Timing it right

A couple of years ago, when I was only just pregnant, I went to a birthday lunch attended by a range of extended family members who were, shall we say, of a significant age. At one point, I got talking to a woman who was I’m not sure how many cousins removed from me.  I don’t know how we got onto the topic of children - I was still within the 12-week wall of disclosure and hadn’t broadcast my condition - but she told me about her brood of children and how she’d had a fifth child  at the ripe old age of 40, well after her first four, who were evenly and properly spaced in her twenties. Bumping into an acquaintance at the doctor’s surgery while going to a routine check-up, she was told ‘Oh Mrs C_____, you’re the talk of the town!’

OK, it was a small town, but still. Clearly, even a married woman couldn’t avoid the gentle opprobrium of being the talk of the town for having what was thought to be an inappropriately-timed baby, a visible sign that the couple in question were still getting busy at an unseemly age.

This was, of course, a wee while ago now.  Mrs C______ was the talk of her town in the early 1970s, having had most of her children, as was the done thing, in her twenties in the early 1960s.

In New Zealand, as in a number of other western countries, the average age of first births has risen sharply since the mid-twentieth centruy. In the 1950s and 1960s, the average age of first births was much lower, averaging in the early 20s. In the 1975, the median age was 25. In 2012, Statistics New Zealand established, with the usual caveats that: "the median age of mothers giving birth to their first child is roughly 28 years, two years younger than the average across all mothers. The median age for both childbirth and birth of first child has remained steady since 2001. The median age of women giving birth to their second child is roughly 32 years.' Furthermore, women are, overall, having fewer children. 

Clearly, women’s consensus on when ‘the right time’ is to have  a baby has shifted in the last half-century. But this ‘consensus’ is not only the result of individual ‘choice’ (and biological capability), but also societal pressure. Teenage mothers are frowned on, as are mothers over forty. Even those past their early 30s receive some censure, not least in the description of their pregnancies. At 34, my first pregnancy was clinically described as “geriatric primigravida’ or, in other words, ‘way old at time of first pregnancy’ (humph!). Furthermore, societal approval or censure depends on who it is having children - if white and middle-class, you should be having children and are being selfish by leaving it late or not at all; if brown and poor, you should be having few to no children, so as to minimise bludging off the state.

But it is not simply societal pressure that polices ‘the right time.’ Finding ‘the right time’ - assuming a woman has some choice in the matter - to have children in order to balance the competing demands of career - and again assuming this is something a woman wants - and family has been a plank of second and third-wave feminism. And it varies from woman to woman, career to career.  Emily Monosson’s edited collection about the experience of women scientists, for example, traced the consequences for each mother in the timing of their children. Some had their children as graduate students, and several of those then had to negotiate ‘alternative career paths’ or effectively position themselves as unecumbered in order to fight for tenure (a couple had partners who took on the full-time care-giving role in order to do this).  Others had their children once they had received tenure, but had to either change the focus of their work - for example, pursuing a policy path rather than a lab-based path - or fight to be taken seriously by minimising the ‘distractions’ from their work. In no case did any of these mothers have an easy time of it.  Those who came closest were those whose partners shouldered the traditionally female role of primary care-giver.

There seems to be an idea that if only the magical right time can be found, women can plan their families and careers, with minimal financial and emotional penalties for motherhood.  But when is it?  Early, so you can physically recover more quickly, have more energy to parent, and years yet to decide on a career? Or later, so you can establish yourself in a career, negotiate good benefits and be a more mature parent?  There are pros and cons to both. On the web, parenting sites, medical sites, financial planning sites, life-coaching sites, and even respectable news sites too abound with varying answers to the question of ‘when is the right time to have children’?

It's a key issue covered by Anne-Marie Slaughter in her provocative 2012 article, ‘Why Women Still Can’t Have it All’, in which, among other things, she debunked the myth of ‘finding the right time.’ She comments:

The most important sequencing issue is when to have children ... the truth is, neither sequence is optimal, and both involve trade-offs that men do not have to make. You should be able to have a family if you want one - however and whenever your life circumstances allow - and still have the career you desire. If more women could strike this balance, more women would reach leadership positions, they could make it easier for more women to stay in the workforce.

A range of books by other feminist writers - Anne Crittenden, Madeleine Kunin, Marilyn Waring, to name but a few - have detailed exactly what these trade-offs are: loss of income, loss of status, loss of future benefits (such a retirement savings), increased insecurity in the event of marital breakdown. And an increasing percentage of women in western countries - up to 30% of women of child-bearing age - are apparently deciding - or failing not to decide - that the trade-offs are not worth it. 

