be and I cope with it. Do you really think a little bit of temporary isolated pain in my fingertips is going to bother me? Go and shove your sexist bullsh*t.” But I didn’t. And, a little while later, I stopped learning the guitar.

Many years later, a combination of boredom and a new-found appreciation of my physical capabilities, took me back to the guitar. Now in my late ‘30s, I have no illusions about what learning the guitar will lead to, other than some relaxation, enjoyment and another way to interact with my daughter.

And, although I don’t have any strong feelings about whether she should be a musician or not, I want to offer her the chance to make the music rather than simply inspire it.

'by putting them second, you're really putting them first'

This time yesterday I was in the air, flying up the country and back again for work. I really don’t like flying, but needs must, and there I was pinioned to my seat as the plane starting to taxi down the runway. ‘Is it too late to get off?’ I panicked to myself, as the safety briefing started to roll. 

For the third time in as many years, Air New Zealand has changed their safety briefing. I thought the one with the Gin Wigmore track and body-painted otherwise-nude flight attendants was quite clever, the one with the All Blacks less so (not least because of its homophobia) and this one - an animated two-hander voiced by Melanie Lynskey and Ed O’Neill (wtf? Al from Married with Children?) plain odd. Hearing it twice in one day did nothing to improve the so-called jokes either. Still, amongst all the ‘witticisms’, were the usual safety tips: the brace position, location of life-jackets and emergency exits, and instructions for what to do when the emergency masks fall. 

As in most other briefings, you’re reminded to put your own mask on first before helping others. But this time there was more. Accompanied by a staunch cartoon gorilla mum facing down a lion, Melanie Lynskey told us in a jolly voice that ‘in nature, it’s normal to put your children first’ but when the masks come down ‘by putting them second, you’re really putting them first.’

Air New Zealand in feminist motherhood parable shock! As feminist Andrea O’Reilly notes, the commonplace airline instruction to put on your own mask first before helping your children is ‘an appropriate metaphor for feminist mothering. Mothers, empowered, are able to better care for and protect their children.” 

But what does it mean in practice to put your children second, while really putting them first (aside from when putting on masks, that is)?  What does it mean to be a feminist mother and parent?

I recently stumbled across the fabulous blue milk blog on feminist parenting (subtitle: thinking + motherhood = feminism) and was struck by a project the writer had undertaken: canvassing her readers on what they thought made a feminist parent. She set her readers ten questions and received an overwhelming response - mostly from women, it’s true, but also from some enlightened men, and also from a range of different family types. You can read the results of her survey here. 

What I was particularly interested in was her question to parents about how they defined feminist parenting. It struck a chord because I suppose it’s the main thing that I have been trying to figure out for myself with this blog. The full list of responses to that particular question is available here. 

Even from this small selection, respondents to the survey defined feminist parenting in diverse ways. Some saw it in terms of gender neutrality, others saw it in terms of role modelling, or actively critiquing social conventions, others in connecting with other women and parents, others as behavioural, others as an awareness of social relations and the ways in which privilege operates. It got me thinking about the things on the list with which I identified, and how I would define feminist parenting. 

The (unfinished) list that follows is a result of my thinking so far: I was interested to see that some items on the list involved contradictions or balancing acts. Bear in mind too that these are my aspirations for feminist parenting, and on a given day - particularly one preceded by a poor night’s sleep - I usually fall well short:

• role-modelling a ‘strong, capable female figure’ - especially when I don’t particularly feel like one - but also showing that it is OK to be tired, grouchy, and vulnerable sometimes 
• demonstrating that domestic work is not solely women’s work, but is worked shared by everyone in the house (she’s already clocked the ‘daddy broom’, for example)
• trying to have ‘some of it all’ rather than buying into the media constructions of ‘having it all’ or, worse, ‘doing it all’, by carving out time for myself to pursue my own interests
• trying to role-model a feminist relationship, by, among other things, challenging conventional naming practices and thinking about different ways to show family identity for all the family
• challenging gender conventions in regard to femininity while simultaneously trying not to send a message that being female is therefore bad 
• role-modelling the importance of what people think and do rather than what they look like (that’s my excuse for bad hair days and I’m sticking to it!)
• and, as she gets older, I will no doubt be increasingly concerned with the sexualisation of children and trying to counter the incredibly narrow and misogynistic messages that currently circulate in culture about female sexuality, without being repressive.

