'it's like running a marathon'

Who said Superwoman was dead?

Perhaps the 1970s’ ideal of the mother who does everything - childcare, paid employment, housework - is down and out (and according to novelist and journalist Shirley Conran she is). But if we conceive of Superwoman more like Superman - the embodiment of physical strength and capability - maybe she deserves to be resurrected. For any woman who goes through pregnancy, birth and early motherhood well deserves the tribute.

I was repeatedly told that being pregnant and giving birth was like running a marathon. The first trimester, that anxious period of waiting for the magical twelve-week marker when it’s ‘safe’ to finally tell all and sundry, is like running one marathon. The newly fertilised egg is busy turning itself into a zygote into a blastocyst into an embryo, and zapping all your energy and mineral reserves into the process (a bit like a National government and strip-mining). And you run this marathon while probably ingesting much less food than you ex-gest (is that a word?) due to morning sickness.

There’s some respite during the second trimester, when (if!) the nausea and vomiting subsides, and you’re not yet quite the size of a house. My midwife confidently told me that I’d feel amazing during this trimester, better than I ever had before. This euphoric feeling didn’t materialise for me, but after weeks of living on the plainest of plain carbohydrates and staying horizontal for as long as possible in order to avoid an emergency trip to the bathroom, just feeling more or less normal was good enough for me.

Then the second marathon begins in the third trimester. As your girth increases, so, unless you’re blessed with the right genes, do the stretch marks, the swollen ankles, and the developing milk glands (the body parts formerly known as ‘breasts’). You begin to waddle slowly rather than walk, your pace decreasing as the weeks go by. If you’re really lucky you’ll have considerate friends, family or work colleagues who will delight in pointing this out to you, as they know you’ll never be able to get up enough pace to catch them and punch them in the arm and will have to settle for a murderous glance instead. You’ll feel more and more tired, probably compounded by not being able to sleep very well, and baby by now may well have seriously depleted your iron stores.

And then the third and most daunting marathon begins: labour and birth. During this stage, a woman’s body does some amazing stuff: the muscles of the uterus contract, the cervix thins and dilates, and then every part works to push the baby down the birth canal and out of the vagina. Spent and bloody, new mums can feel invincible (assuming they haven’t been carted off to theatre for emergency surgery of one kind or another that is). Whatever the outcome of the birth, the next few weeks and months involve the body furiously healing its caesarean sites, episiotomy incisions, perineal or cervical tears, ruptured uterine walls, or stretched and sore muscles.

So three marathons in nine months, and that’s even before you get to round-the-clock feeding (breastfeeding being particularly physically demanding), sleep deprivation, carrying the baby round, and trying to recover from the most profound physical effort of your life. As someone who had previously felt exhausted at even the thought of one marathon, let alone three, this sounds like Superwoman to me.

From the vantage point of a year later, when I have well and truly recovered from the experience, a trace of that invincibility remains. If I feel tired while swimming and unsure if I can make a few more lengths, or if I hurt my shoulder and wonder how I’m going to manage, I remind myself that I gave birth and survived.

Women’s bodies are conventionally subject to all kinds of scrutiny: too thin or too fat, too tall or too short, hips too wide, breasts too small, arms too skinny, thighs too wobbly, or tummies too flabby. But how often do we stop and celebrate what they can actually do? As Naomi Wolf argued in The Beauty Myth, women will always be found wanting when it comes to conventional ideas of beauty. But bodies are not primarily made to fit a pre-determined and static idea of what ‘beautiful’ is. Whether it’s giving birth, digesting food, lifting and carrying, producing milk, playing music, writing a book, or even running an actual marathon, bodies - women - are capable of being and doing so much more than looking aesthetically pleasing in a two-dimensional photograph.

