'free to be you and me?'

‘There’s a land that I see

Where the children are free

And I say it ain’t far

To this land from where we are.’

So begins the bouncy title track by the New Seekers from the album Free to Be You and Me by Marlo Thomas and Friends (first released in 1972). 

Quite apart from the fact that I’m quite a fan of the plinky-plunky ‘70s sound of this song and recommend you give it a listen, I thought I’d take a moment to think about children’s songs as one form of didactic narrative that children encounter in their early years. 

I’ve ransacked the local library’s CD collection (‘records, mummy, what are those?’) and come home with many different child-friendly tune collections to pass the time away. Many these days are touted as being ‘educational’. Baby Einstein, for example, introduces us to famous classical composers via simplified arrangements in Baby Beethoven and Baby Mozart. Simplified classical music - the proper arrangements deemed too stimulating and complex for very young children - is also used in allegedly sleep-inducing CDs such as Music for Dreaming and Sweet Dreams for Children (it seems like a bit of a contradiction to educate - and, presumably, stimulate - children with the same kind of music that is also supposed to send them to sleep). There are collections of the more traditional nursery rhymes and songs, such as ‘B-I-N-G-O’, ‘Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star’, and ‘If You’re Happy and You Know It’, performed by everyone from the Wiggles to your local pre-school to Rolf Harris. Putumayo Kids has a wide range of world and folk music, many with messages of love and peace and ‘why can’t everyone just get along?’ Drawing on the success of simplified arrangements for other kinds of music, there’s also a a growing range of lullaby renditions of famous rawk bands - treat your child to Nirvana interpreted on the glockenspiel or the Ramones played on the triangle! (If Courtney Love had a problem with the Muppets doing a tongue-in-cheek version of ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’ in the recent movie, who knows what she makes of these?)   

My favourites among the ones that I’ve found so far are the weird imaginings of They Might Be Giants  on No! and Here Comes the ABCs (who knew the folks behind ‘Particle Man’ would reinvent themselves as really rather good children’s musicians?) and the compilations For the Kids and For the Kids Too. In the latter two compilations, contemporary indie artists take on classics like ‘Rainbow Connection’ and ‘My Favourite Things’ as well as offering up brilliant new ones like ‘Your Attitude Towards Cuttlefish’ and ‘John Lee Super-taster’. I’ve also re-visited the 1970s' anarchy of The Muppets, and become acquainted with The Wellington Ukelele Orchestra. 

So, taken together, what do all these kinds of musical narratives mean for small children? First, there is the familiar Western lexicon of twinkling stars, farmers in dells and putting your left arm in and shaking it all about. Everyone likes to be singing from the same song-sheet at some point in their lives. Second, there is a perpetuation of the kind of music educated people should know about: Beethoven, Mozart, the Young Person’s Guide to the Orchestra, Peter and the Wolf, the Dance of the Sugar-plum Fairy (you see where this is going ...). Third, some of the ‘let’s all just get along’ music has some problematic sentiments: on Putumayo’s Acoustic Playground there’s a song about the love train that travels around the world - even Russia and China too! - that sounds patronising, at best, and ethnocentric, at worst. Last, there is more diverse music on offer: songs in te reo Māori and Gagana Samoa, for example. While this is a welcome development on the whole, dropping 'Te Aroha' into a collection of otherwise English songs can seem like the ‘ethnic spice’ (as feminist critic bell hooks has described it in ‘Eating the Other’) in the mix that serves to shore up the position of the dominant culture and its values. Whether we like it or not, whether its overt or not, children’s songs and music are also narratives with an ideological agenda.

At the risk of killing everyone’s buzz a little more - and let’s face it, songs and music are meant to be enjoyed without too much over-thinking - I want to look at the thing that’s missing from a lot of this music: any overt messaging about behaviour. And, in the general spirit of this blog, of feminist messaging about gendered behaviour. Which is where we come back to Free to Be You and Me.

Like me, it is a product of the 1970s. And second-wave feminism.

