Books etc

Have no fear, I am not about to launch this post by saying that my two year-old is now able to read. She certainly enjoys books, and a combination of the pictures and (incredibly) repetitive reading means she can now reel off by heart the words in some of her books. But proper reading of unfamiliar words - in fact, of any words - is still a ways off yet.

No, the subject of this post, is books about child-bearing and child-rearing, more particularly, my antipathy towards them. I’m not the only one it seems. Novelist Rachel Cusk describes them in this way:

There are books about motherhood, as there are about most things. To reach them you must pass nearly everything, the civilised world of fiction and poetry, the suburbs of dictionaries and textbooks, on past books about how to mend your motorbike or plant begonias and books about doing your own tax return. Childcare manuals are situated at the far end of human experience, just past diet books and just before astrology.

It is possible, I sense, to make a specialism out of anything and hence unravel the native confidence of those you address. The more I read, the more my daughter recedes from me and becomes an object whose use I must relearn, whose conformity to other objects like her is a matter for liminal anxiety. (A Life’s Work, p 111)

I don’t want to totally slate these kind of books, nor criticise people for relying on them. At times, particularly in the first year of my baby’s life, I was as much in need of support and advice as anyone. I have talked with many people - other new mothers and fathers, experienced parents, health professionals - and I have read a few books, looked online and dipped into books and magazines. But my forays into child-bearing and rearing manuals - no matter how well-intentioned - have led me to conclude that Cusk, in her supercilious way, may be right: that they can work to undermine confidence even as they seek to reassure; that they can serve to distance a parent from their child - who becomes an object to be analysed or a problem to be solved - even as they emphasise responding sensitively to each child’s individuality and difference. 

I’m not suggesting that this is necessarily a conscious agenda of disempowerment on the part of the writers - much as it isn’t on the part of self-help books that exhort you to ‘Love Yourself’ and then give you tips on how to get your hair and makeup just-right. Rather, it seems to me that these contradictions help drive a process that effectively polices parents, especially new parents, and especially mothers. 

Recent research by historian Angela Davies has shown that childcare manuals by authors from Dr Spock to Gina Ford have been setting the bar too high and, for 50 years, mothers have felt more powerless, not less, after reading their words of wisdom. Davis carried out 160 interviews with women of all ages and from all backgrounds to explore their experiences of motherhood. In Modern Motherhood: Women and Family in England, 1945-2000, she says every manual designed to offer support and advice to women has had the opposite effect, leaving them dispirited and feeling inadequate. She says:  

Despite all the differences in advice advocated by these childcare 'bibles' over the years, it is interesting that they all have striking similarities in terms of how the experts presented their advice. Whatever the message, the advice was given in the form of an order and the authors highlighted extreme consequences if mothers did not follow the methods of child-rearing that they advocated. Levels of behaviour these childcare manuals set for mothers and babies are often unattainably high, meaning women could be left feeling like failures when these targets were not achieved. So while women could find supportive messages, some also found the advice more troubling. (Davis quoted in the Guardian)

Ordinarily a lover of books, I haven’t immersed myself in these ones, not least because in the weary times I wasn’t caring for my new baby, the very last thing I wanted to do was read about caring for babies. In fact, one of the first books I read after leaving the hospital and figuring out which day of the week it was was not What to Expect in Your Baby’s First Year but Please Kill Me: The Uncensored Oral History of Punk! I have dipped into them in times when I wasn’t sure about something - or done the online equivalent - but something stopped me from devouring them in pursuit of the secrets of good motherhood. 

Now, as this blog attests, this didn’t stop me reading about experiences of motherhood itself. Far from it. I have read books by novelists exploring their own experiences of motherhood, whether fictional (Margaret Drabble) or non-fictional (Anne Enright, Rachel Cusk). I have read about the experiences of professional women who have combined the insights of their working lives with their personal experiences of mothering (Sarah Blaffer Hrdy, Stephanie Coontz, Sue Kedgley). I have read the polemical works of feminist mothers (Adrienne Rich, Naomi Wolf, Elisabeth Badinter). And many more besides. 

Where these books - of which, it sometimes seems there are numbers now to rival the What to Expect, Baby Whisperer and Contented Baby ilk - differ from the how-to manuals is that, where they move beyond the ground of personal experience (and not all of them do), they seek to empower rather than undermine, to foster solidarity rather than individually guilt-trip, to analyse and critique rather than simply accept. One could argue that some of these approaches may alienate mothers who don’t wish to engage with the more political aspects of mothering, rather than the day-to-day business of it. That may well be the case. But what they don’t do is tell you how to do it nor imply consciously or not that you could be doing it wrong and you should be thinking about how you will get it right or pay the consequences at all times.

