Taking the plunge

It’s been a long time between drinks, both literally and metaphorically. The last time I had an alcoholic beverage - a very nice glass of gewurztraminer - was sometime in early January. And the last time I posted to this blog was shortly after the national census in March. Why this combination of abstinence and radio silence?

Well ... drum roll please ... because I have once  again taken the plunge and am nearly four months pregnant, with the baby due in early October. Woo .. hoo?

The main reason for my fall-off in motherhood-type musings, then, is that winning combination of marrow-deep exhaustion, endless nausea and frequent vomiting that characterise the first trimester (well, mine, at least). In this physical state, I’m feeling ahead of the game if I can get out of bed without being sick, drop off the child to her carer and get through a day of work.  

It’s been interesting - well, it’s passed the time anyway - to compare last time and this time, and I imagine the comparisons will continue all the way through the rest of the pregnancy to birth and beyond. Given that this blog was started well after my last pregnancy and birth experience, which I wrote about with the benefit of hindsight, I thought it might be fun - for me at least - to write about the second time round as it happens. Well, I won‘t be live-blogging the actual birth, but you get the idea.   

This time last year, I was still feeling pretty ambivalent about going through it all again. But time passes, and the idea of having another baby became more appealing. Or maybe I got to the point where I'd forgotten just enough of that very intense first year for it to seem like a good idea to take the plunge again.

So what’s happened so far? What’s the same and what’s different?

Having changed GPs, this time round I was congratulated on being pregnant, given a confirmation pregnancy test as well as comprehensive information on lead maternity carers ... and have not yet been compared to a car. Already this is a drastic improvement on how my previous doctor handled the news last time.

My current GP sent me for a 7-week dating scan. Having a lived appreciation of what is involved in bringing up one child, I spent much of the time beforehand convinced that I was going to have twins ... or even triplets. After drinking a litre of water in under an hour, so the radiologist would be able to find their way to the relevant bits, I sloshed my way to the ultrasound room. Again, we saw a shadowy egg sac and heard a beating heart. Fortunately, like last time, it was just the one. Phew. 

I have been for an optional 12-week scan, the principal reason for which is to screen for suspected chromosonal ‘abnormalities’. I had decidedly more mixed feelings about this scan this time round. Last time, I was excited about any opportunity to see what was going on in there, and the reason for actually having the scan felt very abstract and unreal. But this time round, I have a greater awareness of why the scan is offered and what it might mean for us, if the initial scan indicates that there might be a problem. I could’ve chosen not to have it, but at the same time I want to know even if if means facing more difficult choices further down the track. I’ve yet to receive the results, which are due next week. Fingers crossed.

While having the 12-week scan, the radiologist had some trouble trying to get a decent view of the embryo. While he focussed on getting a good image, he didn’t say much to me. In a state of heightened anxiety, I over-interpreted his silence to mean that he must’ve seen something concerning. Instead of the excitement of last time, I started feeling really upset watching the strange blob on the screen move around. I was on the verge of tears when he finally spoke, announcing that it’d taken him a while to get a good view. For the future, communication helps dude. Especially after my scan-o-rama experience last time.  

Even though I have been very tired and sick over the last few weeks, I’m fairly sure it hasn’t been quite as bad as last time (or maybe I’m just trying to kid myself this is the case). I’m starting to feel more like myself now, though some days are still better than others. I always go out with a trusty plastic bag or three with me: these came in handy the times I was sick right outside a core government department (on more than one occasion, I might add),  and at my desk just before a big meeting. On the plus side, I was less concerned with what might happen at the meeting, than with trying to look like I hadn’t lost my breakfast immediately beforehand. I think this is called perspective.

With a child around already whose needs and wants are very real and pressing, this baby - who I am yet to feel moving around - still feels very abstract and faraway. I’m finding it really hard to imagine having two little people around the place. The best I can come up with is a kind of clone of the one we already have ... only smaller. But, as I continually hear, babies are all different, and I’m wondering what new and special tricks this little one will have up his or her sleeve. Difficulty breastfeeding? All night feeding marathons? Reflux? Who knows...

Also in the abstract - and it’ll be interesting to compare what I write now to what I experience after the baby’s birth - I’m feeling like I might be a little more prepared this time round. Or, at least, that I have more of an idea of what to expect: how time-consuming a newborn baby is, how much they feed, how they might disrupt your sleep, the potential for feeling isolated, how you have to scale back what you can reasonably expect to do in a day and so on. But perhaps this is a comforting illusion? Time will tell ...

Finally, in quieter moments, there is one thing that I hope will be very different this time around. The birth experience itself. After last time, the doctors at the hospital assured us that there was no reason I couldn’t have another child and that it was very unlikely what had happened then would happen again. Unlikely ... but not impossible, says a small voice in my brain, who is still not entirely convinced that another baby is a great idea. For me, then, taking the plunge a second time round is about the triumph of hope over experience, of feeling more informed and preparing myself as much as I can (including specifying a preference for an emergency caesarean over forceps, if the need arises), and of feeling the fear and doing it anyway. 

review: How To Be A Woman

Newsflash! Feminism is not fusty, fussy and frowny.  It’s fun, funny and frivolous. After all, ‘it’s a good time to be a woman: we have the vote and the Pill and we haven’t been burnt as witches since 1727.’ But, as Caitlin Moran, concedes ‘a few nagging questions do remain.’

Indeed.

If the blurb on the back of the book is to be believed, Moran has the answers to the questions that every modern woman is asking. 