And isn’t that worthy of being called Superwoman?

review: Confessions of a Coffee Group Drop Out

On a typically blustery Wellington spring day, I had no choice but to take the baby to the local library so that we could get out of the house. If we had braved the playground there’s no telling if either of our hairdos would recover. Given that the baby has virtually no hair, this is really saying something. So, as she rampaged around the shelves, trying her best to get in the lift and upend the rubbish bin, I surveyed the Bestsellers shelf. In between the most recent Booker winner and Jamie Oliver’s latest offering, I happened upon Eleanor Black’s Confessions of a Coffee Group Dropout: Navigating New Motherhood, which was published this year. I had a quick flick through it and discovered that it was a New Zealand journalist’s reflections on new motherhood: wry, highly personalised, and sprinkled with soundbites from interviews with other new mums.

From the cover, you could be forgiven for thinking it was chick lit, especially given the predominance of (do I even need to tell you this?) Barbie pink. So much so, that I was kinda embarrassed to go and get it out. I had to get out Julian Barnes’ Sense of Ending as well, just to restore my credibility to myself (with Julian Barnes? Oh dear). Although I did start reading Black's book first.

It reads like a light version of both Life After Birth - but without the historical research and overt political agenda - and novelist Anne Enright’s Making Babies - but without her idiosyncratic brand of witty bleakness. Which is not to say it is all kittens and puppies. Far from it. Black’s book tackles such subjects as unwanted advice, dropping out of coffee groups, competitive mummy wars and trying to do it all. I can imagine her as an amusingly negative alternative mum, rolling her eyeballs behind the backs of the other mothers in her coffee group who are comparing notes about their favourite preserving methods. It was an entertaining read, despite the not-too-promising cover.

But, like Kate Figes, Black seems concerned with ‘truth-telling’, and trying to reassure both expectant and new mums that the perfect ‘supermum’ doesn’t exist and that everyone lies about childbirth and childrearing. Although she doesn’t overtly espouse a feminist politics, her myth-busting certainly seems to have a pro-woman agenda. She uses the trope of ‘lying’ a lot, which I found kind of intriguing. Black almost goes so far as to posit that there is something of a conspiracy about childbirth, where mums don’t tell expectant mums what to really expect. Even though childhood seems to be increasingly wrapped up in crass sentimentalism, I’m kind of wondering who these new mums are who really think that childbirth will be a piece of cake, and that doing the lion’s share of bringing up a baby is going to be easy. I mean, it’s not called labour for no reason, right?

There’s no doubt that the actual experience is not something you can really prepare for - whether it’s a birth that doesn’t go anything like you thought it would, or a child who cries all day for no apparent reason, or feeling like your identity has been eroded because you don’t have an income and no-one looks you in the eye anymore. But I’m not sure that the opposition of lying and truth really captures it. I wonder if the emphasis on ‘truth-telling’ is a - perhaps unconscious - attempt to construct a universal shared female experience (ignoring the fact, of course, that not all women have babies). If we were all honest about what having babies was like, then we would all be able to find that womanly solidarity that continues to elude is, and would just stop all these competitive mummy wars and dull domestic chitchat.

Nice as that desire is, I think it’s just as limiting as the more sentimental narratives around, because it attempts to erase difference at the same time as insisting on it. What I mean is that, on the one hand, Black tells us that there are many different ways to be a mother and you have to find what suits you (so far, so good), but on the other hand, she’s also kind of dismissive of coffee groups and various other activities that some women find essential to getting through the day.

I wonder if the crux of the issue is less about an opposition between truth and lies - which begs a lot of questions, not least who’s truth? - and more about embodiment. By that I mean both emphasising the material aspects of lived human experience, and remaining focussed on the differences that embodiment necessarily entails. And those differences - which could be related to class or race, or location, or support networks, or eduction (to name a few) - are determining. Something as profound as giving birth marks women’s bodies - which are already different - in different ways, and alters the ways in which they perceive themselves, and others. While the experience gives women things in common, it doesn’t make them the same, and never will. Perhaps the mistake is imagining that it might?