Elsewhere, Susan J. Douglas and Meredith W. Michaels trace the ways in which parental advice books have proliferated since the 1980s, as part of the ideology of what they call the ‘new momism.’ This has happened in parallel to the increasing dominance of neo-liberalism and the development of ‘turbo-capitalism’. As Susan Gregory Thomas outlines in Buy Baby Buy, this period also saw an explosion of toys and other materials aimed at parents. Similarly, the profusion of how-to books offer up the enticing proposition that good parenting can be bought and sold, that the secret to raising happy children is as simple as making the right purchase. And no matter how well the books of such high-profile feminists as Naomi Wolf might sell, they would be well below the sales figures and brand proliferation enjoyed by the likes of the What to Expect range.

When it comes to childcare books, it seems that making parents feel bad is pretty good for business.

'a spoonful of sugar helps the medicine go down'

‘In ev'ry job that must be done

There is an element of fun

you find the fun and snap!

The job's a game

And ev'ry task you undertake

Becomes a piece of cake

A lark! A spree!

It's very clear to me that ....’

In the last few weeks I have been negotiating my return to work. This has involved not only discussing how and when with my manager, but also, and more importantly, finding acceptable and affordable childcare. Unluckily for me, no Mary Poppins floated magically from the sky to provide her services free of charge. No Supernanny with TV crew in tow came knocking at the door. And, fortunately, no too-good-to-be-true nanny-with-an-agenda Peyton Flanders wants to offer her hands for my cradle.

Instead, propelled by dark mutterings about daycare lists as long as your arm and the dearth of quality childcare places available, I started trekking around various centres and visiting a number of in-home educators to try and find the right balance between what I could afford and what felt comfortable. Aside from the practical considerations, of course, returning to work and choosing childcare (two sides of the same coin) is cathected with other more intangible concerns: guilt, uncertainty, sadness. Convincing yourself that you’re doing the right thing by returning to work and leaving your child in someone else’s care is at least as much about your emotions as your bank account.

Novelist Rachel Cusk describes her search in A Life’s Work:

The person I had in mind was to be found not in the Yellow Pages but amidst choirs of heavenly angels, or in the pages of a storybook. She was wise, competent, kind, loving. Her salary was modest and vocational; her hours were love’s own. She had no earthly existence but sort of materialised on my doorstep each morning, took the baby reassuringly from my arms, wiped away my tears and said things like You just go off and enjoy yourself, we’ll have a lovely time here, won’t we? She was the projection of my conflicted self; she resolved the fact that I never wanted to leave my daughter with the unfortunate truth that if I didn’t I would never be able to do anything else again. (p 147)

I guess I’m not the only one who wishes that the Mary Poppins solution was a real option.

Meanwhile, back in the real world, I began my search for childcare while I was still pregnant. Fellow parents at work had warned me that daycare places filled up quickly in the central city. One woman who had visited a centre while she was eight months’ pregnant, and was not planning to return to work until the baby was one, was told she had left things to the last minute! Determined not to be similarly caught out, I too started doing the rounds, thinking how ridiculous this panic was: it meant long lists were kept artificially inflated by anxious parents-to-be who had no real idea what their childcare needs would be once their babies were born. I’m sure it suits daycare centres to be so in-demand.

I visited three centres before my baby was born. I walked into one, just down the road from me in a converted house, and nearly turned right round and walked back out again. My politeness gene kicked in, however, and I looked around the centre trying my best to swallow my feelings of dismay. I visited another, which was much better, but was slightly perturbed by the religious content. Nonetheless, I put our name down, thinking we could cope with that if necessary.

A third centre seemed to be The One. It seemed calm and spacious, well-lit and warm, with a lovely outdoor area and kindly staff. Feeling cheered, I enthuiastically asked where we could sign up. The centre manager was keen too, until I told her that my child would be 18 months before she would attend. ‘We only take children up to age two,’ she said. ‘It would be too disruptive to settle her in at 18 months and then send her someone else six months later.’ At the time, disappointed, I took this at face-value. Looking back on it, I find it hard to believe an 18-month old would find a third of their life-span to be too short a time in which to get settled. I also marvelled at the irony that I was effectively being prevented from my current top choice by my desire to stay at home longer than a year.

But, c’est la vie, it was not to be.

Feeling more and more exhausted by the late stages of pregnancy, I decided to put my search on hold until after the baby was born. I did, however, make the mistake of reading a little around what things to look for in choosing childcare. While I am otherwise a huge fan of books, in terms of raising children I think they have limited applicability (i.e. good for reference, but no substitute for instincts, experience and loving perserverance). And so it proved in this case.

