speaking privileges

This week, I have been haunted by the image of Trayvon Martin.

Trayvon, an African-American teenager, was shot dead on 26 February 2012 by a self-appointed neighbourhood watch captain who thought the boy’s presence in a Florida gated community was suspicious. Returning from the store having bought an iced tea and a packet of skittles, Trayvon, dressed in a black hoodie, was followed by George Zimmerman, a man in his late twenties who just happened to have with him a semi-automatic weapon. As he walked back to his father’s house within the community, Trayvon was talking to a friend on the phone. He told her that a man was following him and that he was scared. She told him to run. Trayvon did, and thought he had lost his pursuer. Moments later, however, he was cornered and shot at point-blank range, guilty of little more than ‘walking while black.’

But there’s more. Although there were witnesses to the murder, and Zimmerman has admitted to killing Trayvon claiming he was acting in self-defence, he was not detained, arrested, or charged. Part of the reason is Florida’s Stand-Your-Ground law, which states that a person can stand their ground and shoot someone if they reasonably believe they are under threat. I guess you have to wonder how someone with a zealous faith in ‘neighbourhood vigilanteism’ and a semi-automatic can ‘reasonably’ believe anything.

Overwhelmed by grief and anger at their son’s senseless killing and that the man responsible for it had not even been arrested, Trayvon’s parents’ call for justice has gained both national and international attention. Nearly a month after his death, on 21 March - the International Day for the Elimination of Racial Discrimination (itself a memorial to the Sharpeville massacre in South Africa) - A Million Hoodie march for justice took place in New York and Philadelphia and a Peace March for Trayvon took place in Florida. Many people took to social media wearing black hoodies to show their solidarity for Trayvon and his family, and demand justice.

When asked about his response to the case, President Obama, in careful remarks intended not to impede an investigation by the Justice Department, said ‘I can only imagine what these parents are going through, and, when I think about this boy, I think about my own kids ... if I had a son, he’d look like Trayvon.’ He talked about the need for national soul-searching and praised the fact that federal, state and local authorities are working together in a thorough investigation.

When I first learnt of Trayvon’s death, I thought about how agonising it must be to a parent who has washed and fed and clothed and hugged and played and laughed with him, to learn that your son has met a violent death for no reason at all. Like President Obama, I thought about my own child and thought about how I would feel if something this terrible happened to her.

But, here’s the thing.

It’s highly unlikely that what happened to Trayvon will happen to her. Partly because she is a girl. Partly because she lives in New Zealand, where we don’t have a (vexed) constitutional right to bear arms. But, mostly, because she is white.

It is not my place, as a Pākehā / white person, to speak about the everyday ‘micro-agressions’ of racism. But I can - and should - speak about white privilege. Being white, or Pākehā in the New Zealand context, confers a set of privileges - which feminist critic Peggy McIntosh has described as an ‘invisible knapsack’ - to which most are unconscious beneficiaries. McIntosh comments:

Describing white privilege makes one newly accountable ... I began to understand why we are just seen as oppressive, even when we don't see ourselves that way. I began to count the ways in which I enjoy unearned skin privilege and have been conditioned into oblivion about its existence.

My schooling gave me no training in seeing myself as an oppressor, as an unfairly advantaged person, or as a participant in a damaged culture. I was taught to see myself as an individual whose moral state depended on her individual moral will. My schooling followed the pattern my colleague Elizabeth Minnich has pointed out: whites are taught to think of their lives as morally neutral, normative, and average, and also ideal, so that when we work to benefit others, this is seen as work that will allow "them" to be more like "us."

‘White privilege’ might sound like an American term to New Zealand ears, but it is relevant here too. Robert Consedine summarises how New Zealand’s colonial history has benefitted Pākehā in Healing our History and New Zealand Herald columnist Tapu Misa shows how this historical privilege impacts in the present.

In thinking about white privilege and what it means for my daughter (and me), I have come up with the following - incomplete - list:

1. She won’t be subject to casual racist slurs in the class room - as these young children were.

2. She won’t have to see dolls for sale that are crude caricatures of her facial features, nor have shopkeepers defend the sale of such items when the offence is pointed out to them, as in this case.

3. Nor will her ethnic background be used to sell ice-creams, which will continue to be sold even after they have been described as racist.

4. She won’t have to search high and low for the few dolls and Disney princesses - Jasmine, Mulan, Tiana and Pocahontas (themselves sometimes problematic) - that resemble her.

5. She won’t internalise an image of beauty that does not look like she does, and then torment herself when she doesn’t measure up, as the character Pecola Breedlove does in Toni Morrison’s novel, The Bluest Eye, or the winner of this speech competition.

6. If she is late for school, an assignment or a sports meeting, it won’t be blamed on her racial or ethnic background.

7. If she is good at sports or good at maths (or bad at either) it will be seen as a result of her individual achievement, not her racial or ethnic background.

8. She won’t constantly feel like a visible minority in her own country due to her skin colour, her clothing or her beliefs and practices.

