confessions of a dairy cow

Last week I was buttonholed in a cafe by a guy with time on his hands who wanted a chat. I was trying to breastfeed the baby at the time, and, frankly, just wanted to be left alone. The baby is easily distracted at the moment, so - while I am committed to trying to feed her in public - it is not always easy and unwanted attention at the wrong time doesn't help. 

This guy's son was playing with my elder daughter in the cafe's play area, which provided him with a licence to chat. During the course of this mostly one-sided conversation - my responses were mostly 'mms' and 'that must've been difficult' and 'reallys' (which, I was told, meant that I was 'shy'. Too 'shy' to tell him to just bugger off and leave me alone, I guess). Apparently, Mr Cafe was not an acute reader of high-context communication. During the course of his monologue, he told me about his son's mother - they are separated - and her struggles with breastfeeding. She had had a difficult time with it - for which she had my sympathies ... and not only for her breastfeeding woes. He then described her as a 'cystic cow'. 

I misheard him and thought he'd said a 'stink cow'. 'A what?' I said. 

'A cystic cow,' he repeated. 'Do you know what this is?'  Without waiting for my answer he told me that a cystic cow was one who can't be milked. 

Nice. 

Whatever may've happened between them, he referred to his ex-partner, who had clearly struggled with breastfeeding - and quite possibly because of mastitis given his choice of imagery - as a sick animal.

I was offended on her behalf and didn't even bother producing my half-hearted rejoinders after that. A passive response, to be sure, but then I was still sitting on the couch pinned in place by a nursing baby, while he was standing. Once again, having a baby made me acutely conscious of my physical vulnerability  ... and hers. 

He eventually got the message that I was no longer interested in listening to him, however, and left.

This encounter got me thinking about cows more generally.  

'Cow'' can be used a comparatively mild insult for a woman (as compared with, say, 'bitch', another animal insult). It has a variety of uses: it can refer to size, especially if someone is blocking your way, intelligence ('stupid cow') or unkindness ('mean or nasty cow'). It can even be used as a means of expressing pity for someone ('poor cow').

And, apparently, if you breastfeed it can just be straightforward term of description. 

I've never been referred to as a 'cystic cow', but I have been jokily likened to a dairy cow because I was breastfeeding more than once. 

Images of human female breasts and dairy cows are frequently conflated: just try to Google 'milkmaid' like I did to find an image for this post and see what you come up with. Believe me, my choice is at the very modest end of the spectrum. Images of buxom women with their breasts on display while milking cows were prevalent.

Or recall the character Nursie from Blackadder Two. Still present at Court as a blatant figure of ridicule (she is big and stupid, a stereotypically bovine woman), Queen Elizabeth 1's wet nurse is described as having an 'udder fixation' and every year dresses as a cow  'with lots of lovely udders' for the fancy dress ball. Whenever she tries to contribute to affairs of state, she is silenced - 'mouth is open Nursie, should be closed' - not least because she can remind the monarch of when she was young, vulnerable and dependent on an unlettered poor woman for sustenance. All of a sudden, she doesn't seem quite so funny.

But on examining my feeling of insult at being likened to a cow, I realised that I was also buying into the notion that cows are inferior.  Because actual cows, as opposed to women described as cows, are not stupid or unkind. They may be big, but that is the way their bodies are made. They do not raise or exploit another species of animal for the production of food and drink and they do not insult each other by calling each other 'humans.'

Animalising a human being is a way of seeing them as less than human, for sure, but it is also a way of reinscribing the supposed fact that humans are superior to other animals, of suppressing the fact that we are animals ourselves.

I began to feel empathy for actual dairy cows, whose calves are weaned early and who are kept artificially lactating so people can consume a vast array of dairy products. For a breastfeeding feminist, veganism seems a logical ethical choice, as these bloggers articulate (here and here). 

While I can intellectually relate to this call to abandon dairy products in solidarity with actual dairy cows, I have to confess that my dependency on cheese and yoghurt has meant that I have not yet put my money where my mouth is. It is salutary to reflect, however, that many people consume a dairy-laden diet, but there is a general squeamishness about products made with human breastmilk. 