Without wanting to sound like an infomercial, let me tell you more about it (you can watch most of the tracks off the album on youtube; they appeared in a television special in 1974, so there are visuals to go with the sounds). Actress Marlo Thomas - most famous in the early 1970s as TV’s That Girl, but maybe more familiar these days as Rachel Green’s mother in Friends - was searching for a new kind of bedtime story for her niece Dionne. Thomas says, however, in the liner notes, ‘I was saddened to find that all of her books ... put her and her mind to sleep. I started to look through stores and found, with few exceptions, shelf after shelf of books and records, for boys and girls, which charmingly dictated who and what they must be, colorfully directing new minds away from their own uniqueness.’

I could point out the ideological ramifications of ‘freedom’ and ‘individualism’, particularly during the height of the Cold War, but that would be missing what is both charming and instructive about Thomas’ project. Some of the proceeds from the record went to the newly-established Ms. Foundation to support a range of projects ‘aimed at improving the skills, condition and status of women and children.’ Comments in the liner notes come from Gloria Steinem and Dr Dorothy H. Cohen, the latter of whom says:

Recognizing that the new male and female image will emerge in coming generations if children can be freed from the stereotypes of the past, the many gifted participants in this work have poked fun with undisguised pleasure at attitudes that have been taken seriously for centuries.

In addition to celebrating every child’s creativity, then, Free to Be You and Me was also a feminist project. Other tracks include ‘William Wants A Doll’ (voiced by Thomas and Alan Alda. Yup, thats right, Hawkeye from M*A*S*H), about a boy who wants a doll, but isn’t given one because it would be ‘cissy’.  That is, until his wise grandma points out that it’s good for him to have a doll, because one day, he’ll be a daddy and he should know how to nurture a baby (well, okay, it has some limits). There’s also ‘Parents are People’, which lets kids in on the big secret that their mums and dads aren’t just mums and dads, but people too, and ‘there are a lot of things that a lot of mommies can do, and a lot of daddies can do, and a lot of parents can do.’ Another song ‘It’s All right to Cry’, sung by former New York Giants’ footballer, Roosevelt ‘Rosey’ Grier, lets both boys and girls know that it’s okay to have emotions and to express them, because ‘it might make you feel better’ (sidenote: Grier seems to have had a rich and varied career: post-football, he was a bodyguard for Robert Kennedy, and was guarding his wife when Kennedy was shot. He subsequently had a TV career, promoted non-traditional masculine hobbies such as needlepoint and macrame, and became a Christian Minister who works with inner city youth).

Another tells the story of ‘Girl Land’, envisaged as a kind of amusement park:

‘Welcome to Girl Land, 

My Good Little Girls

Admission’s a Wink

And a toss of your curls

There’s fun for all

From Eight to Eighty

You go in a girl 

And come out a Lady.’

But ‘Girl land’ has been closed down, because ‘it was never much fun’ and ‘always a bore’ and ‘you never get out’. 

The simple joy and hope in many of these songs is not only still quite catchy, but almost heart-breaking. At least, to me. Why, you may ask?

Because, if we fast forward forty years to 2012, ‘Girl Land’ has not only been re-opened, but it’s had a fresh, new makeover (I bet Marlo Thomas didn’t have to deal with Playboy-branded clothes marketed at young girls or the internet’s role in the pornification of culture, for example). And mommies, at least, are no longer people, they’re ... well, mommies (unless, of course, they work, in which case, they are bad mommies). William can forget about that doll, and he better not cry about it either. 

Rather than‘it ain’t far from where we are’, I’d say that we still have some way to go to that land where ‘you and me are free to be ... you and me’.

'if you want to be successful, don't have children'

Once upon a time in a former life, a senior female (and feminist!) colleague told me during a mentoring session that if I wanted to succeed in my career that I shouldn’t have children.

