on striving for mediocrity

It seems a contradiction in terms: how can one strive to be mediocre? Surely being mediocre means not doing much beyond the bare minimum and leaving ambition, determination and sacrifice to one side? In the capitalist west, such values are lauded: if you want to succeed and get ahead in life, you need ambition, drive - and you might have to make some hard choices along the way about what you really want. Of course, if you don’t want to be uber-successful, you can drop out, but you run the risk of being labelled as lacking in direction, being selfish or lazy, or a loser. So who would strive to be mediocre?

Why do I ask? Because I have been pondering the concept of ‘mediocre mothers’, as opposed to ‘perfect mothers’, and wondering whether it might not, in fact, be better for women to strive to be the former rather than the latter. The article about Elizabeth Badinter that I mentioned in an earlier post - must read that book soon! - has been continuing to resonate with me. Badinter argues that the prevalence of so-called ‘mediocre mothers‘ is an important part of the reason that France has bucked the trend of declining birthrates in Western Europe. New mothers - and, more importantly, the wider culture - apparently don’t set impossibly high standards for themselves, and then beat themselves up if they fail to achieve them. There may be some truth to this, but I’m sure the extensive welfare state, which has generous paid parental leave provisions and all kinds of support systems that are free (at the point of service) in place is pretty helpful too.

But back to this concept of ‘mediocre mothers’. It’s kind of depressing to me how mothers are almost in competition with each other, even over things that we largely have little control over, such as baby’s developmental milestones. I can’t make my baby grow teeth any faster in order to keep up with the ones who have a practically full set of gnashers before their first birthday. It’s not like there’s a prize for the best, most perfect, mother. And, even if there were - God, I hope there isn’t! - by the time the beautiful baby is a teenager, if not before, they’re sure to burst that particular bubble.

I’ve read columns which opine that women who have babies later in life, after having climbed the career ladder somewhat, can be especially prone to ‘perfect mother’ syndrome. The argument goes that such mothers put all their energy and time management skills into raising their children, so that they tie themselves up in knots breastfeeding as long as possible, scheduling all kinds of developmental classes, buying the latest educational toys, preparing the most nutritious food from scratch and so on. The quest for perfection - whether physical, emotional or moral (intellectual is not really required, sorry ladies) - is a particular curse of womanhood. I blame the two millennia of Eva / Ave patriarchal thinking for this. When the perfect mother - Mary, the mother of God - is also a virgin, everyday women are bound to fall short.

I’m not excepting myself from a tendency towards ‘perfect mother’ syndrome. It’s so easy to be judgemental about what others are doing, if it’s different from what you’re doing. Even if it doesn’t matter at all if the baby has an all-organic food diet or not, as long as he or she is getting enough nutritious food. I guess the reason new mums are so hard on each other is that, if someone does things differently, it can be interpreted as an implied critique of what you’re doing. Surely, only one person can be right?!

Let me give you an example of ‘perfect mother’ syndrome. My baby was having some issues with sleeping a few months back, so naturally I read a lot of information and got plenty of advice - some useful, some less so - about how to tackle it. During this time I read Elizabeth Pantley’s book, The No-cry Sleep Solution. There were several good tips in this book, but I was particularly struck by an anecdote that she related hear the the end. She described being at her son’s little league game with her new baby, and how the baby was being passed around, held and generally cooed over by everyone at the game, and how great this was for the baby. So far, so good. And then she goes to talk to another new mother at the game, whose baby is strapped into a buggy rather than being held by all and sundry. This mother is having sleeping issues with her baby and is talking about ‘self-settling’ and ‘controlled crying’ and various other techniques. What was Pantley’s response to this? I have no idea what she did in person, but in her book - that’s right, in writing, for everyone to see - she scolded this woman for being cold and controlling! It certainly left a sour taste for me that Pantley felt the need to finish her otherwise useful book with a touch of moral superiority and judgement. So much for solidarity. In my limited experience, those of us who have had to ride out sleeping difficulties, no matter how short-lived, have sought solutions from all corners, even the ones we might have been ideologically opposed to in the warm glow of a good night’s sleep.

It seems to me that Badinter offers a much more affirming vision - both for a mother’s sanity and her solidarity with other mothers - with her take on mediocre motherhood: "My only advice would be to listen to your own desires and know that no one knows the secret of good motherhood. Moreover, don't let yourself be influenced by fashion. If you don't want to breastfeed, there is a good bottle to use; and if you breastfeed, well that is good too. Don't follow fashion, fashion changes."

Hear, hear.

'you're going to breastfeed, aren't you?'