9. She will not be subject to intimidation and fear if the police lock-down her community to search for would-be terrorists.

10. Statistically speaking, she is unlikely to leave school early with basic qualifications, find no or low-paid work, and she is unlikely to encounter prejudice in the health, education, and justice systems.

11. She is unlikely to be stopped while driving unless she’s actually breaking the law or going through a mandatory drink-driving checkpoint.

12. If she submits her CV for a job, she won’t be turned down for an interview as soon as the HR department sees her name (as has been shown to be the case in the UK, Australia, and New Zealand.)

13. She is unlikely to hear a TV presenter describe people like her as not being New Zealanders, nor be told she is being ‘overly sensitive’ when she makes a complaint about it.

14. She is unlikely to be positioned as the sole spokesperson or representative of her racial or ethnic group.

My point with this list is not that my daughter shouldn’t be spared this discrimination, but that all children should be spared it.

And, given the events of recent weeks, here’s another one for the list:

15. She is unlikely to walk down the street in a hoodie and be shot in the chest at point-blank range for ‘acting suspicious’ by a ‘concerned citizen’ who has to date neither been arrested nor charged.

If only Trayvon Martin had had that privilege.

review: The Mommy Myth

‘Did you see the news?’

‘I saw it in a magazine ....’

‘This week on Myths and Lies about Motherhood ...’

The media comes in for a fair amount of beat-up about everything these days. And not without cause, as the Levenson Inquiry, for example, is daily demonstrating. But the dodgy aspects of the media are not just about phone-tapping and hacking, shoddy journalistic ethics and corporate greed. Regardless of how sophisticated our critique of it may be, or how cynical our reading is, mass media - in the form of news media, TV shows, advertising, movies, magazines - plays a critical role in what we think about, even if, we tell ourselves, it doesn’t tell us how to think about it. It sets the agenda, and both politicians and the public take note.

Psychologist Susan J Douglas and philosopher Meredith W Michaels - respectively, a mother-of-one and a mother-of-five - wrote the The Mommy Myth: The Idealization of Motherhood and How It Has Undermined Women (2004) in order to analyse and critique the role of the mass media in ‘promulgating and exaggerating’ myths about motherhood. In the US, Douglas and Michaels argue that the mass media’s representations of motherhood ‘have laid down a thick, sedimented layer of guilt, fear, and anxiety as well as in increasingly powerful urge to talk back’. (p 13) Since the 1970s, and reaching a peak in the mid-to-late 1980s and 1990s, media constructions of motherhood have raised the bar ‘year by year, of the standards of good mothering while singling out and condemning those we are supposed to see as dreadful mothers.’ (p13)

While rigourously and systematically tracing the evolution of media constructions of motherhood since 1970, Douglas and Michaels also remind us what second-wave feminists actually had to say about motherhood (as opposed to right-wing distortions of it) and the ways which public policies on childcare, welfare and community funding have been eroded to the point of non-existence since the introduction of Reaganomics (detailed in a chapter pithily titled ‘Dumb Men, Stupid Choices’). Coupled with dwindling political will and a strengthening backlash against feminism (we’re all post-feminists now, right?), the growth of the ‘new momism’ has served to:

contain and, where possible, eradicate, all of the societal changes brought on by feminism. It is backlash in its most refined, pernicious form because it insinuates itself into women’s psyches just where we have been rendered most vulnerable: in our love for our kids. The new momism, then is deeply and powerfully political. The new momism is the result of the combustible intermixing of right-wing attacks on feminism and women, the media’s increasingly fine-tuned and incessant target marketing of mothers and children, the collapse of government institutions - public schools, child welfare programs - that served families in the past ... and mothers’ own very real desires to do the best job possible raising their kids in a culture that praises mothers in rhetoric and reviles them in public policy (pp 23-4)

The mountain of evidence to support their argument is compelling. From little news focus on motherhood in the 1970s to the ascension of the celebrity mother and demonisation of the crack-addicted welfare mother in the 1980s, Douglas and Michaels piece together an overwhelmingly stifling media onslaught of images of perfect, intensive mothering working in tandem with cautionary tales of ‘mothers-gone-bad’ who were poor and nearly always black and living in the inner-city (in contrast to statistics which actually showed that most poor mothers were white and lived in hard-to-reach rural areas). It is easy to marvel from the lofty heights of 2012 at how cynical, self-serving, and mean-spirited the removal of government funding for welfare and childcare programmes was (Nixon, for example, first in a long line of presidents to veto a government-funded childcare programme, used his discretionary veto power to torpedo this bill so he could count on support in some wavering corners when he sought re-election). Easy, that is, until we read contemporary news-stories about politicians telling single mothers to get back to work, and tinkering with funding for early-childhood education. Conservative, patriarchal ideas disseminated by politicians and the media have come to seem natural, like common sense.