No pressure then. 

Starting to make this list made me realise that aspiring to feminist parenthood is not a recipe for smugness (as aiming for perfection might be). As one respondent to the blue milk survey wrote:

Feminism has not necessarily made me a better mother. It’s given me ... an alternative, perhaps kinder model for self-critique, instead of worrying about whether the house is clean enough, I’m thinking about whether or not I’ve met my own social or intellectual needs, in order to ensure I’m fulfilled and happy, which in turn makes me a better more resilient, more patient mother.

As the plane left the ground yesterday, and I guiltily left my baby in the care of her father for the day, I felt somewhat comforted by the message ‘by putting them second, you’re really putting them first.’ Because if I want to succeed at being a feminist parent, as opposed to a perfect parent, I need to let go of the idea that it is me and only me who should be responsible for looking after her all day everyday, before everything else always. 

For the duration of the flight, at least.

in the name of the father?

I’ve just read about the outcome of an Australian court case concerning whether or not two children should have their surnames legally changed to that of their father. The father argued that it was ‘an Australian principle’ that children take their father’s surnames, ‘important for their sense of identity’, and - here’s the clincher - ‘right and proper’.

The judge rejected these arguments, and the father’s request for a double-barrelled surname, saying:

The flaw in the argument that a child needs to have a parent’s surname as part of theirs in order to prevent a confusion about identity or cement a relationship with a parent, is readily exposed when one considers that no one would dream of suggesting that the millions of Australian children who were given their father’s surname in the 19th and 20th centuries had, as a result, a less than satisfactory relationship with their mother and their maternal extended family or were confused about their identity.

There were particular circumstances relating to this case to do with disputed paternity and custody issues. Nonetheless, it raises an interesting question: whose surname or family name should a child have?

Names can be a badge of individualist identity, but they can also contain links to the past, to family and friends, and to a child’s wider community. There are as many diverse reasons for family naming practices as there are diverse families. And names - and who has the right to name - are also about power. In the Bible, for example, Adam, who was given the power to name the animals, was also given dominion over them. In the Grimm’s fairy-tale, if the queen could correctly guess the name of Rumplestiltskin then he would no longer have power over her. It is no coincidence either that naming - or more accurately re-naming - was (and is) part of the process of colonisation. 

But back to the level of inter-personal relationships. 

This recent Australian case resonated with me, because we grappled with similar questions (although without being too concerned with what was ‘right and proper’). What follows traces how we decided whose surname our baby should have. I am by no means suggesting that it is what everyone else should do, not least because we only represent one family type. I’m simply offering it up as one story among many.

First, we need to go back a little way, till the time BD (that’s not a mistake: BD means ‘Before Daughter’)

My partner and I are married (which still seems like a funny thing to say. I like to think that if we’d had the option of a civil union, I could say that we are united with civility instead, but married it is). After we were married, I didn’t change my name. I had no intention of changing my name, and my husband wasn’t the least bit concerned that I should change my name. That one was easy enough, as I’m reasonably sure that I wouldn’t have been seeing someone long enough to get to the marrying point if they were the kind of person who would insist on me changing my name.

I’ve heard many reasons for why women should change their names if they marry, ranging from the traditional to the very personal to the slightly unhinged. But none have been as compelling to me as ‘this is my name - why should I change it’? I come from a fairly traditional family: my name - or, more particularly, my surname - is my father’s surname, to which my mother also changed hers when she got married. As some have pointed out, if I refused to change my name for feminist reasons, then isn’t it at least a little ironic that I’m clinging to my father’s surname?  Wouldn’t it be better to choose a whole new name?  To which my answer is ‘this is my name - why should I change it?’  No-one expects my husband to change his name to mine, so why should I be expected to do the opposite, just because it has been a convention in a specific society for a specific amount of time (this genealogical website contains lots of interesting information about diverse contemporary and historical naming practices)? 