Lest anyone think I am solely obsessed with pink and blue, and the gendered nature of a baby’s environment, I thought I’d take a swerve back to some of the fun pregnancy and newborn baby moments that I’ve experienced. And when I say ‘fun’, I mean, of course, ‘hugely invasive’, ‘stupid’ and ‘downright offensive’. I’ll leave to one side the apparently common pregnancy experiences, such as random people touching your tummy without your permission, for the one incident that really sticks in my mind.

I was about seven or eight months pregnant, and still at work, when a kind of colleague (i.e. one I don’t know very well) plopped herself down on the couch next to me during a break, laughing to colleagues that she’d sit next to me because it made her feel slim. No, that wasn’t the offensive part, that was just the latest example of mildly amusing (read: not at all amusing) pregnancy humour directed at me.

Once the room had emptied out somewhat, she then bailed me up about whether or not I was planning to breastfeed. I should explain that that this was a tricky subject for me: I wanted to try breastfeeding, but I knew that my mother had not been able to do it. Feeling that snapping back ‘mind your own business’ was not really appropriate workplace banter, I decided to hedge and hope that my off-hand ‘well, if I can’ would be rightly interpreted as a polite version of ‘mind your own business’. Given that she felt that it was perfectly all right to ask me about this in the first place, I should’ve known that my diffidence would actually be interpreted as invitation to keep going on about it. And on and on.

‘Oh no you must!’ she cried, as if I’d actually said, ‘I’d rather crawl naked over broken glass, rather than breastfeed.’

‘You must,’ she insisted. ‘It’s so important for bonding with your child. You don’t get the same bond from bottle-feeding.’

Feeling more and more uncomfortable with the direction the conversation was going, namely, the increasingly missionary zeal with which I was being buttonholed about breastfeeding, I tried to close it down. Unfortunately, I had learned nothing from my opening gambit. My feeble ‘well, I don’t want to put too much pressure on myself’ and ‘it doesn’t work for some women’ had the opposite effect to the one I’d intended. Instead of shutting her up, she instead took this as a challenge, hectoring me about how I’d be short-changing the baby if I didn’t, and how the cracked nipples and mastitis were all worth it in the end (side-note: really?).

At the point someone else decided to join in, so they could double-team me, I felt suffocated enough to do what I should have done in the first place. I stood up, said I wasn’t comfortable with the conversation and left the room. For good measure - perhaps to create a teachable moment, perhaps out of spite - I added that ‘some women, including my own mother, weren’t able to breastfeed, so I didn’t take it as a given.’ Needless to say, next time I saw them they were quite apologetic.

And so they should have been. The issue here is not whether or not I was going to breastfeed - I was able to, as it turns out - but the fact that this woman felt entitled to tell me what I should and shouldn’t be doing, when her opinion was neither desired nor required.

I am not the only expectant mother who has felt under pressure about breastfeeding. It’s a tricky one, because New Zealand has low breastfeeding rates, and the Ministry of Health has been running a campaign for the last few years to turn that around. I’m well aware of the benefits of breastfeeding but I’m also well aware that I turned out OK as a formula-fed baby. So my diffident answer turned out to be how I really felt: I would try to breastfeed if I could, and, if I couldn’t, I didn’t want to beat myself up about using formula. Surely, it’s more important that the baby is not left to starve, right?

But this little incident got me thinking about more than just the personal pros and cons of breastfeeding. It happened to coincide with my reading an article about French feminist Elizabeth Badinter, who had come out swinging against the "holy alliance of reactionaries". According to the article in the The Australian (committing a cardinal sin here by not reading the book myself - I aim to rectify this in the near future), this alliance is:

pressuring women to be "perfect mothers" who stay at home to wash cloth nappies, prepare organic purees for "tyrant" children and suckle them to exhaustion ....In her explosive bestselling book Conflict: The Woman and the Mother, Badinter targets ecologists, pediatricians, breastfeeding zealots and the media for peddling a return to "naturalism" and an idealised concept of motherhood that elevates concepts of masochism and female sacrifice to unforeseen levels. The new "subterranean ideological war" is making women across the world feel horribly guilty, she says. Most dangerous, it is threatening the gains of decades of feminist struggle for sexual equality and is even slashing birthrates.

I didn’t agree with all that she was reported as saying, but this passage had a lot of resonance for me. While I felt that I wanted to do the best I could for my child, I was a little suspicious about the reification of the natural in child-birth and child-rearing. Isn’t this another way of assigning women to their ‘natural’ roles as mothers and keeping them there?

But head and heart are often at odds. I’m still figuring out how to navigate what I intellectually and politically agree with, and what I feel is the right thing to do. I also feel like I want to maintain an identity independent of being someone’s mother and I don’t want to be a drudge. So, how do I do it?! Well, I’ll get back to you when I’ve figured out how it’s possible to have your cake and eat it and throw it round the room. Maybe it’s time to dust off that Muddling Through(c) technique again ...