Somewhat taken aback, I was searching for a response when she continued, as if by way of explanation for this extraordinary edict, ‘children need time, and if you want to be successful in this job, you will need to spend a lot of time on it.’ By a lot of time, she meant evenings and weekends as well as nine-to-five, five days a week. She herself did not have children, and was famously devoted to her work, in a way that I admired but had not particularly sought to emulate.

At that point in my life, I had not particularly decided one way or another whether I wanted to have children (time was still on my side). My main reaction to this piece of friendly ‘advice’ - and that is the spirit in which it was offered - was that I didn’t particularly appreciate being told how to live my life. No matter how high-powered, a job is still a job, no matter how much you love it. At the time, however, I let it pass, and thought to myself that if I did have children I would, as Tim Gunn might say, ‘make it work’. Or rather, we would make it work, as parenting would not just be my sole responsibility.

Fast forward a few years to me sitting in a public lecture on discrimination cases with Robert Walker, a Justice of the Supreme Court of the United Kingdom (or, to give him his full title, the Right Hon the Lord Walker of Gestingthorpe). In the question-and-answer section at the end of his fascinating talk, a prominent member of the law school asked what Walker thought about the ‘problem’ of too many female law graduates. Knuckles audibly dragging on the ground, the academic in question complained that over 50% of law graduates were women, but that, once they got jobs, they would end up getting pregnant and leaving the profession. What was a law school to do about this drain on resources? Fortunately for everyone, Walker was not of the same ilk as his questioner, and gave the excellent answer that the ‘problem’ was not the proportion of female graduates, but that firms were not sufficiently flexible and family-friendly nor instituting policies that meant they retained their female staff.

A few posts ago, I wrote about pro-natalism and the problematic assumption that all women really should have children and that, if they didn’t, that they were somehow lesser members of society. In this post, I want to consider the related problem: is it possible to balance to have children and a successful career?

In my earlier post, I said that it was perfectly possible for mothers to be successful. As well as Helen Clark and Julia Gillard, there is room for a Sonja Davies, a Hillary Clinton, a Sarah Palin, and a - dare I say it? - Margaret Thatcher. In addition to Mother Teresa, the less fortunate have been helped by Eleanor Roosevelt, and Clara McBride Hale. Nobel Peace Prize laureates who are also mothers include Tawakkol Karman, Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, Aung San Suu Kyi, and Wangari Muta Maathai. Novelists Margaret Atwood, Anne Enright and Toni Morrison have children, as do scientists Ada E. Yonath, Elizabeth H. Blackburn, Carol W. Greider and Marie Curie and business women Anita Roddick and Sharon Osbourne. US Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg is another to add to a much longer list than I have room for here. In even those fields of achievement where physical prowess is important, there are examples of successful mothers: tennis players Kim Clijsters and Evonne Goolagong Cawley, swimmer Lisa Curry, and netballer Irene Van Dyk.

Are these women then superwomen? Certainly many of them have the financial capability to hire nannies and nurses to help them care for their children, if they so desire. Many also have more flexible professions than those with 9-to-5 jobs, which allows them to arrange their lives so they can spend as much time as they can with their children, although many are also devoted to their jobs. Some have become involved in various kinds of activism to give themselves, their children and their communities better lives. But it’s no denying that women in their roles as mothers also face substantial barriers if they are to be successful in their chosen fields, as these articles demonstrate in the fields of science and business.

Success might also depend on how much you want to rock the boat once you achieve it. US presidential candidate Hillary Clinton came under much more sexist scrutiny in 2008 than her rival vice-presidential nominee Sarah Palin (and you can bet that Clinton’s one child versus Palin’s five played a hefty role in that), for example.

