Conserving energy

You know that saying about the road to Hell? Yeah, well I had all sorts of good intentions after my long period of radio silence of getting back into my regular blogging habits, but ... I got a little derailed by a full-on couple of weeks, which have been personally capped by the likelihood of losing my job (it has been ‘disestablished’ under a current proposal for a new organisational structure, which is due to be finalised at the end of May) and a bout of lurgy that took me back to my sick-bed just as I was finally getting over that pesky morning sickness. Hmmm, I know, first world problems, right?  

To put it in perspective, this was the same fortnight that saw the Boston marathon bombings, a series of bombings in Iraq ahead of provincial elections, the death and funeral of divisive former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, a major industrial accident in Texas and, more positively, the passing of legislation to ensure marriage equality in New Zealand and then France (the 13th and 14th countries to pass such legislation). Among other things. All things considered, being a bit sick, but otherwise reasonably healthy, and still having a pay-check while my organisation settles on and into a new structure seem like things worth being thankful for. 

All of this perspective then got me thinking about energy. More specifically, about how to conserve and renew it. Not in the environmental and economic sense of energy sources, whether fossil or renewable, clean, green or fracked-up. Nor in the sense of excess energy that needs to be expended, as in Georges Bataille’s Accursed Share ... or in the case of an over-active toddler.

No, I mean, energy in the sense of the life-force - or lack of it - that each person draws on to get through the day. You know how some days you feel like you can do anything, and if you get a few extra tasks to do, you can take them in your stride, no problem? (I dimly recollect these kind of days). Or some days you just feel so ground down that everything, no matter how small, seems like a chore and an imposition? Objectively, there may be little difference to tell between the kinds of things a person has to do on each of these days. The difference between them lies in the reserves of energy a person can draw on in order to get through them. Those reserves of time and energy can be eroded by any number of things: for example, a decline in physical health, over-committing oneself, lack of support, abuse.  On the other hand, they can also be built up: for example, by enjoying your work, having a supportive network of family and/or friends, volunteering, exercising.  

Each person occupies a series of roles that require some of this energy: for example, as a family member (and most people occupy more than one role in their families), a friend, community member, person with interests and activities (I hate the word ‘hobbies’), workers and so on. For these roles to be active, each requires some of your time and energy. Most days, it’s a question of making sure those are as in balance as it’s possible for them to be, given the range of other factors going on in people’s lives. Some of these roles are energising: it can be fun to relax with friends or family or to feel like you’ve made a bit of a difference in a piece of work or in community activity. Other roles can suck your energy: a proposed job-restructure is incredibly de-motivating and de-stabilising to an organisation and its workers, even if their jobs aren’t on the line.

One of the things that was absorbing my energy recently was feeling bad that I wasn’t able to contribute to the care of my daughter while I was experiencing morning sickness in the way that I had before I got pregnant. In order to get out the door in the morning, my husband and I had previously split the jobs that needed to be done to do this. Even though it was obviously great that my husband took over nearly all the toddler-related wrangling while I was sick, I felt bad that this was the case. I also felt bad that the increased level of care he gave her meant that she increasingly turned to him if she was upset or wanted something, or started saying things like ‘I don’t want my mummy’ when she passed by on her way to breakfast. (Sidenote: this was also the period when she started saying things like ‘I don’t want my feet’ so I didn’t take her words too much to heart, even though they stung a little.)

It was while thinking about energy and how much each role needs, that I started to think more about the new role that I was (and am) assuming: that of mother-to-be. Not that anyone was accusing me of malingering or anything and my sense of feeling-bad was entirely self-imposed, but I realised that I hadn’t yet made the mental switch to the fact that I am now no longer ‘just’ the mother of one child. That second child might not yet be born, but it was definitely making its presence felt and demanding energy from me. And I am currently the only one who can provide that energy. While I was struggling to keep my breakfast down, I was also growing a foetus and a placenta, and various other parts of my body were changing too to accommodate them. Thought about this way, the energy my husband is directly investing in the second child is minimal at present, even as the energy he is putting into the care of the first is increasing. This shifting of energy, of trying to find the ideal balance between all my (and our) roles, is only going to become more necessary once the baby is actually born. 

In one sense, this is all kind of obvious. But, for me, it actually required me to sit down and think about how and where I use my energy to realise that feeling bad about being unable to care for my daughter in the way I’d like while having ‘morning’ sickness is a waste of time and energy. Not least because she doesn’t care that I feel bad that I didn’t get her up in the morning, she only cares that I get her up in the morning or, if I don’t, that someone else does. So, instead, I have come to feel glad that she is spending more time with her dad in the mornings, that I have a husband who’s happy to step up, and that admitting to myself that I don’t have the unlimited energy resources of a fictional Superwoman is both a good thing and a good way to embark on this latest stage of motherhood.

'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?

the personal is political

I’ve got a few things to get off my chest. So naturally I took to the net. Instead of trolling round other blogs, however, I thought I’d dust off my own soapbox. Over the past ten months of motherhood, and the nine months preceding it, I have been bombarded with all manner of messages, advice, information, conventional and alternative wisdom, and frankly it’s doing my head in. And I’m sure it’s only going to get worse.

The straw that broke the camel’s back, and subjected the blogosphere to blog 3.0 from me, was reading Zoe William’s article in the Guardian last week, ‘Come Back Superwoman: the lost ideal of combining motherhood and work.’ Although not exhaustive, it crystallised for me some of the things that have been bugging me for a while, namely, the great leap back to the 1950s we seem to have taken when it comes to motherhood and child-rearing. Suddenly, the - admittedly difficult to live up to - ideal of combining motherhood and work (aka ‘Superwoman’) is no longer as feted as it once was a few years ago. Confessing that you find breastfeeding a real drag and that you’re kinda bored stuck at home seems to require ten ‘Hail Marys’ and an ‘Our Father’ for penance.

I exaggerate, of course, and the only experience I’ll be drawing on is my own, which is both Pakeha and middle class. That experience so far has brought home to me the import of the feminist slogan ‘the personal is political’. Practices and purchases that we make as parents, whether we actively choose them or not, say something about what we believe or don’t, what we’d like for our children and what we don’t. And these are political - with a small ‘p’ - whether we like it or not.

One of the things I’ve noticed so far in the last 19 months is the naturalising of everything: science is the new alibi for making sure women should be stuck in the home, or, if they aren’t, that they should feel pretty darn guilty about it. And science, or ‘hard-wired’ biological difference, is being invoked as the real reason why girls like pink and dolls and, hence, why women are ‘natural’ carers and nurturers. ‘Natural’ childbirth seems to be enjoying a new period of fashion too, and breastfeeding is ‘nature’s perfect food’ so why wouldn’t you make every effort to do it? Until the twentieth century, nature killed large numbers of mothers and babies in childbirth too, but perhaps we shouldn’t mention that.

Let me be clear. I am not against natural childbirth, breastfeeding, stay-at-home mums, working mums, dolls or scientific research. But, speaking as a cultural critic, it seems like something’s going on. As I try and implement my own parenting technique - the soon-to-be-patented one of Muddling Through - I aim to unpack what that might be.

As I mentioned above, I’ve got nearly two years’ worth of material stored up, and that’s before I even get to things that are irking me at the present moment. Along the way on this wild ride, I’m likely to ruminate on such things as gender performance, the politics of birth and breastfeeding, consumerism, role-modelling and the superwoman ideal, childcare and whether, how and when to go back to work. And I might even throw in some book reviews of some material I’ve been reading to try and get my head round these issues. You lucky people.