While Douglas and Michaels show how the dominant media image of mothering has become one of intensive, upper-middle-class, corporately-defined individualism, they also show that representations of rebellious mothers have similarly gained attention. For every soft-focus magazine exclusive with Christie Brinkley or Marie Osmond, there is a Roseanne, or a Peg Bundy, or a Brett Butler, to mouth off at the new momism. Douglas and Michaels position themselves more squarely on the side of the Roseannes of the world, but also stress that she is a construction too: the binary opposite of the angelic mother who delights in every nano-second she spends with her children. Their mode of address throughout the book gives away their preference: they wisecrack, open chapters with cynical depictions of family life (think Married with Children rather than The Waltons), and undercut their more serious scholarship with sarcastic asides. Ordinarily, I’m all for this kind of thing, but, having just stated Shari L. Thurer’s book The Myths of Motherhood - if books about motherhood are not truth-telling, they’re myth-busting! - in which she deploys the same mode of address it’s hard not to read it as a self-deprecating defence mechanism i.e. you can’t criticise me more anymore than I am already criticising myself.

Historian and critical theorist Michel Foucault described power as not simply repressive, but also creative. Exploring the way in which sexuality, specifically homosexuality, was established as an identity rather than an act in nineteenth-century discourses of power, he argued that what began as an identification and a term of abuse, could be reclaimed as a subject position from which to speak (i.e. ‘we’re here, we’re queer, get used to it!’) Similarly, repressive (and regressive) constructions of the new mother, create a corollary, the rebellious mother, the one who talks back and reclaims the right to determine what motherhood should be, both for herself and other mothers. Viewed in this way, Douglas and Michaels project is unashamedly political: it is not meant to be a dispassionate, ‘balanced’ and ‘objective’ account of the media in the last four decades. Rather, it is a call to arms: don’t let them define and pigeon-hole you! don’t let them put all the responsibility for growing healthy, well-rounded children on you (remember, it takes a village to raise a child)! and, most importantly, don’t watch Meg Ryan movies! Actually, I just slipped that last one in there.

It all sounds a bit ‘70s, doesn’t it?

Which is no bad thing, as Douglas and Michaels remind us. Most women inspired into activism by second-wave feminism were mothers. Mothers who demanded better treatment for themselves and their children, better childcare options, better support from the government for their families, better relationships with their partners, better pay and better career opportunities. And, here’s the other big secret that they say the media won’t tell you about feminism ‘exposing patriarchy was, while certainly dangerous, also - let’s face it - a blast!’ (p 38)

And, as novelist Linda Grant has recently reminded us, there are still a thousand reasons why this important work needs to continue.

stay-at-home mothers versus working mothers?

Ding, ding, ding!

‘In the red corner, we have the stay-at-home mum: she’s chosen to look after her kids full-time and forego the ratrace for now!’ (doesn’t she know it’s boring to keep house and look after kids all day, and she’ll lose out in the job market when she does go back to work?)

‘In the blue corner, we have the working mum: she’s chosen to go back to work and pay for the best childcare she can afford!’ (doesn’t she know she’s abandoning her child for the sake of filthy money?)

It’s a knock-out fight: stay-at home mums versus working mums. Who will win?

Okay, okay, perhaps I exaggerate. But I have noticed a creeping and contradictory binarism that drives the ideology of the perfect mother. Whether you’re a stay-at-home or working mum, you’re bound to fall short of being the perfect mother: all women are set up for failure.

Inflamed by lurid media stories of the kind I have detailed in a previous post, the supposed binary opposition between mothers who stay home to look after their children and mothers who work to support their children is the engine of what US feminist critics Susan J. Douglas and Meredith W. Michaels call ‘the mommy wars.’ In their 2004 book The Mommy Myth: the Idealization of Motherhood and How it Has Undermined Women, Douglas and Michaels comment:

The ethos of intensive mothering has lower status in our culture (‘stay-at-home mothers are boring’), but occupies a higher moral ground (‘working mothers are neglectful’) ....The ‘mommy wars’ put mothers into two, mutually exclusive categories - working mother versus stay-at-home mother - and never the twain shall meet. It goes without saying that they allegedly hate each other’s guts. In real life, millions of mothers move between these two categories, have been one or the other at different times, creating a mosaic of work and child-rearing practices that bears no resemblance to the supposed iron-clad roles suggested by the ‘mommy wars’. Not only does the media catfight pit mother against mother, but it suggests that all women be reduced to their one role - mother - or get cut out of the picture entirely. (p 12)

I was moved to blog about the tension between the two for two reasons. One, in the mother’s group that I attend I have picked up a faint but definite tension between the mothers who stay at home and the ones who work. It kind of depresses me that even a group that is supposed to be about supporting mothers - all mothers - is clinging to pre-determined positions and, however covertly, judging those who don’t fit them. Two, having been a stay-at-home mother for the last 16 months, I am about to become a working mother for three days a week. In that sense, I will not be quite either mother figure: neither fully staying at home, nor fully re-entering the work-force.