The conflicting impulse concerning successful women - is it better to be childless and driven or have children and learn to juggle - reminds me of the historical debate concerning the position of women after the Reformation. Wait! Don’t stop reading! I promise you, there is a connection. Feminist critics and historians have debated whether pre-Reformation Catholicism gave women more opportunities - an avenue for literacy and power through the convent and a female goddess (albeit one with her wings somewhat clipped compared to the ancient goddesses of Isis, Ishtar, and the like) - or whether post-Reformation Protestantism did, via a more central place for mothers who were not held to the Virgin Mary’s impossible standards of maternal chastity, and access to literacy through vernacular bibles and prayerbooks. Both schools of thought have pros and cons. It seems to me, however, a little like arguing over who has the best prison cell. One might have a less lumpy mattress, and the other a bigger window, but you’re incarcerated either way.

I have so far assumed that success is measured in external and ambitious terms, citing world-leaders, famous sportswomen, famous writers, scientists and philanthropists. But success is relative. I don’t know how successful I would have been in my previous career if I had chosen to sacrifice everything to it (including future children). And the ‘suggestion’ that I shouldn’t have children wasn’t even a major factor in my decision to leave that profession. I do know that it was making me unhappy, and no amount of conventional success, if indeed I achieved it, was worth that. And I do believe that happiness and success are linked. My ambitions may be more modest now, but - I hope - I am in a better position to succeed at them, by making conscious efforts to change a situation with which I wasn’t happy.

Perhaps part of the problem is that the mainstream definition of success is monolithic and gendered, which is why there is a tendency to think that ‘successful’ women are precisely successful because they do not have children. It is certainly why my former mentor and that legal academic thought that women having children was a ‘problem’ that needed to be avoided or solved. In human rights terms, this is known as a ‘deficit model’, in which a woman - or a person of colour, or a disabled person - is the one with the problem. A more enlightened and empowering way of examining the issue is through the ‘social model’: how does the way society works disadvantage - or, indeed, disable - women, people of colour, and people with disabilities? In the case of mothers particularly, women are disadvantaged through workplaces or careers that are not flexible enough to cope with their family responsibilities, and through childcare options that are expensive, of variable quality and/or difficult to reach.

Perhaps the real issue is whether we want to have a successful society, in which mothers along with everyone else are able to achieve to their fullest potential. That doesn’t mean halting the birthrate, but addressing the institutions that perpetuate discrimination and changing the way societies rather than individuals work.

That looks like success to me.

What makes love grow?

‘Can you tell me what makes love grow?’

So went one of the songs I learnt as a child (which goes to show that you can take the girl out of Catholic school but not Catholic school out of the girl). In relation to babies, numerous theorists - of both the academic and armchair kind - will tell you that the answer is early and strong mother-baby attachment, or ‘bonding’.

I remember when the word ‘bonding’ used to be tossed round semi-ironically: friends would talk about ‘bonding sessions’ when they got to know each other better (alcohol was usually involved) or you would ‘bond’ with someone over a shared experience: a night on the town that went wrong every which way; an arduous assignment that meant pulling an all-nighter; a road-trip. You might have even used it to talk about a moment when you really got on with members of your family: ‘my mum and I really bonded while we were planning our all-night road-trip’, for example.

But, when it comes to motherhood, bonding - like so much else - is deadly serious. So serious, in fact, that there is a whole literature devoted to it. Sociologist Mary Ann Kanieski argues that the development of a discourse of bonding, and its dissemination in the popular media, constitutes a disciplinary regime, which regulates the behavior of new mothers. And it not only regulates their behaviour, but can be definitive of motherhood itself (you can read her paper here).

Kanieski notes that while bonding and attachment can occur with any caregiver, of whichever gender, the research on attachment overwhelmingly relates to mothers. She also notes that the earliest attachment theorists, such as John Bowlby, began their research looking at the lack of attachment in institutionalised children. That means children in institutions who were otherwise physically well cared for, but were still exhibiting signs of what came to be known as attachment disorder: aggression, developmental delays and higher mortality rates than non-institutionalised children. Bowlby diagnosed a lack of love and affection (by whom was, of course, assumed).

