On failing to become a Pregnant Superwoman

About a month ago, when I was still feeling quite sick in the first trimester of my current pregnancy, I was walking towards the bus station around the time that school got out. It was the last day of term and there were hordes of over-excited teenagers streaming past me in the opposite direction. None of them paid me the slightest bit of attention, preoccupied as they were with their own lives. 

Walking past them, however, I suddenly felt extremely self-conscious. Covering my-not-quite-showing-yet tummy with my arm, I felt menaced, exposed and vulnerable. At the same time telling myself that I was being silly in the extreme, I felt like any moment one of these teenagers in their youthful high spirits might inadvertently cause me - or, more specifically, my less-than-12-week foetus - some harm.

No doubt some of my (imagined) fear was due to my physically weakened state: at the time, I was only managing to keep down perhaps one small meal a day and some crackers. I find a full tummy does wonders for one’s sense of perspective. But perhaps my reaction went deeper: perhaps I was having some kind of primal maternal reaction to perceived external threat. 

My experience of threat that day got me thinking about how women negotiate their increased physical vulnerability during pregnancy - whether through sickness, increased girth, or any of its other fun physical changes. While I agree that ‘pregnancy is a state of health’, I can’t help but appreciate some of the special assistance I have received while pregnant, particularly flexible work hours negotiated with my managers so I could work around the worst parts of my morning sickness. The acknowledgement that I was neither a Pregnant Superwoman nor a slacker not only helped me continue to work effectively during that first trimester, but also helped my psychological well-being (i.e. it didn’t totally stress me out).

I also remembered how much it drove me up the wall the number of times I had to stand on the bus home from work while eight and nine months pregnant - very tired and swollen - last time round. On one particular ride, the only two people standing on the bus nearly the whole way home were myself at eight months' pregnant, and another woman who was clearly in a similar condition. Not one person offered either of us a seat (check out this pregnant woman’s graphic survey of the how often she was offered a seat on the subway). Noticeably, the seats designated for vulnerable people only specified that they should be given up for elderly and disabled people. Occasionally, they specify parents with small children - ones who are presumably managing buggies and other paraphenalia as well as children. I realised that it’s been a long time since I saw these seats designated for pregnant women as well.

There may be a perfectly good reason behind this ‘oversight’: namely, the establishment of a legal - and, to some extent, social - framework that discourages discrimination towards pregnant women. Gone are the days when pregnant women were forced to leave the work-place, or were routinely subject to patronising attempts to get them to rest at all times because they shouldn’t be attempting anything too strenuous in ‘their delicate condition.’

This is not by any means to suggest that women do not still experience discrimination while pregnant. The very useful Employers’ Guidelines for the Prevention of Pregnancy Discrimination states clearly that pregnancy discrimination as a form of sex discrimination, and that ‘it may be unlawful for an employer to discriminate against an employee or a job applicant because she is pregnant or because it is assumed she may become pregnant’ (p 3).  

While recognising that pregnant women shouldn’t be treated negatively because they are pregnant, however, the guidelines also recognise that there may be health and safety concerns connected with a woman’s pregnancy at work. These could relate, for example, to heavy lifting and handling, exposure to radiation or certain chemicals or a risk of infection. Early risk assessments are recommended to identify ways to mitigate these concerns. Any steps taken to do so - such as a temporary transfer to another kind of role within the same organisation - should not have a negative impact on a woman's pay, benefits or other work opportunities.

I was and am very clear that I don’t want to be discriminated against because I am pregnant: I did not lose any of my faculties along with my lunch during that first trimester.

And yet ...

My perception of my own physical vulnerability - whether walking through a crowd of excitable teenagers or feeling my ankles swell even more while standing on the bus home - made me want to demand special treatment: ‘look out world, pregnant woman in the area’!

Was I guilty of failing the Pregnant Superwoman test?  Was admitting vulnerability somehow un-feminist?

In her fascinating book Origins: How the Nine Months Before Birth Shape the Rest of Our Lives (2010), science writer Annie Murphy Paul grapples with similar feelings. Pregnant while she wrote the book, which examines the insights of fetal origins research, Paul talks about experiencing ‘a new and acute sense of vulnerability.’ I felt an uncanny jolt of recognition as I read the following description:

Hurrying down Seventh Avenue toward the subway, crowds streaming past, I realize that I am scanning the faces of the strangers who walk by, and that I’ve put a protective arm across my belly, at three months just beginning to swell. Being pregnant has made me vigilant, on guard for threat; I feel alert and instinctive as an animal, ears perked and nose twitching. (Origins, p 41)

Paul speaks to researchers who confirm her sense that her instinctive protectiveness might indeed be an evolved behaviour with which pregnant women compensate for their decreased immunological response (Origins, pp 41-3).