On the one hand, some child-experts recommended day-care in well-lit, open-plan spacious rooms with high teacher-to-child ratios. This meant that children were in sight at all times, and presumably spoke to parents’ fears about the disturbing things that could happen to young children in daycare when no-one was looking. The subtext seemed to be the more adults around - preferably women, of course - the less chance your child would end up abused in some way. Sociability is emphasised rather than close attachments (which could, perhaps, be undesirable).

On the other hand, other childcare experts recommend the maintenanace of close, personal attachments for children, particularly under the age of two. Ideally, this would be a parent or other guardian (read: mother or grandmother), but, if you really have to go back to work (and do you, really?), a nanny or home educator is the best option. The subtext in this case is less about abuse - this has to be downplayed if you are to trust one person to look after your child - and more about child development. Brain and emotional development is emphasised rather than sociability.

I found both schools of thought played disturbingly on the already guilty feelings that I was having about childcare. At the same time, these subtexts made me angry. The spectre of institutionalised child abuse - which does happen, but is, mercifully, not common - encourages women (and it’s usually women) to either stay at home or stay concentrated in comparatively low-paid early childhood care. The spectre of possibly impeding your child’s development by placing them too soon into group daycare can work to make women rethink or postpone their return to work, lest they irretrievably damage their children. Assuming a basic level of parental care and attention, is it really so detrimental? After all, historians tell us that the breadwinner-homemaker family is a fairly recent invention and somehow homo sapiens has managed to not only survive but also prosper.

It was with some feeling of triumph then - and, to be honest, a little whisper of ‘yes, but how do I know they’re right? - that I read about recent research by feminist scholars on the effects of childcare on young children. They confirmed findings that very young children tend to have the best outcomes if they have a secure and loving relationship with a primary caregiver (note that this doesn't have to be the mother). However, they also found that there was very little difference between these children and children who had been in high-quality childcare from a young age.

There are key phrases here, such as, ‘high quality’ and ‘secure relationships’, that can still press buttons. What if you can’t afford ‘high quality?’ What if you can’t afford not to work? But the conclusions were much less emotive than those summarised above with their questionable subtexts. Importantly, they also placed these conclusions in the context of developing appropriate policies and flexible work-places that better supported the needs of all families with young children. In reviewing the available New Zealand literature in early 2011, the Children's Commissioner reached similar conclusions.

Once my baby was born, and after I had recovered enough to start looking again at childcare, I once more delved back into my quest. I visited several more daycare centres. With my actual child in tow, they all started to seem lacking in various ways: too dirty, too small, not enough outdoor space, not at all what I had envisaged. Some centres did not even return my phonecalls or emails of inquiry. Even though I still had several months to go before returning to work, I was starting to panic.

My husband and I discussed the possibility of us both working part-time and sharing childcare. This would’ve been my ideal, but in the more pragmatic world of the workplace, employers can be even less flexible with fathers than they can with mothers. So, in the short-term, this is not a realistic option for us.

We then decided to look into the option of in-home childcare. We found pretty soon that hiring a nanny would virtually eat up all my salary, and render working almost pointless. So, our next option was in-home childcare. A woman (and, yep, it’s usually women) looks after up to four children in her own home, with an emphasis on educative activities (or ‘play’, as you and I might like to call it). This seemed like a better option to us, and we went through a few agencies to meet different eductors. And, again, the quest was initially dispiriting. Few to no people available in our area, days that didn’t align with working-days and home environments that weren’t quite what I had in mind. I was starting to feel a bit like I had virtually no choice but to postpone my return to work a little longer, at least until my baby was two, and the childcare options became wider.

This feeling is apparently not an unusual one. In Opting Out? (2007), which explores the reasons why career women are apparently choosing to ‘opt out’ of the rat-race to become full-time mothers, sociologist Pamela Stone concludes that high-achieving women "face a double-bind which is created by the pressure to be both the ideal mother (based on the intensive mothering model) and the ideal worker…The result of this double bind is that their choices or options are indeed much more limited that they appear at first or than the women themselves appreciate."

I know I was starting to feel - from both work and the available childcare that I could afford - that my ‘choices’ were narrowing. The responsibility I don’t have a ‘choice’ about is my child’s wellbeing. If it came down to choosing between leaving her somewhere that I wasn’t really happy with, and returning to work, my ‘choice’ would be made for me.

Fortunately, that didn’t happen. We have, at last, found a childcare arrangement with which we are happy. I haven’t yet started back at work, so I can’t speak from the position of actually have left her with someone else for the entire working day, but, at the moment at least, I’m hugely relieved that I feel I can trust the people who will be looking after her.

And, for now, that’s my spoonful of sugar.

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.