After finishing it, I’m not quite so sure. Some of the questions about botox and brazilians seem less like the concerns of ‘every modern woman’ and more like the kind of things you might find posited as ‘issues’ in Cosmo. 

Having said that, I do think it’s great that this book has struck a chord with many girls and women, who have found something of value in it, and have, hopefully, taken up Moran’s call to re-define themselves as ‘strident feminists.’ And if it then encourages them to take a deeper look at the serious, momentous and urgent stuff rather than simply guffawing at an anecdote about getting really drunk with Lady Gaga, then Moran will have achieved a great deal. Several reviews have already welcomed the book in this way, and I think it’s difficult to argue with the positive impact a best-selling book about feminism can have. I myself was interested in her insider's take on how the media construct representations of female celebrities as 'everywomen' (basically, by asking when they're going to have a baby all the time).

Other reviewers have, however, criticised this book because of what they perceive as its inherent snobbery and focus on the mores of a particular social set, likening it to a Victorian etiquette book in the process. More broadly, I think the book reveals the limits of individual memoir as a ground for political action. Memoir gives a writer license to retreat into the authority of subjectivity, so, in Moran’s case, one could be forgiven for thinking that brazilians appear to rate more highly than rape as a feminist issue (although I realise it’s not a zero-sum game and there is a relationship between the two). I found myself torn between interest in Moran’s memoirs - she’s lived an interesting life and spins many a funny yarn about it - frustration at her wanting to make a joke of everything all the time, and exasperation at some of the supposedly empowering solutions she trumpets (burlesque and female-centric porn will set us free apparently. Um, really?) 

Yes, the personal is  political, and (paraphrasing bell hooks) ‘there is no joy in appropriating someone else’s oppression’. The power of consciousness-raising rooted in personal experience is then to elevate it to the structural: ‘I’m only earning half as much as that doofus of guy doing the same job as me’ - ‘me too’ - ‘let’s start a revolution!’ The idea is that even those not directly affected will recognise that ‘there but for the grace of God ...’ 

All the amusing anecdotes and hilarious romps involving lots of booze, Lady Gaga and so on got a bit wearing after a while. I couldn’t help but think that while there was a lot of strategic mileage to be had out of the ‘feminism is fun, dontcha know’ schtick that there was also a disavowal of some righteous anger as well. Women aren’t meant to be angry, so it was disappointing to see Moran, in interviews promoting the book, quickly pointing out that she’s a funny feminist not a scary or awful one. 

Sure, pioneering feminists like the suffragettes might’ve shared some laughs over a gin or three, but they went on hunger strikes, chained themselves to railings, lobbied politicians, and even threw themselves under horses because they were bloody well PISSED OFF at not having the vote and not having the right to own property. Similarly, second wave feminists probably had a rollicking good time at consciousness-raising sessions, protest marches, and speculum parties. But they were also pretty incensed at being poorly paid for their work, being stuck at home with small kids all day while being treated as little more than children themselves, needing male relatives to sign documents for them, being subject to overt sexual harassment as part of daily working life, being unable to decide their own reproductive futures, and, in some cases, being legally raped by their husbands. 

Pretty hilarious stuff, when you get down to it.

And yet, there are other moments when Moran drops the quips that have a quiet power. In the book’s postscript she poses herself the rhetorical question ‘so do I know how to be a woman now?’  Instead of the expected self-deprecation, she writes ‘I distrust this female habit of reflexively flagging up your own shortcomings ... I’m talking abut the common attitudinal habit in women that we’re kind of ... failing if we’re not a bit neurotic.’ Her response to the question instead? ‘Kind of yes, really, to be honest (pp 297-8).’ Not exactly strident, maybe still a little neurotic, but progress nonetheless. 

Where the book is most powerful - and given its theme - most pertinent to this blog, is in the chapters on birth, mothering, not-mothering, and abortion. These chapters are the strongest because the amusing anecdotes and wry asides retreated - but, you’ll be relieved to know, didn’t disappear entirely - to include moments where, to put it bluntly, shit gets real. Particularly confronting was her chapter on abortion, which aimed to show that deciding one’s own reproductive fate is about more than what happens in cases of rape and incest. 

Here are a couple of selections from these chapters:

(on birth): of course, I haven’t told you the half of it. I haven’t told you about Pete crying, or the shit, or vomiting three feet up a wall, or gasping ‘mouth!’ for the gas and air, as I’d forgotten all the words. Or the nerve that Lizzie damaged with her face and how, ten years later, my right leg is still numb and cold. Of the four failed epidurals, which left each vertebra smashed and bruised, and the fluid between them feeling like hot, rotting vinegar. And the most important thing - the shock, the shock that Lizzie’s birth would hurt me so much; would make me an animal with my leg caught in a trap of my own bones, and leave me begging for the doctors to take a knife and cut me free. // For the next year, every Monday at 7.48am, I would look at the clock and remember the birth, and tremble and give thanks it was all over, and marvel that we both survived. (pp 221-2)

(on deciding to have an abortion) This isn’t who I’m going to be again: another three years of being life support to someone who weeps for me, and rages against me, and who knows, when they’re ill, can only be relieved by resting their head on my belly, and dreaming they’re back inside. My two girls ... are all I want .. I’ll do anything for those girls. // But I will only do one thing for this baby - as quickly as I can before it goes any further (p 271)

To me, these stories offer a much more powerful version of the personal is political than the chapters which preceded it. By putting herself out there in this way, Moran really has the potential to speak to other women’s experience and effect change. But that's all a bit po-faced and serious, innit?