Like me, however, Paul seems to be a little reluctant to fully sign up to research insights that could be used to politically roll back decades of hard-won feminist gains. After outlining the legal battles against pregnancy discrimination in the US, Paul concludes:

I know I don’t want Supreme Court justices, or even psychologists and public health experts to tell me how hard I should be working while pregnant. I have no desire to return to the stifling prohibitions of the Victorian age, or the paternalistic protections of the Progressive Era. And yet it seems to me that, in our own time, pregnancy comes with a set of expectations that is oppressive in its own way. Women today are given to understand that pregnancy should not slow them down in the slightest; at the same time they’re barraged with warnings that too much stress could harm their fetuses. … That’s a lot of cultural baggage to bear, at a time when women have enough additional weight to carry. I find myself daydreaming about a pregnancy free of these burdens, concerned only with the optimal experience of woman and fetus.   (Origins, pp 69-70)

She briefly examines the work culture of the US, and looks to other countries where women are not only paid for parental leave but also for ante-natal leave. Wanting to debunk what she calls the ‘Pregnant Superwoman’ myth, Paul aims to take it easier on herself throughout the rest of her pregnancy: she signs up for a yoga class and has a mid-afternoon nap on the sofa instead of rushing to the computer while her son is asleep.

I think, however, that she is a little to quick to attribute the ‘Pregnant Superwoman’ myth solely to feminism, as, for example, when she says:

My guess is that the Pregnant Superwoman got her start when women entered the workplace in large numbers in the 1960s and 1970s. Getting ahead proved that nothing about being female -including the inconvenient tendency to get pregnant - would interfere with one’s performance or one’s commitment to the job. (Origins, p 59)

A historian might’ve pointed out to her, however, that in this time period many of the women entering the workforce were already mothers, ones who had their children at a very young age (often in their early 20s) and were looking to find fulfillment outside the home once their children were at school.

As Susan Douglas and Meredith Michaels have argued, the myth of the Superwoman in general is a media construction, rather than a feminist one:

The supermom - a media construction - was not what feminists had hoped for as a model. Feminists didn’t think mom should suddenly do everything - work outside the home, and clean the house and care for the children and make gourmet meals. Feminists thought maybe dad and the government should participate too. But we got the media’s version of the feminist ‘have it all’ mom anyway. Then when it turned out that real women could not and would not actually be supermom, the supermom was discredited as something we had allegedly aspired to but couldn’t achieve, and thus we were supposed to go back to the kitchen. (The Mommy Wars, p 206)

My guess is that ‘Pregnant Superwoman’ is probably cut from the same cloth. Thinking some more about my altered - and temporary - state, I realise that vulnerability is not the same as weakness. Recognising that different people have different limits - whether at different stages in their lives, or throughout their lives - means that societies need to re-organise themselves to accommodate and realise the potential of all their members. Flexible working practices and parental leave are just some examples of the ways in which treating pregnant women equally means treating them differently.

La vie en rose?

This morning, the baby - or the toddler, as I should henceforth call her - made a beeline for her one pink top and insisted on putting it on. ‘Oh dear,’ I thought, trying my best not to make it seem like a big deal. ‘It’s started. She’s about to cheerfully undo all my attempts to give her a life in technicolour.’ Teenagers with a penchant for black have nothing on the monochromatic world little girls are encouraged to inhabit these days.

On the way to the supermarket, we stopped at a second-hand toy and book sale. The community hall was bursting at the seams: parents tried to stop their kids running off with toys before they’d paid for them, kids tried to wheedle their parents into just one more toy, and everyone frowned at those foolish enough to wheel strollers through the narrow lanes either side of the trestle tables. Wading through this sea of humanity, toddler long since abandoned somewhere behind me, I couldn’t help but notice by the meerest of glances which stalls had stuff for girls and which didn’t. Three guesses how I managed this feat of deduction? Yep, they contained items that were predominantly pink and glittery. There were pink dolls-houses and wands. Pink tea-sets and vacuum cleaners. Pink phones and tiaras. Gender-stereotyping, what’s that?! 

‘To the books,’ I thought. ‘They won’t let me down!’