What is interesting here is that the quality of actual parental bonding - or, indeed, parenting - was not in question. It was the lack of it altogether that was thought to be the problem. It was on Bowlby’s theoretical framework that a series of experiments were subsequently conducted by various researchers to test the quality of attachment between mothers (yep, just mothers) and their children. The adequacy of that attachment (and that was judged by the researchers, not the mothers or children themselves) was thought to demonstrate how well-adjusted a child would be. This is the moment when that mother-child bond started to come in for such close scrutiny.

Bonding, which is the attachment from parent to child (rather than the other way round) was developed as a theory in the mid-1970s, based on earlier attachment experiments and - wait for it - research on animals. Observation of chimpanzees, goats and rats - and how they reacted when, again, their offspring were taken away from them - formed the basis for the development of theories of human bonding. These theories worked their way into birth practices: natural birth, the importance of the first few minutes after birth in which you would gaze adoringly at your child, skin-to-skin contact and exclusive breastfeeding for the first six months and beyond. Not that these things are necessarily bad in and of themselves, I hasten to add, more that if they didn’t happen, it was thought that junior could grow up to be a serial killer. ‘Against animal testing’ suddenly takes on a whole new meaning.

Kanieski does point out that, academically, attachment and bonding theory has largely fallen from favour. This has not stopped it, however, from thriving as a popular discourse setting guidelines about ‘normal’ behaviour for new mothers.

From her analysis, Kanieski concludes:

Bonding discourse establishes normal mothering behavior. It demands a form of parenting that is woman-centric, and time-consuming. It requires that mothers engage in self-surveillance to avoid the risks of poorly attached infants. As a result, bonding discourse promotes a traditional understanding of femininity in a time of women’s greater participation in the paid work force. Most seriously, bonding discourse personalizes problems that are structural in nature. By focusing on the choices a mother makes, it ignores the larger structural context in which childrearing is performed.

The stakes, of course, are high: ‘unattached’ mothers who fail to‘bond’ adequately with their children can be blamed for all manner of social ills. That’s some pretty serious guilt-tripping to be placing on new mothers, who’ve just had their world turned upside down by giving birth. No wonder some women only guiltily confess to not feeling an immediate bond with their children.

I found Kanieski’s analysis of bonding and attachment particularly interesting, as I’m currently reading a potted history of motherhood. Again, even a cursory look at - in this case, Western European - history shows that norms of motherhood that prevail today are far from universal, timeless and natural. For example, wet nursing, particularly for middle and upper class children, was common in the early modern period. When mothers of even royal children struggled to find the nurse they wanted, it apparently didn’t occur to them that nursing their own children was an option. Children could be sent away to live with their nurses in some cases up until age seven with little to no contact with their parents. So much for bonding.

I guess it’s another one of the things that nobody tells you about birth and new motherhood: that you may not have a shiny happy talcum-powder moment with your new baby, the one where you can’t stop looking at them out of sheer delight. It may take a while to really feel that you love your child, and advice books these days seem to stress that if you don’t feel ‘bonded’ instantly that it’s okay. It’s about building the relationship with time, like any relationship, and, while that happens, taking care of your baby’s immediate needs.

In my case, I missed those apparently vital few moments, and my child had to wait a good nine hours before we even got to meet again. According to the most extreme attachment advocates, this means that we might have Lizzie Borden on our hands. In the first few weeks, while I was struggling with recovery, and learning how to breastfeed, I’m not sure I could’ve honestly said that I was crazy in love with my baby. I know I did feel an immense responsibility towards her, to keep her warm, and fed, and safe.

And those are the seeds from which love grew.

'so when are you going to have another baby?'

Around the time my baby was nine months old, I started hearing this question, spoken and unspoken, everywhere.

It was on the lips of the mothers who pushed their young children on the swings at the playground. It was in the hesitation of family, who didn’t want to get their heads bitten off, asking about our plans for the future. It was in the unspoken assumption that seems to circulate everywhere that if you’ve had one, then you should have - or should want to have - another one.