Yet that still means around 60-70% of women still are having children, planned or unplanned, old, median-aged or young, rich or poor, healthy or unhealthy, aware of the costs involved ... or not. These are for a range of reasons - familial pressure being a frequently cited one - but one could not really consider them ‘rational choices’ if the pros and cons were solely rationally weighed up. One of my husband’s former co-workers once said that ‘there would never be a right time to have kids if you ever really thought about it.’  Ensuring that both individual women and societies don’t ever ‘really think about it’ seems a given.

I mean, if a society really thought about what it takes to raise children then it would channel its tax dollars into measures that support families and encouraged the gun-shy (rather than coercing the downright ’nos’, of course) into parenthood: paid parental leave for all families, universal family support payments throughout childhood, paternity leave, properly subsidised and adequately remunerated childcare, and so on. 

Now, when is the right time to have that conversation?

Memories

Our girl appears to be learning to read. 

Well, to put it more accurately, she is in the early pre-reading stages. That is, she is learning to remember the stories that she hears over and over and can remember what lines go with which picture in which book. She has taken to sitting still - for a few minutes only, mind - open book on her lap saying to herself something like ‘On Monday he ate through one apple’ or "‘Don’t worry,’ cried Stickman. ‘I’ll soon set you free.”. She appears to remember things that happened in the previous days and weeks, but needs prompting for any longer time-period.

She is also approaching the age where she may well remember things that happen to her now in later life, particularly if they were outstanding or traumatic for some reason. Autobiographical memories sustained over a long time-period, though, are not thought to develop until around pre-school-age. Memory is not just one process, then, but a range. Various types of memory include declarative memory (such as facts or knowledge that can be consciously recalled), procedural memory (unconsciously retained skills such as holding a fork, drinking from a cup, getting dressed, going to the toilet), and episodic memory (specific personal memories organised cohesively into a narrative). Children are thought to have a dense amnesia for the first few years of life, and then a period of relatively sparse memories for a few years after that.

Some of the multiple explanations for the development - and, importantly, the retention - of memories include the development of fluent language skills and the development of a concept of self-hood. Of course, these processes are inter-linked. Subjectivity - a person’s sense of self - is defined in language. A subject is a person who speaks and says ‘I’, inhabiting that ‘I’ as their own real and discrete self. At the moment, our girl uses the variants of her name, ‘me’ and ‘my’ to describe herself. She is increasingly starting to use the pronoun ‘I’ now too, notably in the phrase ‘I want it.’ 

Very young children do remember things, then, but the things they remember don’t often become memories. What they forget - a process called childhood amnesia - also becomes part of the process of creating subjectivity. One of the processes that they forget - or, rather, it becomes unconscious to the point of seeming natural - is the process of becoming gendered.  This is why what children learn and experience when they are very young is so important to their subsequent development, as neuroscientist Lise Eliot has identified.

Memories can also be unreliable. Neuroscientist Karim Nader think this may be due to something called ‘reconsolidation’ or the recasting of early memories in the light of everything that has happened since. Editing in this way is part of the process of learning life lessons: remembering a difficult time in the past is tempered by the knowledge that things worked out all right in the end, for example. 

Memories are not only individual, but also collective. ‘Collective memory’ is sometimes used as another name for history, giving the later a sheen of naturalism. Collective memory becomes ‘common knowledge’, by which individuals - some individuals, at any rate - create social bonds and a sense of shared identity. Conventional histories, for example, have focussed on ‘great men’ and significant political events, rendering, for example, the domestic lives of ordinary people little more than a backdrop to the great concerns of the age. 

Since the middle of the twentieth century,  however, in response to the political concerns of a wide range of previously marginalised groups, historians (including feminist and post-colonial historians) started to dig deeper into these lives. One technique used to uncover previously excluded lives and pre-occupations is called ‘memory-work’. Memory-work actively seeks to question established narratives of the past, often by employing non-traditional methods, particularly oral histories, to re-establish the voices of those who have been excluded from traditional histories. Sue Kedgley’s account of the lives of Pākehā mothers in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries is one example of making visible the concerns and preoccupations of white settler colonialism from the point of view of women in the family.

As our girl increasingly displays her rapidly expanding feats of memory, she is consolidating her self-hood, a self that is anchored in a particular place in a particular time, with a particular cultural, linguistic, and historical inheritance. It is a self that is already gendered, and, as she becomes increasingly aware of how other people differ from herself, this process of becoming-feminine will intensify. The desire of other little girls in her class at kindergarten or school to exclusively dress in pink, for example, could well erase the memories that currently constitute her sense of self: that her favourite T-shirt is a grey one with a picture of a mountain on it, and that one of her favourite toys is a Thomas train set.  

But the memory process of reconsolidation means that she will also likely outgrow and revise her own past: in their turn, pink fairy princesses will become passé and baby-dolls will only be fit for babies. Memories might be the things that we remember from our pasts, but, in recasting them, they also might be what keeps us from living in the past, both individually and collectively.