Leaving aside the three big ice-bergs of partners’ roles, the value placed on part-time workers (of which women, primarily mothers, make up the majority) and the large and growing voluntary sector that augments gaps in state-funded social welfare in which stay-at-home mothers play an active role, is it possible that I am going to have my cake and eat it too? Or, more likely, am I going to feel caught between a rock and a hard place, thinking that I’m failing at both roles? As you can see, even my unexamined thinking about this is binary: will I fail or succeed? And why is success or failure - to my critical mind, an inappropriate and unhelpful way of thinking about parenting - based on whether I am in paid employment or not?

Douglas and Michaels suggest that the reason for this is that the messages of the media, politicians, academics, advertisers, marketers, and the person in the street work to create cultural norms about motherhood. Arguing that, in many ways, the gains achieved by second-wave feminists are being eroded, they suggest that we have entered the era of the ‘new momism’. They describe the new momism as ‘the insistence that no women is truly complete or fulfilled unless she has kids, that women remain the best primary caretakers of children, and that, to be a remotely decent mother, a woman has to devote her entire physical, psychological, emotional and intellectual being, 24/7, to her children.’ (p 4)

But the new momism is more than just a return to the 1950s. Considered to be more progressive, it is apparently based on women’s choices. Women can choose to work, or they can choose to stay at home. So far, so good: women are positioned as active and autonomous agents in their own lives. But what are the consequences of their supposedly freely chosen choices? Douglas and Michaels argue that under the prevailing ideology the only correct ‘choice’ for all women is to ‘choose’ to have kids and to ‘choose’ to stay at home - only if middle class, mind - and devote their lives to them. Based on this analysis, Douglas and Michaels conclude that the new momism is therefore ‘deeply contradictory: it both draws from and repudiates feminism’. (p 5)

Meanwhile, back in the mothers’ group, a stay-at-home mother mourned the fact that people didn’t value what she did: ‘No-one thinks it’s important.’ Another insisted that she got plenty of stimulation from her children, and that if she went back to work then she’d get time for herself. A working mother, perhaps feeling cut to the quick by these comments, said that ‘she felt bad for going to work and leaving her kids.’ Another said she had returned to full-time work when her baby was very young, and was now looking forward to cutting back her hours to spend time with him. For mothers of a certain class, it seems, choosing to participate in paid employment located outside the home is a defining and dividing line.

I listened to all of them express how they felt, and I felt sad. I recognised some of the defensiveness in play - ‘my choice is really the right one ... isn’t it?’ - and I recognised the unspoken feelings of guilt, inadequacy and uncertainty driving them. I recognised them, because I feel that way too. I felt sad about it because I wanted very much for us all to cut each other some slack and to cut out the covert competitiveness. I’ve said it once and I’ll say it again - if only to keep convincing myself - THERE’S NO SUCH THING AS A PERFECT MOTHER.

Perhaps, in a salute to all mothers and in recognition of the value of whatever role they perform, it’s time to resurrect that cherished slogan of second-wave feminism: ‘every mother is a working mother’.

And consign the ‘mommy wars’ to the dustbin of history instead.

'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.

'what does she have to look forward to?'

Another gem from the mothers’ group I have recently started attending provides the theme of this post. One of the mothers present told us about her sister, who is in her thirties and is still ‘living the London life’. This is code for ‘she has a partner, they both have plenty of disposable income and no children, and are able to do what they like when they like’.

Imagine, a woman earning her own money and doing what she pleases with it! In this day and age!

As the mother of a young child too, I can well understand what might drive this mother to slightly envy and occasionally even resent her sister’s apparently carefree life. What I don’t understand is what she said next. She told us that she had an unspoken question for her sister, one she would never dare ask, but frequently played on her mind. Puzzled, she told us what was bugging her: ‘I don’t understand what it is she looks forward to?‘

I have to confess, I was a bit stumped as to what she meant.

She then elaborated and said ‘I mean, I look forward to having lots of grandchildren. I love children, and I want lots of them and one day I want to be surrounded by grandchildren. I don’t understand what she looks forward to - another trip? A promotion at work? What?’

Someone else then chimed in with a similar question for non-mothers, this time the even more patronising ‘I know! I mean what have you accomplished if you don’t have children?’

At this point, I was thinking to myself that this might not be quite the consciousness-raising experience I was hoping for, and that perhaps I really had been born two decades too late. Where are those speculums when you need them?

I didn’t really feel that there was any rejoinder for me to make to this conversation that would not be offensive to either of the two speakers. Who am I to police a woman’s relationship with her sister? Nor question their positive sense of accomplishment and happiness with their own entry into motherhood. As far as that goes, good luck to them, it’s fantastic that they feel that way. What stuck in my throat was the policing of women’s other lives, and the assumption that, as all those present were also mothers, we would all feel the same way.

While I love my daughter and value my experiences with her so far, I do not consider motherhood to be my one and only accomplishment. I do not consider raising a child to be ‘my greatest achievement’. And, especially, I do not consider women who do not, cannot, or will not have children, for whatever reason, to somehow not be ‘proper’ women (the implied subtext of the conversation above) to either be pitied or treated with suspicion.