I finally found a table that mainly sold books and started thumbing through them. One box was full of ‘girls’ books’.  Without exception, every one was about fairies or princesses or fairy princesses. I felt depressed and, remembering the pink shirt preference of the morning, a little worried. Of course, no-one was forcing me to buy these books, but the fact that there were so many of them all together, clearly intended for another little girl just to love really bothered me. 

It was not always the case that books aimed at little girls so blatantly inhabited the role of fantasy (and not the Tolkien-kind either). ‘When I was a kid’, to wheel out a hackneyed phrase, stories for girls seemed to be dominated by horses and ballet. If you had two X chromosones, you were apparently pre-programmed to dream of Follyfoot or Sadler's Wells. Of course, these were manufactured gender preferences too, but at least they were a bit more real and, more importantly, active. The girls in them had to work hard to succeed at their dreams, they had to do stuff in order to try and be successful - and they didn’t always succeed either. 

Now, it may well be the case that these fairy princess stories are about the one fairy princess who rebels against her royal fairy upbringing and redefines what it means to be a fairy princess - I feel ridiculous even writing that - but, here's my issue, why are they fairy princesses at all? Can’t a girl be rebellious or ambitious or whatever other defence is usually given for stuff like this without first being represented as either an ephemeral imaginary creature or an ephemeral technically-real-but-totally-Disneyfied-to-the-point-of-unreality creature?

I’m starting to get worked up again just thinking about it.

You may well think, ‘where’s the harm’?  It’s only toys and books, no-one’s forcing you to buy them, and your daughter may well totally love these kinds of books when she gets older and then what will you do? And, anyway, it’s it only natural for little girls to like this stuff?

Well, no, it isn’t. And that’s the problem.

Recent research by neuroscientists such as Cordelia Fine and Lise Eliot has shown that there are some small sex differences in children’s brains, but that they are not as great nor as 'hardwired' as we are led to believe. Eliot, for example, found after an exhaustive search that there was ‘surprisingly little solid evidence of sex differences in children’s brains.’ In fact, she found only two that had been reliably proven: boys‘ brains are larger than girls by around 8 to 11 per cent, and that this difference shows up around the onset of puberty when girls‘ brains finish growing about one to two years earlier than boys’.  Before the jokes start coming, she considers this difference to be on a par with boys‘ greater height and weight at birth and in adulthood (Pink Brain, Blue Brain, p 5).

So little girls aren’t pre-progammed to like fairy princesses after all? Woohoo! But then why do so many of them seem to gravitate towards it?

The obvious answer is money. Pink items are aggressively marketed at young girls who then use their pester power to wear down even the most intransigent of parents. How cunningly simple to gender everything so parents will have to shell out twice if they have children of each sex. In Cinderella Ate My Daughter, journalist Peggy Orenstein describes the sheer magnitude of gendered merchandise on offer: 

The annual toy fair at New York's Javits Center is the industry's largest trade show, with 100,000 products spread over 350,000ft of exhibition space. And I swear, at least 75,000 of those items were pink. I lost count of the myriad pink wands and crowns (feathered, sequined and otherwise bedazzled) and infinite permutations of pink poodles in purses. The Disney Princesses reigned over a new pink royal interactive kitchen with accompanying pink royal appliances and pink royal pot-and-pan sets (though I would have thought one of the perks of monarchy would be that someone else did the cooking). There were pink dinnerware sets emblazoned with the word princess, pink fun-fur stoles and boas, pink golf clubs, sleds, tricycles, bicycles, scooters, and motorcycles and even a pink tractor. Oh, and one pink neon bar sign flashing "live nudes" .... "Is all this pink really necessary?" I asked a bored-looking sales rep hawking something called Cast and Paint Princess Party. "Only if you want to make money," he said, chuckling. (Read more here) 

Fine, but I’ve also seen plenty of hand-knitted, hand-carved and hand-painted things to think that this isn’t only about the dollar. It seems a bit of a coincidence that the profusion of pink fairy princess products exploded in the 1980s, around ... oh ... the same time as mainstream culture mounted a backlash against second-wave feminism (detailed magnificently by Susan Faludi in Backlash: the Undeclared War Against Women way back in 1991 and, more recently, picked up in respect of the ideology of intensive mothering in Douglas and Michaels’ The Mommy Myth).

