In the midst of life ...

I should say at the outset that this pregnancy-related post is quite a solemn one (don’t worry, I’m fine!), and even though it is firmly grounded in my own experience may act as a trigger for some readers. 

* * * * *

This is a tale of two pregnancies.

During my first pregnancy, I began to bleed at seven weeks. As I’m sure you can imagine it was a startling and unexpected sight. Given that I was still in my first trimester, I worried that I might be about to miscarry and quickly made an appointment with the nearest GP that I could find. After a check-up, he seemed fairly relaxed that my fears were not about to be realised, but sent me for a scan just to be on the safe side. I felt calmer, but was eager to see what was going on in my otherwise-much-as-usual abdomen.

I don’t think that I really expected to see much at this scan. After all, the scans where you can discern faces and legs and hands come later, at 12 and then 20 weeks. I guess I thought the radiologist would have a quick look and reassure me that everything was just fine (well, fingers crossed anyway).

After consuming practically my own body weight in water in the hour before my appointment, I propped myself up on the bed and gel was smeared across my tummy. Using my inflated bladder as a guide, the radiologist soon found what he was looking for. There, magnified several times, was a small shadowy circle: that, he said, is the remainder of the egg sac, the proof we sought that my pregnancy was still viable. Phew!

But there was something else there too. Something I had not expected to see.

It was like a tiny flickering light, a candle buffeted by a draft. 

As we looked at it, the radiologist turned on the sound. Clear, regular thuds turned the flickering candle into a sure sign of life: a heartbeat. Along the bottom of the screen, we could see the jagged lines graphically representing that heartbeat. This fetal heartbeat, much faster than ours, pushed the lines close together, into steep, high peaks, and deep, narrow valleys.

I watched, speechless, unexpectedly moved by this testament to a life that was still going strong, despite what I feared. Whatever the reason for my bleeding, it was clear that the foetus and I were still in this together.

Afterwards, I couldn’t stop thinking about this moment. It got me thinking about, of all things given my very recent fears, abortion. I was and am firmly pro-choice, believing that it is a woman’s right to control her own fertility. But my experience at the seven-week scan had given me a different perspective. I didn’t agree with pro-life advocates, but I could understand better where they were coming from. It was hard to deny the life-force of that tiny but steady beating heart, that palpable assurance that ‘yes, I’m still here.’

It reminded me of the anti-abortion sign parked by the side of the road of State Highway 2, which infuriated me every time I drove past it: ‘abortion stops a beating heart.’ Designed to guilt-trip, it now seemed like they might have a point.

I’m not the only expectant pro-choice mother who has been given pause by an early scan. In Misconceptions, Naomi Wolf wrote of her reaction to her three-month scan:

As I saw that hand and foot, something irrational happened: a lifetime’s orientation toward maternal rights over fetal rights lurched out of kilter. Some voice from the most primitive core of my brain - the voice of the species? - said: You must protect that little hand at all costs; no harm can come to it or its owner. That little hand, that small human signature, is more important now than you are. The message was unambivalent. (Misconceptions, chapter 5)

While I did not share many of Wolf’s sentiments - ‘voice of the species?’, ‘more important now than you are’? Jeez, Naomi! - I related to her altered perception. And how it led her to question her basic notions of identity and politics. She comments further:

I was still passionately pro-choice. But I was beginning to wonder if a pregnant woman was an implicit challenge to the autonomous ‘individual’ upon which basic Western notions of law, of rights, even of selfhood were based. There are two people inside me now, I thought. Everything is different. Pregnancy, it seemed required a different kind of philosophy; even a better pro-choice language. (Misconceptions, chapter 5, extracted here)

In a previous article in New Republic, Wolf opined that the pro-choice movement had "developed a lexicon of dehumanization" and urged feminists to accept abortion as a form of homicide and defend the procedure within the ambiguity of this moral conundrum. She continues, "Abortion should be legal; it is sometimes even necessary. Sometimes the mother must be able to decide that the fetus, in its full humanity, must die."  Wolf concluded by speculating that in a world of "real gender equality," passionate feminists "might well hold candlelight vigils at abortion clinics, standing shoulder to shoulder with the doctors who work there, commemorating and saying goodbye to the dead."