I'm not suggesting that we all need to abandon ice-cream for breastmilk yoghurt, but thinking about the links between humans as animals - breastfeeding being an obvious link between humans and other mammals - and dairy cows shows up the contradictions and hypocrisies that drive industrial farming. And that's before we even get to artificial hormones, dodgy feed and other illegal practices. 

Regardless of my new appreciation of veganism as a feminist practice and my growing understanding of animal rights, I still don't like being described as a dairy cow because I'm breastfeeding.

Maybe I'm just a stubborn cow that way.

It's a girl!

I'm back!

With a ten-week old baby asleep - for the moment - in her basket.

And a three-year old in childcare.

I just have a few snatched moments as I hear the baby stirring a little. But what I have learned in the past ten weeks is to snatch the time to do things for myself here and there when I can. Waiting for a clear half hour or more makes for a crash course in frustration.

So! We have another baby girl who is getting bigger day by day and is slowly becoming more settled and a little less unpredictable. I’m obviously biased, but I think she is adorable. Just like her big sister.

In the last thirteen weeks since I went parental leave, I have:

• done a two and a half hour job interview six days before giving birth (not recommended. I was so shattered afterwards I went to bed straight after dinner)
• given birth via elective caesarean section (of which more another time when it feels a bit more in the dim and distant past. But, in brief, everything went well this time around. Hurrah!)
• been discharged by my midwife and had two visits from the local Plunket nurses (of which more in another post)
• felt really upset as I listened to the cries of baby number two as she had her six-week vaccinations. On the plus side, she seemed fine afterwards. 
• heard people say some really odd things about second children in general and girls in particular (or which more in another post)
• not had nearly as much as sleep as I’d like and trying not to get my hopes up about her sleeping through the night
• breastfed the baby, then fed her again, and again, and again ...
• read both hopeful (a test case for gender pay equity in New Zealand and calls for a shorter working week) and depressing  (the repellent Roast Busters being top of the list) things in the papers about mothers, and girls and women in general. There is still a long way to go to achieve genuine gender equality.
• felt, so the ending to a million primary school stories goes, ‘tired but happy’.

That’s all I got for now. 

I think I hear the baby calling....

The milk of human kindness?

Kate Middleton’s breasts are not the only ones being pawed over in the media at the moment: mothers are copping it too.  

Breastfeeding appears to be the latest beat-up of mothers in the media. Hardly a day goes past, it seems, without some story or other about mothers and what they do with their breasts. Some cite mothers who sing the praises of breastfeeding, others tell of the stories of mothers were made to feel bad for not being able to breastfeed. Some articles push the ‘breast is best’ message, while others opine that sometimes breast is not best after all and most mothers don't even met their own breastfeeding goals. Some articles even carry opinion polls: did you breastfeed and are bottle-feeding mothers vilified? As if they are a disinterested party, newspapers also observe that the breastfeeding debate has 'gone sour'.

Of course, there’s those celebrity breasts too: Jessica Simpson is apparently addicted to breastfeeding while others proudly and publicly trumpet their plans to do it . Even Posh Spice, fourth time round, breastfed, describing it as ‘heaven’. 

And, a few months ago, the media struck gold: a seismic backlash and counter-backlash over an anti-smoking advertisement (which was not actually about breastfeeding at all) featuring a celebrity father who was bottle-feeding his young child. The furore over this one seemed to leave everyone reeling: bottle-feeding mothers, breastfeeding mothers, breastfeeding advocates, and fathers who wanted to be involved in the care of their babies. 

This explosion of stories about breastfeeding seems to me less about what is best for children (and way way less about what is best for women), and more about divide-and-rule - just like it is with artificial divisions created between stay-at-home-mothers and working mothers. The reality is that many women both breastfeed and bottle-feed:  one mother I know principally breastfed her children, but, as a full-time working mother, also supplemented with formula. Other mothers I know who were unable to continue breastfeeding, persevered for several weeks to try and give their babies the benefits of breastmilk, then switched to formula, so their babies didn’t, y’know, starve. Others breastfed for several months, but switched to formula before the magical 12-month mark either because they just couldn’t take it any more or their doctor advised stopping breastfeeding for the sake of their own health. Some women also formula-feed from birth, while others exclusively breastfeed and continue breastfeeding until their children choose to self-wean. Breastfeeding, like so much else when it comes to mothering, is a spectrum not a monolith.