So I didn’t. And it’s not like the world spun off its axis or anything.

So far, so straightforward.

When it came to naming the baby, however, there was much more to negotiate. The baby was going to be a new person, who was partly me, partly her father, and wholly herself. It was one thing to stand my ground when it came to my own name and identity, but it is another when I began to construct one on behalf of someone else.

First up was the fun bit. What would his or her first name or names be? We settled on some boys names fairly quickly, though struggled with a middle name that didn’t offer up potentially tease-worthy initials. The girls names were harder: I liked ones my husband didn’t, and vice versa. I couldn’t believe he suggested, among others, ‘Ena’. Had he never seen Ena Sharples glower out from under her hairnet in Coronation Street?  We eventually settled on a first name - chosen first because we both liked it, but it had pleasing family connections too - and the middle name followed easily.

Now to the hard bit. Whose surname or names, in what order, and with what punctuation?

The completely new surname for all of us solution didn’t feel right to us, particularly, as I’ve already noted, I had been so firm all along with ‘this is my name - why should I change it?’  Double-barrelled names also received pretty short shrift: it felt unwieldy and carried connotations that didn’t appeal. Which left us fairly quickly with some finite options:

• father’s surname

• mother’s surname

• both surnames, non-hyphenated (as is the practice is in Spain) 

• father’s surname, but with mother’s surname as a middle name

• mother’s surname, but with father’s surname as a middle name

I made my mind up pretty quickly - mine last and his in the middle - and, BD, my husband abstractly agreed.

But, once we arrived in the time AD, all bets were off. With an actual live baby to name, challenging social convention now had to be weighed together with creating a visible connection to her and to each other. As we went back and forth about what was the best solution, the surname box on the birth registration form remained blank. We received not one but three increasingly threatening letters from the Department of Infernal Affairs telling us that ‘failing to register the birth could disadvantage the child’ and result in prosecution. One was postmarked 26 December.  

The third threatening letter did, however, force our hand. As our baby’s parents, we had to come to some firm decisions about what her name and her identity - at least for the first part of her life - would be. It was time to nail our colours to the wall.  My husband supported my desire to have my surname as part of the baby’s, but didn’t want his erased in doing so. OK, so we include his surname. He was a little more confused about where it should go: in the middle or at the end? On some level, he felt that having his surname as a middle name would give it lesser importance - after all people are mostly called by their given and family names, not all their middle names all the time. 

We continued to go back and forth over the same old ground: does that mean you want to double-barrel? No. Well, we could have both our names at the end? No. So does this mean you want your name at the end? I don’t know.

And so it went on.

How did we resolve this?  Well, with time. Over time, we realised that the issue of surname order was actually informed by two others. One of the issues was creating connections with the baby. But as the minutes, days and weeks passed with her, a handful of letters on a form seemed like the least important way of creating connections with her. And as time passed, another issue that emerged was the kind of relationship that we have with each other: my husband is not the kind of man who wants to assert his right to have his name as the baby’s surname, and that is also more important than where on the form our respective surnames go. And, I have to admit, the more time passed, the more it became clear to me that I wanted my surname to be last. If we have another child, I am happy to consider the option of reversing what we did this time - having my surname as the middle name, and my husband’s as the surname - but this first time, I wanted the last word.  

In the end, the baby was named with both our surnames: her father’s as a middle name, mine as her surname. If, in the future, she wishes to change it for whatever reason, that’s her prerogative. Until then, she has her mother’s surname, and her first name echoes the names of some of her female ancestors on her mother’s side. It means her father gets the  presumptive inquiries directed to ‘Mr Pryor’ that I would otherwise have got. It means that her name recognises that her mother’s identity and family connections are visible and at least as important as her father’s. It might not be the final nail in the coffin of patriarchy (or even the first), but it does demonstrate that naming practices are not neutral, natural or trivial.

Just ask Rumplestiltskin.

'it was your choice to have a child'

“You'd think there was no right more sacred than to be financially underwritten by the community when you choose to have children too young, alone, and without the means to support them” (Columnist Rosemary McLeod writing in The Press)

Choose to? Leaving aside the mean-spirited politics, what kind of ‘choice’ is that?