I don’t think she’s on the right track here, but Wolf does have a point. Trans-historically, cross-culturally, and among other animal species, reproductive control - whether through abortion or, more troublingly, infanticide - is the dark other side of the story of women’s ability to bring forth life. 

My own reflections on this topic didn’t end with my first pregnancy, however.

In this, my second pregnancy, I also had a seven-week scan. This one was simply ordered as a ‘dating scan’ to establish an estimated due date, rather than to confirm the viability of the pregnancy. Again, I sloshed into the radiologist’s room, had the gel put on my tummy, and looked expectantly at the monitor. This time my fear was not that I might have lost the baby, but that there might be more than one heartbeat in there. 

Again, we saw the shadowy egg-sac - just the one, thank goodness - appear on the screen. Again, we saw the candle-flame flickering. Again, we saw the jagged heart-rate and heard the quick rhythmical beat. 

This time, however, my emotional response to the scan was quite different. 

This time, I was more matter-of-fact, less surprised: ‘There it is’, I thought to myself, as if I had just found a lost set of car-keys. I watched the monitor and was only surprised by the fact that I was not really surprised.  What had changed since my previous first scan and this one?

In a word, experience.

While I still remembered my sense of wonder from the first scan, I was also somewhat older and wiser about what it takes to bear and raise a child. I remembered feeling sick as a dog during my previous first trimester. I remembered nearly dying after giving birth, and the long process of recovery from that. I remembered the sleep deprivation, near-constant breast-feeding, isolation, and marginalisation that counter-balanced the marvel of a new baby and the joy of her every movement. I remembered that there are emotional, financial and social costs in having a baby, just as there are incalculable gains. 

More importantly, I knew that I had wanted my first baby and I wanted this one. But I also knew that not every woman who finds herself pregnant does (for whatever reason that may be). I found myself agreeing wholeheartedly with pregnant Guardian columnist Tanya Gold, who recently wrote: “Pregnancy has made me more pro-choice, not less; an unwanted pregnancy, I now know for certain, is too much to ask, here or anywhere.”  Similarly, journalist Caitlin Moran powerfully narrates her own experience of abortion, after already suffering a miscarriage and giving birth to two children, in How to Be A Woman. Her conclusion? That women know best about what’s best for them.

But, as my reaction to my first scan attests, this is a complex area.  

While I remain pro-choice, I cannot un-remember the flickering light of life I first saw approximately three years ago. Nor can I ignore the fact that, for some groups of women, the right to have children is threatened by things I am extremely unlikely to experience, such as forced sterilisation (see examples here and here). Nor that some groups of women are stereotyped as ‘bludging breeders’ and are on the receiving end of social censure for having or wanting to have children. But in every circumstance, when it comes to fertility, women are often positioned as less than human, their right to control their own fertility - be it having children or deciding not to have them - is seen as a matter for others to determine. 

Knowing now what I was yet to learn then, I am more convinced than ever that it is the state’s responsibility to provide women with access to legal and safe abortion, not only in cases of rape, incest, threat to the mother’s life, or for medical reasons, but also in cases where a potential mother does not want to carry a child to term for whatever reason that may be. Anything less would be, ironically, to infantilise women, to treat them as if the state - and, by that, let’s face it, I really mean patriarchal ideology - knew better than women themselves about what is best for them.

This is not an abstract or settled issue, either. 

Just this week, Texas senator Wendy Davis filibustered for 11 hours to stall proposed legislation that would have limited Texan women’s right to exercise control over their own fertility. The proposals she took a stand against called for abortions to be banned after 20 weeks, clinics to upgrade their facilities to be classed as surgical centres and doctors to have admitting privileges at a hospital within 30 miles. They would have forced 37 of the state's 42 clinics to close, making it very difficult for women in rural areas to obtain an abortion if they needed one. 