I should note here, before I get too much further and lest I be accused of selfishness, that my definition of achievement is of something completed and finite: an essay, a task, a mountain-climb. Perhaps this is too narrow, but, for me, parenthood is very much a process and in process. It is something that will only reach an endpoint when one of us dies. To my mind, to make my child into something that I have ‘achieved’ is in a sense to wash my hands of her. I think it also puts a heavy burden on her: ‘don’t screw up or you’ll ruin what I’ve achieved’. While she is young, it is my responsibility to give her the best start possible, but her life will be her creation.

But I’m digressing.

What I want to discuss in this post is the idea that women who don’t have children are missing out in some way. I’ve never heard anyone say this about men who are not fathers. By this logic, aren’t they missing out too? Or is it okay to not be a dad, because you can legitimately find self-worth and accomplishment in other things?

This conversation reminded me of the way in which New Zealand’s former prime minister Helen Clark was described in some quarters as selfish because she did not have children. This is notwithstanding the decades of public service she had provided to the FOUR MILLION people of New Zealand, and, subsequently, to the world, as the head of the United Nations’ Development Programme. Recently, Australian prime minister Julia Gillard has been subject to the same kind of sexist scrutiny of her suspect childless ways (this is the subject of a blog-post by the fabulous Antipodista). Presumably, Mother Teresa (maternal in the monastic sense) is suspect in the same way, then? The idea that women can only be accomplished if they have children is sexist, patronising, and narrow, regardless of who says it. I stress that this does not mean that mothers shouldn’t feel a sense of accomplishment for their mothering, just that there are many ways to be accomplished, and why should we compete over them and judge each other for them?

If we think about it a different way, if Helen Clark had had three kids, would New Zealand mothers have access to 20 hours’ free childcare for their three-year olds? If Mother Teresa had had a brood of her own babies, would the abandoned street-children of Calcutta have had a tireless champion? Perhaps they still would have accomplished these things - I don’t for one minute want to suggest that mothers can’t do these things too - but perhaps they wouldn’t have.

In Mother of All Myths, Arminatta Forna suggests that the reason mothers and non-mothers are in competition with each other is to do with the current societal preoccupation with pro-natalism: ‘we are all part of a society that assumes, encourages and rewards parenthood while disapproving of those who do not have children. ... Indeed, pressure from family and friends has been cited by study after study as a major reason for wanting to have a family’. (p 139)

Feminist academic Sara Ruddick in ‘Maternal Thinking’ traces how women of all kinds are made to feel guilty by pro-natalism. She writes:

Guilt complicates feminist rage - and slows down feminist activism. There is the mother's guilt towards her children, and the non-mother's guilt that she has evaded this mass sisterhood now elaborated for us all as full of joy and pain, blood and passion, that she has evaded the central life dramas of intimacy and separation described so well in feminist writing about motherhood.

Before deciding to have a child myself, I had ambivalent feelings about becoming a mother. I didn’t not want children, but I couldn’t say that I definitely wanted them either. It never really seemed like the right time, when there was so much else going on in my life. I enjoyed spending time with my nieces and nephews - another untruth about the childless woman is that she has no loving contact with children at all - but it didn’t particularly make me want to rush out and get reproducing as soon as possible.

While I was in my twenties, no-one really passed a comment on this. But, as soon as I turned thirty (and I had been married for a year), the comments began in earnest.

‘So, when are you going to have children?’

‘Um, I don’t know.’

‘You really should, you’ll be a great mum.’

‘O ... kay.’

If I was foolish enough to actually engage anyone on the topic, I ended up being in the unenviable position of trying to defend not having children, which didn’t reflect how I felt at all. I came to resent these conversations and the way in which family, friends and even acquaintances felt that it was perfectly fine to voice their opinion about my uterus like it was their property. It got to the point where my inner child was wanting to react ‘I’m never going to have children. So there!’

Needless to say, I had to take a step back from all this static and make a more mature decision about whether or not to have children based on what both my husband and I wanted for ourselves. As you know, we now have a lovely daughter, and are happy with our decision. But we do not feel we ‘missed out’ by waiting to have her. On the contrary, for us, we feel that we’re both more confident and in the best place possible to parent her.

I also feel strongly that, as a role model for my daughter, I want her to learn that motherhood isn’t just about reproduction, doing the washing up, and looking for lost toys. It is also about figuring out what’s important to you and how you want to live your life.

Because it is true that if you do become a mother your time for yourself is precious, and there’s no point wasting it on judging other women's lives.

'women always over-dramatise their birth stories' (part two)

"Last time on ‘Dramatic Birth Stories’, the baby had just arrived, the mother was deeply shocked, and there was a big bloody mess everywhere."