Early on in my daughter’s life, a medical professional - I forget which in the blur of bodies that came in and out of my life at that point - said that they recommended that couples wait at least a year before having another baby ‘for the sake of good maternal health’. I guess that means that once you feel like you might have your life in some semblance of order, you might consider doing it all again: the sleepless nights, the endless feeding, the complete dependency. What’s different this time around is that you’ll have a better idea of what to expect; you’ll know that the screaming pink bundle does eventually turn into a lovely wide-eyed little person.

Assuming that you have some choice in the matter, there are a number of things to weigh up. Not least the actual ideal number you might want to have: two or three, one or ten? This is also assuming that nature doesn’t spring some nasty surprises on you while you’re making your choice: infertility or loss of a child among the more devastating ones. You might honestly consider whether you do really want to go through all that again. From a distance, a year doesn’t seem like much to be a ‘motherbaby’, but up close, that time can sure drag. Like me, you might have to consider whether you want to come face to face with you own mortality quite like that again, and, if you do, whether there are ways to avoid a similar outcome second time round. After all, a young child needs a mother more than they need a sibling.

You might also consider what your want your life to be like, and how many children might change that picture. Someone said to me recently that when they were deciding whether or not to have a third child, they considered whether they would still be themselves or whether they would just be ‘somebody’s mother'. In other words, she still felt like she had time to be herself and establish her own identity independently of parenting her two children, but that could disappear with the arrival of a third baby.

As I’m writing this, I can hear a tiny patriarchal voice in my head that says these reasons are ‘selfish’ or ‘unimportant’ compared to a child. But are they? Is ‘good maternal health’ - both physical and mental - really selfish and unimportant, particularly if you already have one or more children to look after?

In her romp through maternal history, feminist Shari L .Thurer notes that in eras where women are afforded a better, stronger position in society, and the maternal role is more highly valued, the childbirth rate drops. The historian in me wonders a little whether the cause and effect is so cut and dried, but on some levels it makes sense. There’d be precious little time to split the atom or write Ulysses while tending the ten children to whom you gave birth, each within a year of each other. Just think to what the old woman in the shoe (she had so many children she didn't know what to do) was reduced. Not a great outcome for mother or children. And don’t even get me started on her living conditions.

But, seriously, whether or not to have another child and, if so, when, has been on my mind. The mothers in the playground say that it’s better to knock them out pretty closely together so you can get the age of total dependency over and done with, and the children will have playmates who are close in age. Then they’d be off to school within a year or two of each other, and you could start clawing your life back. On the other hand, it could mean that your older children might not get a long period of focussed attention, and you might physically feel the strain of several pregnancies in relatively quick succession. Swings and roundabouts (well, we were in the playground).

In the last few months, some of the women who were pregnant around the same time as me have taken the plunge and announced their second pregnancies. I have to confess a tiny part of me is a little bit wistful at the news. But, hard on the heels of that sense of ‘what if?’, comes a reality check: am I really ready to deal with extreme tiredness, morning sickness, labour and possible complications, constant breastfeeding, lack of sleep and, and, and .... aaarrgh! And that's on top of looking after the one I already have.

So am I having another baby?

Call me selfish, but the jury’s still out on that one.

on maternity plays

Did you the hear the one about the mother who raised 2.2 perfect kids with no discernible hang-ups, had a happy and fulfilled relationship, a rich and challenging career, and never felt guilty about the choices she had made along the way?

No, neither did I.

But I’m sure you’ve heard stories about mothers who left the kids in the toystore while they went shopping, went back to work while their baby was still very young, and even the ones about desperate women who murdered their children.

I’ve discussed in a previous post some of the kinds of stories that circulate in contemporary culture about motherhood, which specifically focus on the dead mother, the bad mother, the analysed mother, the anguished mother and the celebrity mother. This time I want to focus on the way those stories are told.