Choice is a central obsession of late capitalist culture. As long as individuals have plenty of choice then everything is supposed to be all right: we can choose what job to work at, and choose when we have children, how many we might have, and how we might have them.

And, if we make the right choices, our kids will turn out all right ... right?  After all, we can choose to breastfeed them ... if we have the support and the ability to do so; we can choose to stay at home with them ... if we have enough money and the inclination; we can choose to feed them organic hand-reared meat or home-grown vegetables lovingly braised in a slow-cooker ... if we have enough money, our own homes, the time, and the desire to spend all day preparing food; and, eventually, we can choose to send them to private school ... if we have enough money and the right connections.  

The language of choice is ideological. It assumes an individual who has plenty of resources - financial, cultural and institutional - who can make the most of the choices on offer. If someone can’t - or won’t - make the correct socially-approved ‘choices’, they’re bound to be on the receiving end of, at least, disapproval (‘why is your son wearing pink?’) or, at worst, punishment (benefit cuts, children removed). The language of individual choice, then, absolves the community and the state from any stake in those choices: the individual makes the choice, and the individual takes the consequences. It’s a bare step up from ‘you’ve made your bed, you can lie in it.’ There’s precious little soul-searching about how we might have chosen to ignore families in our midst who really struggle with apparent choices that are not much of a choice at all. It’s like we made the bed, but refuse to recognise it as a device for sleeping, much less lying in.

There is a historical dimension to the ascendancy of ‘choice’ in childrearing. Journalist Sue Kedgley found there was a deliberate move away from State support of families to individual choice as part of the general policy shift in the 1980s and 1990s towards free market capitalism. She comments that the New Zealand Treasury no longer saw childbearing and childrearing as ‘critically important activities for the future of the state ... Instead Treasury ... redefined them as activities that are motivated by ‘personal choice’ or ‘irrational desire’ (Mum’s the Word, p 335) This re-definition meant that laws, policies and practices were similarly re-defined: the responsibilities of the State and community to parents and families shifted from collective investment in society’s future to enabling individual choice. Among other things, this has meant the removal of the family benefit, the glacial roll-out of paid parental leave, and, more recently, cuts to early childhood education.

Perhaps one of the most loaded ‘choices’ a mother can make is whether or not to stay at home to look after her children or go out to work to support her children.  But this ‘choice’ is not simply about the best way to mother. In her analysis of US working mothers who quit their jobs to return to the home, Pamela Stone found that the women she interviewed quit as a last resort, and for reasons of work, not family. She calls their decision "a kind of silent strike" and describes their failed efforts to re-invent the workplace in their image: "These women had alternative visions of how to work and be a mother, yet their attempts to maintain their careers on terms other than full-time plus were penalized, not applauded; it was quitting that earned them kudos." Their use of the language of choice "often had the effect of obscuring or rendering invisible to them the constraints they faced”. In “The Opposite of Choice”, Judith Stadtman Tucker agrees, observing that “the discourse of choice masks the persistence and variables of women's inequality, and the scarcity of adequate options”. 

In the absence of real choices, an increasing percentage of well-educated middle-class women - the group with most apparent choice - are choosing what Elisabeth Badinter has described as a ‘nuclear option’. They are not having children at all. For those that do have children, the language of choice has a policing function. As Aminatta Forna observes, “voices of dissent and dissatisfaction are increasingly met with dismissal and a response which has a peculiarly modern twist: that it was their own choice to have a child” (The Mother of All Myths, p 260). So what if you’re finding it hard to make ends meet, you’re about to go postal from isolation, and you’re sick of people telling you that you have to breastfeed: it was your choice to have a child. Or in other words, ‘you’ve made your bed, you can lie in it.’

In order to have real, meaningful choices an individual or couple can’t parent in a vacuum. Community and State support in the form of, among other things, high-quality affordable childcare, paid parental leave (ideally able to be shared), adequate living benefits for solo parents with young children, and commitment to flexible working both in the public and private sectors would be a good start.

Along with a little less sermonising and a little more understanding about the ‘choices’ people have to make.

That would be pretty choice, eh?