Since her actions, and those of her supporters, succeeded in over-turning the vote, Davis has been attacked by male politicians for being a teenage mother of a teenage mother, someone who should know better than anyone what the value of a life is. 

Given that Davis was a divorced single mother, working two jobs to support her family, and living in a trailer park by the age of 19, I think she, far better than her male critics, probably does know what the value of a life is and what it takes to make and raise one. She did not choose to end her own pregnancy, but she knows enough to know that not all women would make the same choice she did.

review: The Price of Motherhood

Much like buses, in this blog you could be waiting around for book reviews with none looming on the horizon (as in September) and then several come along all at one (as in October - November). Perhaps this says something about the time I have to devote to reading relatively lengthy books on feminism and motherhood, perhaps on how alert my brain is after a day’s paid and unpaid work. As my current reading material - Sarah Hrdy’s Mother Nature - is literally verging on encyclopaedic this might be the last review for a wee while. 

Ann Crittenden’s The Price of Motherhood: Why the Most Important Job in the World is Still the Least Valued (2001) is one of the few books I have read - on any subject - that pretty much lives up to the hype on the cover: ‘a landmark book,’ ‘powerful and important’, and ‘a scathing indictment of policies that cheat mothers’. Naomi Wolf could do worse than have a squizz at this to get some tips on powerful ways to combine the personal and political (although, to be fair, I guess she probably has).  Unlike Kunin’s book, which I reviewed last week, Crittenden's book has a resonance beyond the borders of the United States. In the US, the institutional biases towards mothers may be writ large (in paid employment, in divorce, in single parenting, in tax rules), but they are present to some degree in other so-called developed countries as well. Not least in the ways at which the devaluing  - or, more accurately, the non-valuing - of a mother’s unpaid work institutionalises gender inequity and socio-economic disadvantage.

Crittenden’s book, reissued last year, is based on five years of research in economics, history, child development, family law, public policy, demography, anthropology, evolutionary psychology and on field interviews with a range of parents. It is also based on her own experiences of the acute disempowerment she felt on having children. She writes:

This is also a work of the heart, growing out of my own experiences as a professional woman and a mother. As a beneficiary of the women’s movement, for years I lived the unencumbered life of a journalist; one of the boys in a gender-neutral environment that represented enormous progress for women ... [A] surprise came when I realised [after having a baby] how little my former world seemed to understand, or care, about the complex reality I was discovering. The dominant culture  of which I had been a part considered child-rearing unskilled labor, if it considered child-rearing at all. And no-one was stating the obvious: if human abilities are the ultimate fount of economic progress, as many economists now agree, and if those abilities are nurtured (or stunted) in the early years, then mothers and other care-givers of the young are the most important producers in the economy. They do, literally, have the most important job in the world. (pp 10-11)

While I wonder just how ‘gender-neutral’ her previous work environment really was - it’s not like women without children don’t face any barriers in their careers - Crittenden’s outrage struck a chord. I read on, intrigued. 

First of all, Crittenden traces the disappearance of women’s ‘work’ during the nineteenth century, as workplaces began to be increasingly located outside the home. So far, so obvious. What Crittenden also traces is attitudinal shifts and the specific locatable moments at which these seismic changes occurred. Around the middle of the nineteenth-century, for example, the developing national census began to classify the occupations of individuals within households rather than treating households as a single economic unit. As part of this shift, household labour (‘housekeeping’) was re-classified as ‘unproductive’ and separate from ‘productive labour’. Mothers ‘keeping house’ for their own families (unproductive) were distinguished from women keeping house for wages (productive).  This shift in the way a mother’s work was conceptualised meant that by the turn of the twentieth century, women and children were both considered as dependents or, more specifically, as economic liabilities rather than assets. Despite some differences, this trend manifested across the United States, in Britain and in Australia (and, I would guess, a number of other countries too). 