Still reeling, I watched a small squishy blob being taken away from me over to where the paediatrician was poised ready to take her first measurements. My midwife, however, had other ideas and wrestled the baby off him to return her to me post-haste for some post-natal skin-to-skin.

My first thoughts were ‘how will I get the stains out of my clothes?’

Before I really had a chance to respond to her, the blob was off again to be weighed and measured and monitored.

Meanwhile, the registrar told me that I had been torn by the forceps and would need to be stitched up.

‘Um, ok,’ I believe I might have said.

I was wheeled off to surgery, midwife in tow, while my husband waited with the baby.

The surgery started well enough. I was awake and conscious throughout, as they decided to use a local anaesthetic that went thought the same place as the epidural. My midwife bounded into the operating room. Perching herself at my shoulder, we chatted inconsequentially to pass the time. Apart from the increasingly insistent tugging, which seemed to be endless (I mean, the area we are talking about is not exactly huge), and the anaesthetist who would not shut up asking me if I was okay all the time, the first hour or so was not too bad. Let me tell you, it is quite surreal to be discussing changes to Cardiff’s main shopping centre with one person, while three other people are trying to sew up your most intimate body parts, and another person is constantly informing you of every little change they are making to your drug levels. ‘Just tell me if you’re in any pain,’ he kept saying. ‘And don’t fall asleep.’

Then the beeping started.

There was a frenzy of activity.

‘What’s going on?’ I wanted to know. The registrars ignored me, as they forcefully started pushing and pulling my abdomen. Someone got on the phone to the consultant, who turned up at some point to inspect and offer advice.

‘Uterus won’t contract,’ was the curt response from someone in the room. ‘We have to massage it to stop the bleeding.’

There may’ve been drugs in my system, but that ‘massage’ hurt.

Then I started shaking uncontrollably, my teeth practically chattering themselves out of my head. ‘Shaking,’ I managed to get out. ‘Can you stop it?’

‘I’m okay with the shaking,’ said the anaesthetist. ‘You’re not in any danger.’

‘But my teeth won’t stop chattering,’ said I, stating the obvious.

Clearly this was a winning argument, as yet another body who had entered the room started drapping inflatable warming cloths around me. I gradually felt warmer, and some of my shaking stopped. But those teeth kept right on going. I’m surprised I have any left.

Meanwhile, the registrars had stopped assaulting my stomach and were finishing their needlework. My midwife had given up on the small talk and was stroking my hair and forehead. The anaesthetist had temporarily stopped badgering me to make incessant phone-calls to the lab to try and figure out whether or not I needed a blood transfusion. After a bit of back and forth, he decided I didn’t.

Eventually, it was all over. About four hours later, I was wheeled out into the recovery room. My husband sat waiting for me, with a small bundle next to him that I couldn’t really see properly. The nurses introduced themselves to me and asked my permission to take some colostrum to feed her. I said ‘yes’ and was squeezed and prodded a little more. I watched them feed the paltry results to her, but still have little recollection of what she looked like. I seemed to have hardly any strength for anything, other than to lie on the gurney and try and focus on what was happening around me.

My midwife asked if it was okay if she went home, so she could get some sleep. Fighting sleep myself, I said it was fine.

Some time later, and my sense of time is very hazy by this point, the registrar and anaesthetist burst back into the recovery room, saying we needed to go back to theatre right away. My vital signs were erratic and I hadn’t stabilised in the way they had hoped. A purple form was shoved in my face asking if they had my permission to perform an emergency hysterectomy in order to save my life.

‘Oh,’ I said, thinking this was starting to get very serious indeed. The doctors looked worried and wanted to move quickly. I signed the form with the small amount of strength I had left.

At this point, my husband intervened. He had been told next to nothing about what was going on, partly because of the state I was in, and partly because of the speed at which things were now starting to unfold. Through it all, he had literally been left holding the baby, and was terrified about what might happen. He asked the doctors if there were any other options. Feeling the urgency of the situation, they quickly hauled him out of the room, and, so I understand, told him that unless they took me back to surgery again, as soon as possible, I could bleed to death. Bleeding from the uterus is apparently very serious, and severe injury and death can result in a matter of minutes.

This all happened out of my earshot, of course. When they came back, he was wiping away tears. I didn’t have any time to say anything to him before I was wheeled off again. This time, they told me en route to the operating room, I would be put under a general anaesthetic.

‘I’m scared,’ I said.

‘Why?’ they asked.

‘I’m scared I won’t wake up.’

‘Don’t worry. A lot of people feel like that when they go under,’ they replied. I think this was meant to be comforting.

They put the mask over my face, and then pulled it away again. ‘Nothing’s happening,’ I said. ‘Don’t worry, it will,’ they said, putting it back on.

Before everything fell away, I heard that the consultant was now there, and they were discussing various options to staunch the bleeding.

Obviously, I did wake up again.

By this time, it was mid-morning the next day. Sun was streaming in the window of the birthing room. My husband was asleep in a chair by my bed. I felt a lot better than I had for a little while, although there were a lot of wires coming out of my arms and it hurt to move. I looked around this brave new world, and saw a little bundle with a large angry bruise on her cheek and cuts on her forehead. She was asleep.