Society remains deeply conflicted about women’s breasts. While public health officials, following the guidelines of the World Health Organisation, push exclusive breastfeeding for at least six months as the ideal, ‘the public’ are reportedly and repeatedly squeamish at the sight of a woman baring her breasts in public and latching a baby or young child on to them. Images, such as that on a recent Time cover of a woman breastfeeding her toddler, which generated a great deal of comment and controversy, are considered beyond the pale. 

Mothers therefore seem to be getting some pretty mixed messages about breast-feeding: do it at all costs to the exclusion of everything else but don’t even think about continuing past about eighteen months because that’s just plain weird.

Hmmm ... okay. 

Meanwhile, the actual women on the other end of those much-handled breasts are given pretty short shrift. Some report being made to feel like bad mothers if, for whatever reason, they can’t or won’t breastfeed. While others who want to breastfeed their children for as long as the children want it are labelled as freaks and even child-molesters. Those who advocate breastfeeding and want to support mothers establish feeding, are frustrated by extreme depictions of their work (some advocates are even described using references to Nazism and Islamist fundamentalism. I mean, really? Just because they think breastfeeding is best and want to try and help women feed their babies?) 

Yet another example of women caught in an impossible and contradictory double-bind that means all women fail situation. How unusual.

I have to say, even some feminists are uncertain about what it all means, and have debated whether breastfeeding is feminist or not. Some consider that it is, while others confess a deep ambivalence, and still others contend that formula-feeding has been an important development in freeing women from biological servitude (though if you want to breastfeed that’s okay too). My own feeling is that this is entirely the wrong question to be asking. Breastfeeding in itself is neither feminist nor unfeminist: supporting women to make the best choices they can for themselves and their families in the circumstances in which they find themselves is.

I personally breastfed for a just over a year, and have never used formula. But here’s what I had going for me in order to make that ‘choice’: 

• the physical ability to do so
• a baby who seemed to know how to latch on properly herself (and not all of them do)
• no severe side-effects such as cracked nipples or mastitis
• no other disability or illness that would affect my ability to breastfeed
• a baby with a good appetite who took to solid food well, meaning that breastfeeding became much less time-consuming after about 8-9 months
• a supportive husband, who got the baby up for every feed during the night, and, recognising the toll it took both physically and emotionally, stepped up and took on other domestic jobs
• a decently-paid job from which I could choose to either take a long period of parental leave in order to focus on the baby or return to work and have breastfeeding breaks, privacy to breast feed and/or pump milk.

All that support notwithstanding, I’m not sure I would share Victoria Beckham’s view that it was ‘heaven’.  Here’s how I felt about it: 

• pleased I could do it, especially after a difficult birth that didn’t go at all the way I thought it would
• bored at being stuck in one place while the baby fed for up to 90 minutes at a time 
• resentful at being the only one who could do it
• worried that the baby wouldn’t gain enough weight (health authorities might push you to breastfeed but with their obsession with weighing them, particularly in the early days, it can send a message that breastfeeding isn't very reliable)
• a sense of duty and obligation that if I could do it I should

These are probably not the noblest reasons for breastfeeding, but I’d be lying if I said that I loved it every single minute of every single day. And I think the media and wider culture does all mothers a disservice to perpetuate sentimental and misleading ideals about breastfeeding. I don’t see how it will encourage more mothers to breastfeed if there is not also some honesty about what it takes to do it: time and a lot of patience, support (from partners, families, health workers, and the wider community), understanding, societal structures and practices that can accommodate it, a little bit of luck, and, yes, knowing there is a formula tin available if it is needed.  

Guess that just doesn't make for an attention-grabbing story though, does it?

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.

'I'm pregnant, now what can I eat ...?'

Once my initial doctor had managed to get past the automotive metaphors, and started to engage a little more with me as a pregnant woman rather than a sprained ankle attached to a sportsperson, he started giving me the hard word on what I should and shouldn’t eat. His nurse, who was only marginally warmer than he was - at least she congratulated us - handed me an envelope full of guidelines and advertisements dressed up as information to wade through on the subject of good nutrition in pregnancy. There was specific information on the risks associated with certain foods.