And, in the 1920s, the gendered definitions of productivity became enshrined in international economic instruments, specifically in the measure that became known as Gross Domestic Product (GDP). Significantly, GDP only measured goods and services that were sold; by excluding ‘non-productive’ work from the national wealth ‘almost all the activities of married women were omitted from the scorecard of capitalism.’ (p 65). Crittenden does acknowledge that this has more recently begun to change, not least in terms of contemporary environmental problems (e.g. how do you calculate the value of clean water?), the insights of feminist economics, and a deeper understanding of what is called - a little chillingly, I think - human capital.   

Crittenden cites with approval Marilyn Waring’s call to unpaid caregivers to tell census-takers that they are unpaid workers rather than ‘unemployed’; she traces how a campaign to do just that in Canada in the 1990s led to changes in the way unpaid labour in the home was counted in the census. During this campaign, Carol Lees, its principal organiser, encountered resistance from women’s groups who apparently did not agree with her child-care policy (which, according to her, is ‘to value it wherever it occurs, in or out of the home’ p 83). By the late 1990s, a number of countries had begun to collect data on unpaid labour. These shifts started to reveal the ‘free ride’ most societies were getting on the back of this unpaid work: ‘the entire society benefits from well-reared children, without sharing more than a fraction of the costs of producing them. And that free ride on female labor is enforced by every major institution, starting with the workplace’ (p 86). In neo-liberal economies particularly, children are thus seen as an individual ‘choice’ rather than a social good (much less a community responsibility). This rationale drives such practices as expensive child care of variable quality, limited financial benefits for families, a demonise-the-parents approach to all manner of anti-social behaviours, and humiliating reckonings of what a wife is worth in divorce settlements (including child support payments). Cue a thousand comedy routines concerning blood-sucking former spouses...

She closes her analysis by setting out a programme for business, government, and the community, the ‘free riders’ on mothers’ unpaid labour who reap the benefits from well-nurtured children while contributing little to the cost.

Throughout the book, Crittenden doesn’t shy away from the fact that some early feminists bought into the productive / unproductive distinction and played a role in the perpetuation of inequity: she documents a 1909 debate between Charlotte Perkins Gilman (who described the vast majority of women as ‘unproductive parasites’) and Anna Howard Shaw (who argued that a mother’s role in the home should be compensated), as marking a crucial turning point in the US feminist agenda. Gilman, she argues, saw the shift in women’s status as requiring the overthrow of the patriarchal family as an economic unit to emancipate women, revealing some degree of contempt for the way in which a number of her contemporaries actually spent their time. 

Crittenden concludes: 

As that evening in New York illustrated, at the turn of the twentieth century, the women’s movement contained two contradictory strands: one that denigrated women’s role within the family, and one that demanded recognition and remuneration for it .... For the rest of the twentieth century, the women’s movement followed the first path, and it led to innumerable great victories. But in choosing that  path, many women’s advocates accepted the continued devaluation of motherhood, thereby guaranteeing that feminism would not resonate with millions of wives and mothers. (p 63)

I’m usually a little suspicious of sweeping statements, but it’s nonetheless hard to escape Crittenden’s conclusion. It bristles behind every cry of outrage from previously career-minded new mothers (‘why didn’t anyone tell me?’), some of which are either overtly or covertly contained in the recent outpourings of ‘mummy-literature’: from the sardonic critiques of coffee-groups, to the more personal memoir, to the political polemic, to the historical analysis of motherhood as institution, to the exposition of ‘natural’ motherhood, to the mummy blog. It’s hard not to read it into the statistic of approximately 30 per cent of well-educated middle class women in ‘developed’ countries who are apparently choosing the ‘nuclear option’ of not having children. It’s hard not to read it into the so-called mummy wars between ‘stay-at-home’ and working mothers. It’s hard not to read it in the failure of most governments to provide adequate support for families particularly in early childhood, and in businesses who bemoan family-friendly policies.  It’s hard not to read it in the overwhelming evidence - which Crittenden assembles in subsequent chapters - that those who look after children are not only poorly paid but lack status, have limited political clout, and pay plenty for their ‘labours of love’. 