It had been nearly twelve hours since I gave birth to her, and I had not held her properly once.

During the morning, both the registrar and anaesthetist from the night before came in to check on me. Not only was I now packed full of stuff to stop me bleeding, but I had had three blood transfusions. ‘But don’t worry,’ the anaesthetist said. ‘This doesn’t mean that the same thing will happen again if you have more children.’ Aside from the fact that the thought of having more children was not really uppermost in my mind at that point, I took from this that my uterus was still intact, if not exactly ready, willing and able.

We stayed in hospital for six more days, but I’ll end my story there.

I’ve tried to relate what happened to me - or as much as I can remember, at least - in as unadorned away as I can, lest I be accused of being ‘overly dramatic’. Even now, it still makes me feel very emotional to think about how serious things got very quickly.

All stories are a series of events that have been selected and put together in a certain way to create a certain effect. Until the last few months, narrating my story has been like a kind of therapy for me: I am incredibly grateful to the people who have listened to it, particularly the first time I told it. Telling it dislodged a lot of painful stuff, and certainly help me work through what, I’m sorry to say, was a very traumatic experience.

Contrary to my new acquaintance’s opinion that women competitively over-dramatise their birth stories to - I dunno - make themselves seem tougher, I think many women tell their stories in order to effect a kind of ‘talking cure’ to help them process the profound things that have happened to them.

As one of the hospital midwives said to me, as I bawled again after briefly telling yet another doctor what had happened to me, ‘it’s the ones who bottle it up that you have to watch.’

'women always over-dramatise their birth stories' (part one)

I was with a group of mothers recently and the subject of birth stories came up.

Not in the compulsive way it did in the early weeks after giving birth, when it felt like you had to talk about what had happened in order to process what a profoundly transformative - and, in some cases, traumatic - experience it was. For me, at least, that need has been well and truly met and I no longer feel like it is the first thing I have to know about another mother. Rather, it came up in the context of what some members of the group didn’t really want to talk about. Killing the moment to share a very personal experience and develop some sense of solidarity before it even began, one of the mothers said, ‘Oh no, not birth stories, they’re always so overly-dramatic.’

Another agreed, ‘Yeah, it’s like everyone always tries to outdo each other. Their experience is always worse than anyone else’s.’

In what was, perhaps, a gentle reproof, someone else pointed out that women might dramatise this experience because for many it is the most dramatic thing that has ever happened to them.

The moment passed as we agreed - or failed to disagree - not to share.

I couldn’t help but feel, however, that an opportunity had been missed. In some respects, birth stories are a female equivalent of war stories, and who would dare suggest to a returned serviceperson that the heat of battle is not dramatic? Having said that, I am also aware that the two women who were dismissive of birth stories were also newly pregnant for the second time, and may not have wanted to be reminded about what could potentially lay in wait for them in a few months’ time. There’s no denying that a bit of denial can sometimes get you through.

I’m aware that I’ve skirted around my own birth experience in my blog thus far. But with this criticism in mind, now is perhaps the moment. I will try to be as un-dramatic as possible, lest anyone feel that I am starting ‘BirthWars: an online competition to decide who is the toughest mother out there!’

It all began benignly enough on a sunny Tuesday afternoon.

I was a week ‘overdue’. During my midwife’s visit that morning we had discussed options for induction, including whether or not to induce or let nature take its course. As she got up to leave, I felt an unusual heavy sensation in my lower abdomen. I told her and she smiled and said ‘Oh good’.

I was starting to get seriously bored waiting around for the baby to put in an appearance. I had even started a 1000-piece puzzle of a Worcestershire half-timbered cottage to help pass the time. After my midwife had left, I returned to the puzzle and was congratulating myself on having got all the edge pieces in place, when, at about 2pm, I felt something give. Wondering what it was, I went to the bathroom, in what I can only say was the nick of time. Within seconds of getting there, there was a positively diluvian outpouring that went absolutely everywhere. ‘Guess I won’t be finishing the puzzle, then,’ I thought to myself as I started mopping it up.

Feeling excited and more than a little damp, I phoned my midwife and told her the news. ‘Oh good,’ she said, and instructed me to call her again when the contractions became stronger and more regular. I then phoned my husband, who was also excited and jumped in a taxi to come straight home.

There we were, braced for action, waiting for those contractions to get stronger. And waiting. And waiting. And waiting.

‘That was one!’ I cried, trying to feel like the ripple of discomfort I had just experienced was actually starting to test me. ‘How long has that been since the last one?’

‘Mmm, a while,’ said my husband, ‘maybe 20 minutes.’

‘Oh,’ I said, disappointed. It wasn’t going to be one of those quick labours, then.

The afternoon passed fairly uneventfully. We made sure my bag was packed and got out the combs, hot water bottle and swiss ball. And, anti-climatically, nothing much happened. It was almost Beckettian.