Eliot’s research offers insight here too. Her main field of study is plasticity, which is premised on the fact that the brain actually changes in response to its environment:

Simply put, your brain is what you do with it ... Learning and practice rewire the human brain, and considering the very different ways boys and girls spend their time while growing up, as well as the special potency of early experience in moulding neuronal connections, it would be shocking if the two sexes’ brains didn’t work differently by the time they were adults. So it’s all biology, whether the cause is nature or nurture (Pink Brain, Blue Brain, p 6).  

Putting on my best conspiracy theory hat, I can’t help but think then that there’s something going on when little girls are being bombarded with fairy princesses and pink irons and glittery plastic high heels with precious little else to relieve it. Namely, that patriarchy is insidiously working to disempower women from birth. And when people shrug and say it doesn’t matter, or it’s only natural, it’s sending a message loud and clear - whether it’s meant intentionally or not - that this is what little girls should like and be like. And, that one day, not too far away, this is what they will as women become (well, not actual fairy princesses, but you get the idea). Pinkification of girls can also be considered potentially damaging to little boys as well, as it defines extremely narrow notions of femininity and the ways in which girls and women should be treated because that’s what they like / are like. 

And yet ... what about agency? After all, nobody has to totally follow the cultural script that is written for them, and that applies to both parents and children.

As with most things these days, my toddler is showing me the way. She may have opted for a pink t-shirt this morning (maybe she was sick of getting mistaken for a boy too), but once we got to the sale she made a bee-line for the first thing that grabbed her attention: a blue wind-up car.

Maybe we’ve got a little while to go yet before Cinderella comes knocking. 

review: The Mommy Myth

‘Did you see the news?’

‘I saw it in a magazine ....’

‘This week on Myths and Lies about Motherhood ...’

The media comes in for a fair amount of beat-up about everything these days. And not without cause, as the Levenson Inquiry, for example, is daily demonstrating. But the dodgy aspects of the media are not just about phone-tapping and hacking, shoddy journalistic ethics and corporate greed. Regardless of how sophisticated our critique of it may be, or how cynical our reading is, mass media - in the form of news media, TV shows, advertising, movies, magazines - plays a critical role in what we think about, even if, we tell ourselves, it doesn’t tell us how to think about it. It sets the agenda, and both politicians and the public take note.

Psychologist Susan J Douglas and philosopher Meredith W Michaels - respectively, a mother-of-one and a mother-of-five - wrote the The Mommy Myth: The Idealization of Motherhood and How It Has Undermined Women (2004) in order to analyse and critique the role of the mass media in ‘promulgating and exaggerating’ myths about motherhood. In the US, Douglas and Michaels argue that the mass media’s representations of motherhood ‘have laid down a thick, sedimented layer of guilt, fear, and anxiety as well as in increasingly powerful urge to talk back’. (p 13) Since the 1970s, and reaching a peak in the mid-to-late 1980s and 1990s, media constructions of motherhood have raised the bar ‘year by year, of the standards of good mothering while singling out and condemning those we are supposed to see as dreadful mothers.’ (p13)

While rigourously and systematically tracing the evolution of media constructions of motherhood since 1970, Douglas and Michaels also remind us what second-wave feminists actually had to say about motherhood (as opposed to right-wing distortions of it) and the ways which public policies on childcare, welfare and community funding have been eroded to the point of non-existence since the introduction of Reaganomics (detailed in a chapter pithily titled ‘Dumb Men, Stupid Choices’). Coupled with dwindling political will and a strengthening backlash against feminism (we’re all post-feminists now, right?), the growth of the ‘new momism’ has served to:

contain and, where possible, eradicate, all of the societal changes brought on by feminism. It is backlash in its most refined, pernicious form because it insinuates itself into women’s psyches just where we have been rendered most vulnerable: in our love for our kids. The new momism, then is deeply and powerfully political. The new momism is the result of the combustible intermixing of right-wing attacks on feminism and women, the media’s increasingly fine-tuned and incessant target marketing of mothers and children, the collapse of government institutions - public schools, child welfare programs - that served families in the past ... and mothers’ own very real desires to do the best job possible raising their kids in a culture that praises mothers in rhetoric and reviles them in public policy (pp 23-4)