Isn’t it time that governments, businesses, and communities started sharing more of the costs of raising a child, instead of just reaping the benefits?

thanks for the mammaries

The last time I breastfed my daughter was about 6.25 pm on 3 December 2011.

She was twelve and a half months old, and she fed for a mere five minutes without much enthusiasm. ‘This’, I thought to myself, hardly daring to believe it, ‘is it.’ After a year of breastfeeding, she had more or less decided for herself that she no longer needed it. And so I decided to dispense with this evening feed the next day, and see how she coped.

She didn’t seem to miss it at all.

And, to be honest, neither did I.

While I was glad that I was able to breastfeed her, and in the blurry days following her birth there was some concern that I might not be able to, there’s no denying it can be a chore. As my midwife told me while I was still pregnant, the main thing to know about breastfeeding is that you will be doing it A LOT.

She wasn’t kidding.

In order to try and give ourselves the best shot at successful breastfeeding, my husband and I had gone to classes (it could be our motto: when in doubt, go back to school!). Donning a pair of giant rubber breasts, one of the lactation consultants at the local hospital ran two morning sessions to teach expectant mothers how to perform this ‘natural’ process. Presumably, these were lessons that were once passed on by midwives or other female kin, but are now having to be re-learned.

In any case, there was much useful information amongst the knitted breasts, scary baby dolls and cringeworthy ice-breaker games (sample: the group was split into men and women and each group had to come up with as many synonyms for ‘breast’ as possible. I did not contribute). We learned that babies’ feeding cycles vary, and they can feed anywhere between every two and four hours (my baby, however, sometimes went as long as five or six hours, prompting us to be concerned that she might lose weight again); that babies can feed for between 5 and 45 minutes a side (my baby fed for forty minutes in total - at a short session - and up to an hour and a half - at a long one); and babies have a range of non-verbal cues that they use to tell their mother that they need to feed before they resort to crying (suckling motions with their mouth, head-butting and so on). Using a newly-purchased soft bear - I refused to buy a scary baby doll - we practised how to latch on and tried not to feel ridiculous.

Of course, all this useful information went out the window as my anaesthetic wore off, and I woke up in a haze of powerful painkillers with a small red and bruised bundle to feed. Hospital midwives turned me over and put her to my breast, and even had to position her to latch on. Fortunately, she seemed to know what to do when she was pointed in the right direction. Once I had recovered my senses somewhat, I found the helpful breastfeeding chart that was monitoring our progress: we were rated by letter as to our performance: she was doing well in the ‘time spent feeding’ category; I was scoring abysmally for independent latching on. ‘Must do better,’ I thought to myself, strangely feeling neither humiliated or angry. It must’ve been the drugs.

Once I was released back into the wild and we took the baby home, my days, as my midwife promised, were filled with breastfeeding. Aside from a couple of minor blocked ducts, I was fortunately spared some of the more gruesome side-effects of breastfeeding: mastitis, cracked nipples, painful breasts. Some mothers I know went through considerable personal trial and discomfort to successfully breastfeed their babies. It maybe be natural, but it often doesn’t come naturally.

Rachel Cusk pithily summarises her breastfeeding attempts:

The word ‘natural’ appears in a sort of cartoon bubble in my head. I do not, it is true, feel entirely natural. I feel as though someone is sucking my breast in public. (A Life’s Work, p 95)

And Naomi Wolf describes the sheer physicality of breastfeeding:

When our daughter nursed it was as rough-and-tumble, as purely animal an experience as a human being can have. Some unfathomable instinct hardwired into her sent her into a rapid panting, her small heart racing, when her face with its buttery skin came near the nipple. Guided - who can say? by the scent of milk, or perhaps the sight of the darker areola at the outer field of her primitive vision, she would suddenly go into a small frenzy, shaking her head back and forth, quickly, desperately, searching with her whole face for the nipple brushing against her mouth. when the nipple came in contact with her lips, she would lunge onto it for all the world like a cat pouncing on a mouse. her concentration - no, let’s face it, her savagery - was so acute that she leapt with the force of her whole small body, emitting a soft guttural growl. (Misconceptions, p 227)