By bedtime, the contractions were a little stronger - like moderate periods pains - but still not particularly unbearable. By 2am, they were getting stronger and reasonably regular, although their regularity was probably at least as much a product of my wanting them to be regular than their actual intensity. My husband kept dozing off in the middle of doing acupressure on my lower back. I kept having to prod him awake, but, to be honest, felt that I could handle this level of pain by myself. ‘Hmmm, maybe this labour thing is not so bad after all,’ I thought to myself sleepily. As the pain from the contractions marginally increased, I turned over in bed to try and get more comfortable.

And then they stopped all together.

Disappointed, I too must’ve nodded off, because next thing I knew it was 6am.

Wondering what on earth was going on, I called my midwife. Almost accusingly, she told me that she had been up most of the night watching trashy late night TV, ready at a moment’s notice to make a dash to the hospital. ‘Sorry,’ I apologised. ‘I just didn’t want to wake you up, when nothing much was happening.’

She then asked me if I’d like to go the hospital.

‘Yes,’ I said, with relief, thinking that once we got there, something had to happen.

Wrapped in a towel in case there were any more leaks, me, my husband and the hospital bag arrived at the hospital. I think even the taxi driver was disappointed that it wasn’t an adrenalin-packed race to get there.

On arrival, we sat in the waiting room, while someone cleaned up one of the birthing rooms for us. Sipping my tea, I had visions of blood-soaked walls, and had to remind myself that I was actually in labour.

My midwife explained to me that eighteen hours was as long as the hospital was comfortable letting labour continue once a woman’s waters had broken, in case of infection. By 9am that morning, I had nearly met the deadline at only one centimetre dilated. I had barely even broken a sweat. It was time to induce.

‘OK,’ I thought. ‘Now we’re getting somewhere.’

I was hooked up to a syntocinon drip, which stimulates contractions, and my midwife increased the doses at 15-minute intervals. ‘This is not so bad’, I thought, propped up on my pillows. When the dosage hit maximum, however, I was definitely starting to feel it. ‘Now!’ I cried to my husband when the frequent and strong contractions came so he could get his thumbs into position. For a while, I managed to cope with the now-quite-decided pain with acupressure and determination. When an exam by the registrar found that I was still only one centimetre dilated I burst into tears, not from the pain so much, but from the frustration. All that work and I was getting nowhere.

My midwife started making cryptic remarks that I interpreted to mean she thought I needed to soldier on. Still in the grip of profound contractions, I looked at her like she was insane. She then said that she’d leave my husband and I alone to discuss it. Once she’d left the room, he told me that she had in fact meant that I should have an epidural. ‘Oh,’ I said, feeling like a dunce. ‘OK.’

Feeling relieved that I didn’t have to tough it out, the anaesthetist and a range of other bods that I can’t really remember came in to sort out the epidural. ‘Oh’, she said, trying to insert the gigantic needle between my vertebra, ‘that’s odd.‘ For the record, these are words that you don’t want to hear when you’re in this kind of situation. This was quickly followed by ‘the needle doesn’t seem to go in very far’, which is number two on my list of things you don’t want to hear in this kind of situation. After some back and forth, she decided that the answer was that I simply must have the spinal column of a young east Asian woman (really) and that was that. With all this carry-on, I was thinking to myself that it would be just my luck that the epidural wouldn’t work, and I’d have to tough it out anyway.

Fortunately, I was wrong (again) and the drugs did work. Within half an hour or so, the contractions subsided to a dull roar. I spent the rest of the afternoon and evening, relaxing in my pillows eating sandwiches and listening to jazz. Labour? Ha!

About dinner-time, when my midwife said that I shouldn’t eat any more food, the registrar announced that I was now ten centimetres dilated, and that the baby would probably be born that night. They’d be taking bets on the side for early the next morning, but, with a bit of luck and a following wind, she’d be there by midnight.

Enough of this lounging around like I was on holiday: it was now time to push. My midwife reduced the amount of drugs going in, so I could feel enough to push. Bracing myself against her and husband, a foot on each hip, I bore down with all the strength I could muster. After a few pushes, my midwife said she had seen the baby’s head - the so-called ‘miwife’s peep’ - and my feelings of excitement returned. Not long now. Or so I thought at the time.

An hour and a half of pushing later, my baby was still proving elusive.

From what I understand - and my recollection of some of these events is becoming hazy - she stopped moving and her heart-rate became erratic. The registrars - all of whom looked about 12 - trooped back in: it was time to bring in the heavy artillery. Forceps, with the possibility of an emergency casearean if they didn’t work.

‘Um, OK,’ I said.

An episiotomy incision was duly made. The tongs were produced.

I pushed. The registrar pulled.

And then there was a baby.

Feeling profoundly shocked and violated beyond my capacity to describe it, I remember thinking, ‘what the f*** have I done?’

It was then that things started to go wrong.

Catch the next thrilling installment in ‘birth story: part two’.