The mountain of evidence to support their argument is compelling. From little news focus on motherhood in the 1970s to the ascension of the celebrity mother and demonisation of the crack-addicted welfare mother in the 1980s, Douglas and Michaels piece together an overwhelmingly stifling media onslaught of images of perfect, intensive mothering working in tandem with cautionary tales of ‘mothers-gone-bad’ who were poor and nearly always black and living in the inner-city (in contrast to statistics which actually showed that most poor mothers were white and lived in hard-to-reach rural areas). It is easy to marvel from the lofty heights of 2012 at how cynical, self-serving, and mean-spirited the removal of government funding for welfare and childcare programmes was (Nixon, for example, first in a long line of presidents to veto a government-funded childcare programme, used his discretionary veto power to torpedo this bill so he could count on support in some wavering corners when he sought re-election). Easy, that is, until we read contemporary news-stories about politicians telling single mothers to get back to work, and tinkering with funding for early-childhood education. Conservative, patriarchal ideas disseminated by politicians and the media have come to seem natural, like common sense.

While Douglas and Michaels show how the dominant media image of mothering has become one of intensive, upper-middle-class, corporately-defined individualism, they also show that representations of rebellious mothers have similarly gained attention. For every soft-focus magazine exclusive with Christie Brinkley or Marie Osmond, there is a Roseanne, or a Peg Bundy, or a Brett Butler, to mouth off at the new momism. Douglas and Michaels position themselves more squarely on the side of the Roseannes of the world, but also stress that she is a construction too: the binary opposite of the angelic mother who delights in every nano-second she spends with her children. Their mode of address throughout the book gives away their preference: they wisecrack, open chapters with cynical depictions of family life (think Married with Children rather than The Waltons), and undercut their more serious scholarship with sarcastic asides. Ordinarily, I’m all for this kind of thing, but, having just stated Shari L. Thurer’s book The Myths of Motherhood - if books about motherhood are not truth-telling, they’re myth-busting! - in which she deploys the same mode of address it’s hard not to read it as a self-deprecating defence mechanism i.e. you can’t criticise me more anymore than I am already criticising myself.

Historian and critical theorist Michel Foucault described power as not simply repressive, but also creative. Exploring the way in which sexuality, specifically homosexuality, was established as an identity rather than an act in nineteenth-century discourses of power, he argued that what began as an identification and a term of abuse, could be reclaimed as a subject position from which to speak (i.e. ‘we’re here, we’re queer, get used to it!’) Similarly, repressive (and regressive) constructions of the new mother, create a corollary, the rebellious mother, the one who talks back and reclaims the right to determine what motherhood should be, both for herself and other mothers. Viewed in this way, Douglas and Michaels project is unashamedly political: it is not meant to be a dispassionate, ‘balanced’ and ‘objective’ account of the media in the last four decades. Rather, it is a call to arms: don’t let them define and pigeon-hole you! don’t let them put all the responsibility for growing healthy, well-rounded children on you (remember, it takes a village to raise a child)! and, most importantly, don’t watch Meg Ryan movies! Actually, I just slipped that last one in there.

It all sounds a bit ‘70s, doesn’t it?

Which is no bad thing, as Douglas and Michaels remind us. Most women inspired into activism by second-wave feminism were mothers. Mothers who demanded better treatment for themselves and their children, better childcare options, better support from the government for their families, better relationships with their partners, better pay and better career opportunities. And, here’s the other big secret that they say the media won’t tell you about feminism ‘exposing patriarchy was, while certainly dangerous, also - let’s face it - a blast!’ (p 38)

And, as novelist Linda Grant has recently reminded us, there are still a thousand reasons why this important work needs to continue.

stay-at-home mothers versus working mothers?

Ding, ding, ding!

‘In the red corner, we have the stay-at-home mum: she’s chosen to look after her kids full-time and forego the ratrace for now!’ (doesn’t she know it’s boring to keep house and look after kids all day, and she’ll lose out in the job market when she does go back to work?)

‘In the blue corner, we have the working mum: she’s chosen to go back to work and pay for the best childcare she can afford!’ (doesn’t she know she’s abandoning her child for the sake of filthy money?)

It’s a knock-out fight: stay-at home mums versus working mums. Who will win?

Okay, okay, perhaps I exaggerate. But I have noticed a creeping and contradictory binarism that drives the ideology of the perfect mother. Whether you’re a stay-at-home or working mum, you’re bound to fall short of being the perfect mother: all women are set up for failure.