Recently, I read a paper that compared motherhood - and any proper assessment of how well one might have done it - to a decades-long parenting narrative (see the paper delivered here). Instead, however, the author, philosopher Rebecca Kukla, argues that:

We have a tendency to measure motherhood in terms of a set of signal moments that have become the focus of special social attention and anxiety .... Women’s performances during those moments can seem to exhaust the story of mothering, and mothers often internalize these measures and evaluate their own mothering in terms of them. ‘Good’ mothers are those who pass a series of tests - they avoid a caesarean during labour, they do not offer their child an artificial nipple during the first six months, they get their child into the proper pre-school, and so on.

Or, if you will, instead of thinking of mothering - or, as she initially had it, parenting - as the social equivalent of the Odyssey or Middlemarch, Western culture with its attention span of a fruit fly, prefers to judge according to anecdote, limerick and flash fiction. And, having done so, dramatises these ‘signal moments’ as maternal (‘cos you know it’s really about those mothers) morality plays.

Medieval and renaissance morality plays were intended to educate as they entertained, specifically to educate people in how to live godly lives. Typically, a character would be going along minding their business, then they would be tempted in some way - imagine a little devil on your shoulder - fall into error, but, crucially, they were made to realise the error of their ways and repent. Such plays were used as a means of teaching the primarily illiterate faithful how they were meant to behave.

The modern maternal morality play (or ‘maternity play’ for short) follows a similar format, but with a nasty twist on the traditional tale. The maternity play follows a woman who is going about her business, but then gets pregnant. Now, of course, everything she does is shadowed by temptation. Step away from the soft cheese! Put down that formula tin! Don’t even think about leaving the baby’s arms free while s/he’s asleep! Swaddling, don’t go there!

Now, actually having to, y’know, do something so that the baby is fed, cleaned and put down to sleep, mothers are bound (no pun intended) to make some ‘wrong’ choices, hence the need for salvation. Here’s the real kicker, though. In the maternity play, the point is not redemption (i.e. becoming a good mother) it is the manufacture and maintenance of life-long guilt and anxiety (i.e. continually beating yourself up for the so-called bad choices ... unless your life is tragically cut short and you achieve perfection, of course.)

The signal moment could be transformed into a poem, which wears its artifice as well as its brevity on it sleeve. So, for example, we could think of Sylvia Plath’s ‘Morning Song’ (which I’m going to quote in full, just because I like it and because I can):

Love set you going like a fat gold watch.

The midwife slapped your footsoles, and your bald cry

Took its place among the elements.

Our voices echo, magnifying your arrival. New statue.

In a drafty museum, your nakedness

Shadows our safety. We stand round blankly as walls.

I'm no more your mother

Than the cloud that distils a mirror to reflect its own slow

Effacement at the wind's hand.

All night your moth-breath

Flickers among the flat pink roses. I wake to listen:

A far sea moves in my ear.

One cry, and I stumble from bed, cow-heavy and floral

In my Victorian nightgown.

Your mouth opens clean as a cat's. The window square

Whitens and swallows its dull stars. And now you try

Your handful of notes;

The clear vowels rise like balloons.

Plath, however, is a maternity play all of her own. Leaving aside the beautiful and often angry poems, her epitaph remains the signal moment of a desperate and depressed woman with her head in a gas oven.

Much better, I think, than the anecdotal ‘signal moment’ transformed into a maternity play is the epic or novelistic approach to parenthood, in which chapter after chapter builds a story that can only be properly appraised at its end. Is it an anarchic romance of individual heroism? A comic series of mishaps that temporarily turn the world upside down in order for everyone to live happily ever after at the end? Perhaps a tragic but transformative cataclysm that establishes a new world order? Or a satiric and bumbling picaresque journey through the stresses and strains of modern life? (you might have recognised my simplistic nod to historian and critic Hayden White’s analysis of metahistory). Most likely, it will be a combination of some or all of the above.

Because mothering - parenting - is not about a handful of moments, it’s about living from day to day, week to week. To paraphrase a famous quote, we make our own epics, making the choices we’re able to make, with the resources we have available, in the circumstances in which we find ourselves, given and transmitted from the past.

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.