With a heavy heart, I had already forsworn sushi. Not being a meat-eater and rarely having the opportunity to eat shellfish (which was also banished), I had thought I was pretty much OK with everything else. So it was with an even heavier heart, that I read through the list. Soft cheeses were out, even if pasturised, as were eggs with runny yolks (bye bye eggs benedict, it was nice knowing you). Any deli food, including salads, which had been standing rather than freshly cooked was off the menu. My work lunch options were starting to narrow alarmingly. As I read further, I was surprised to note that hummus - made from cooked chickpeas, pounded sesame seeds, lemon juice, garlic and olive oil - was out too. I realise it is about risk rather than intrinsic harmfulness, but is it really possible to catch listeria from the humble chickpea? Then I thought it must be the anaemic kind that you buy at the supermarket, and momentarily cheered myself with the thought that this was the moment to start making it myself. Not so, according to the food police, even the home-made variety was suspect.

At this point, I started to panic. What on earth was I going to eat? I couldn’t just live on biscuits (which, being thoroughly cooked, were surprisingly OK), rock-hard scrambled eggs and rice for nine months. Not to worry, however. The morning sickness soon kicked in with a vengeance and I was lucky if I could keep down some plain pasta and peas.

Little did I realise that this was the first in a slew of attempts to police my body and appetites in the guise of being ‘for the good of the baby.’ Given that most pregnant women are concerned for the health of their unborn child, what is particularly insidious about this long list of dos and don’ts is that it guilt-trips women into policing themselves and each other. How shocking is it, for example, to see a pregnant woman having a sip of wine, and God forbid, having a tasty slice of brie with it? You can practically hear the CYFS hotline number being punched into a hundred mobile phones.

But it doesn’t end there. Far from it. I have an acquaintance who is determined to breastfeed for as long as possible till her child is possibly even three or four, not, apparently, because she wants to (though I presume she does), but because the ‘World Health Organisation recommends it’. The WHO actually states:

Exclusive breastfeeding is recommended up to 6 months of age, with continued breastfeeding along with appropriate complementary foods up to two years of age or beyond (my emphasis).

So it’s hardly an edict. It seems a little over the top to continue breastfeeding because some suits in Geneva recommend it (and that’s not exactly what they say, in any case). I note that it is the World Health Organisation too: they offer best practice advice to mothers all over the world, not just those in wealthy nations. So it’s probably preferable to continue breastfeeding in places where the alternatives are to drink formula or powdered milk made with unsafe water (hang your head in shame, Nestlé) resulting in disease and death.

In New Zealand, we have the luxury of not having to make that ‘choice’. Given that it’s not such a life or death situation, I can’t help but feel that the food police and the breastfeeding zealots are part and parcel of the same thing: the control of women’s bodies and appetites. Of course, some expectant mothers do eat soft cheese, hummus and have the odd cheeky glass of wine, probably with the added frisson of doing something they shouldn’t. A bit like having a piece of cake when you’re meant to be on a diet: a transgression against the regime of disciplining the body into society’s expectations of it. Only, pregnant women aren’t meant to diet. So it seems that food dos and don’ts offer a replacement regime to which women should either rigidly stick or from which they guiltily fall off the wagon. It seems that there’s no escape from the beauty myth.

Of course, it is also tied up with perfect mother syndrome. Falling into line with the prevailing wisdom on appropriate nutrition for you while pregnant, or for the baby once it is born, is a way of ensuring that you are doing the right thing, even while others may not. That it’s also submitting to someone else’s idea of how you should run your life might not even enter the frame.

I have to confess that I was one of the more scrupulous pregnant women: I sadly passed the sushi counter sniffing the air like a melancholic puppy, passed on the blue cheese and camembert at work functions, and didn’t even think about wine, let alone hummus, that horror of horrors. I even consulted a book called I’m Pregnant, Now What Do I Eat?

In retrospect, I am a little surprised at my docility. At the time, however, I felt apprehensive. I was worried that something I might do, whether inadvertent or intentional would harm the baby. Of course, there are some risks, but, as I am increasingly finding, babies are more resilient than we are led to believe. Mothers I know who did eat hummus and soft cheese while pregnant delivered healthy babies, with no sign yet of their having suffered through exposure to chickpeas and processed milk in utero. So is it the baby we are protecting by being so vigilant or dominant cultural values that primarily define women according to their bodies?

'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 ...