Inflamed by lurid media stories of the kind I have detailed in a previous post, the supposed binary opposition between mothers who stay home to look after their children and mothers who work to support their children is the engine of what US feminist critics Susan J. Douglas and Meredith W. Michaels call ‘the mommy wars.’ In their 2004 book The Mommy Myth: the Idealization of Motherhood and How it Has Undermined Women, Douglas and Michaels comment:

The ethos of intensive mothering has lower status in our culture (‘stay-at-home mothers are boring’), but occupies a higher moral ground (‘working mothers are neglectful’) ....The ‘mommy wars’ put mothers into two, mutually exclusive categories - working mother versus stay-at-home mother - and never the twain shall meet. It goes without saying that they allegedly hate each other’s guts. In real life, millions of mothers move between these two categories, have been one or the other at different times, creating a mosaic of work and child-rearing practices that bears no resemblance to the supposed iron-clad roles suggested by the ‘mommy wars’. Not only does the media catfight pit mother against mother, but it suggests that all women be reduced to their one role - mother - or get cut out of the picture entirely. (p 12)

I was moved to blog about the tension between the two for two reasons. One, in the mother’s group that I attend I have picked up a faint but definite tension between the mothers who stay at home and the ones who work. It kind of depresses me that even a group that is supposed to be about supporting mothers - all mothers - is clinging to pre-determined positions and, however covertly, judging those who don’t fit them. Two, having been a stay-at-home mother for the last 16 months, I am about to become a working mother for three days a week. In that sense, I will not be quite either mother figure: neither fully staying at home, nor fully re-entering the work-force.

Leaving aside the three big ice-bergs of partners’ roles, the value placed on part-time workers (of which women, primarily mothers, make up the majority) and the large and growing voluntary sector that augments gaps in state-funded social welfare in which stay-at-home mothers play an active role, is it possible that I am going to have my cake and eat it too? Or, more likely, am I going to feel caught between a rock and a hard place, thinking that I’m failing at both roles? As you can see, even my unexamined thinking about this is binary: will I fail or succeed? And why is success or failure - to my critical mind, an inappropriate and unhelpful way of thinking about parenting - based on whether I am in paid employment or not?

Douglas and Michaels suggest that the reason for this is that the messages of the media, politicians, academics, advertisers, marketers, and the person in the street work to create cultural norms about motherhood. Arguing that, in many ways, the gains achieved by second-wave feminists are being eroded, they suggest that we have entered the era of the ‘new momism’. They describe the new momism as ‘the insistence that no women is truly complete or fulfilled unless she has kids, that women remain the best primary caretakers of children, and that, to be a remotely decent mother, a woman has to devote her entire physical, psychological, emotional and intellectual being, 24/7, to her children.’ (p 4)

But the new momism is more than just a return to the 1950s. Considered to be more progressive, it is apparently based on women’s choices. Women can choose to work, or they can choose to stay at home. So far, so good: women are positioned as active and autonomous agents in their own lives. But what are the consequences of their supposedly freely chosen choices? Douglas and Michaels argue that under the prevailing ideology the only correct ‘choice’ for all women is to ‘choose’ to have kids and to ‘choose’ to stay at home - only if middle class, mind - and devote their lives to them. Based on this analysis, Douglas and Michaels conclude that the new momism is therefore ‘deeply contradictory: it both draws from and repudiates feminism’. (p 5)

Meanwhile, back in the mothers’ group, a stay-at-home mother mourned the fact that people didn’t value what she did: ‘No-one thinks it’s important.’ Another insisted that she got plenty of stimulation from her children, and that if she went back to work then she’d get time for herself. A working mother, perhaps feeling cut to the quick by these comments, said that ‘she felt bad for going to work and leaving her kids.’ Another said she had returned to full-time work when her baby was very young, and was now looking forward to cutting back her hours to spend time with him. For mothers of a certain class, it seems, choosing to participate in paid employment located outside the home is a defining and dividing line.

I listened to all of them express how they felt, and I felt sad. I recognised some of the defensiveness in play - ‘my choice is really the right one ... isn’t it?’ - and I recognised the unspoken feelings of guilt, inadequacy and uncertainty driving them. I recognised them, because I feel that way too. I felt sad about it because I wanted very much for us all to cut each other some slack and to cut out the covert competitiveness. I’ve said it once and I’ll say it again - if only to keep convincing myself - THERE’S NO SUCH THING AS A PERFECT MOTHER.

Perhaps, in a salute to all mothers and in recognition of the value of whatever role they perform, it’s time to resurrect that cherished slogan of second-wave feminism: ‘every mother is a working mother’.

And consign the ‘mommy wars’ to the dustbin of history instead.