It is most definitely an odd experience to get used to, particularly if you like your personal space. Cusk describes these early moments of motherhood as creating a new unit of being called the ‘motherbaby’:

In this moment, I now realise that a person exists who is me, but who is not confined to my body. ... What she needs and wants will vie with, and often take priority over, what I need and want for the forseeable future. (A Life’s Work, p 95)

This formulation reminded me of psychoanalyst Julia Kristeva’s account of the abject. Breast milk, like blood, comes from within the body, transgressing the boundary between inside and outside. It nourishes a new body, that was once part of the mother too, but is now outside it. The relay of exchanges of what is internal and external between a new, nursing mother and her baby is a process of abjection, initiating the process of separation that will eventually enable a child to become a discrete subject of his or her own.

I’m not sure how formula-feeding fits in with a psychoanalytic account, however.

Certainly, formula-feeding offers more flexibility in childcare than exclusive breastfeeding does (unless you get the hang of expressing, which I never did). Some, such as Elizabeth Badinter, argue that this flexibility is crucial for women’s advancement. Others argue that breastfeeding is the best possible start that you can give your baby, and, even if you only breastfeed for a short time, there will be benefits.

I’m glad I did my time as a ‘motherbaby’, but I am equally glad it is over. I’m enjoying my baby more and more as she becomes a discrete and separate person - with a fondness for cow’s milk - all of her own.

review: Misconceptions

In the early 1990s, perched on a log by a remote lake waiting for a limnologist with whom I had a love/hate relationship, I started reading Naomi Wolf’s The Beauty Myth. With incongruous waders over his grungey flannel shirt and faded cargo shorts, the limnologist scooped up hundreds of microscopic animals in a huge net, while I read about how patriarchy fought women breaching its power structures by pushing impossible standards of beauty to which they could never measure up. For women entrapped by the beauty myth this meant that instead of working out how to finally smash that glass ceiling, they were more interested in just working out. Finding myself both persuaded and frustrated by her writing, I also started to develop a bit of a love/hate relationship with Naomi Wolf.

Some weeks later while watching Oprah - ahem! I mean, of course, studying for exams - I saw Ms Wolf hawking her book on the show. I felt just as vexed as I’m sure she did when Oprah’s audience offered the radical insight - to profound applause - that she didn’t need to worry about the beauty industry because she was so beautiful already. To her credit, she tried to alter the terms of this response and point out that it didn’t matter what people thought of her relative attractiveness, ‘beauty’ was not an intrinsic value but a normative culturally-constructed standard against which women were measured and found wanting. The audience remained skeptical.

I duly read her next two books as they came out: Fire with Fire: the New Female Power and How to Use It and Promiscuities: the Secret Struggle for Womanhood (or a Secret History of Female Desire). Once again, they contained interesting material and provocative arguments. But once again, I came away somewhat unsatisfied, not least because of her increasing use of purple prose to make her points. My abiding memory of these books is cringing over a sentence - I forget from which book - where she proclaimed that male sexual attention was ‘the sun in which she bloomed.’ Presumably meant as a riposte to the spectre of 1970s radical feminism, it just felt embarrassing.

So Naomi and I parted ways from the late 1990s: I went to Japan, she kept right on blooming and eventually became a mother. Her book on that subject, Misconceptions: Truth, Lies and the Unexpected Journey into Motherhood came out in 2001. A decade later, as I too have followed in her footsteps and become a mother, we have met again for a catch-up. So how does Misconceptions measure up?

Her writing is still a mix of the purple, the personal and the political. Not that there’s anything intrinsically wrong with that, of course. There were passages I vehemently agreed with, particularly those relating to the medicalisation of birth, and the shifts in identity of new mothers. But there were also many I found superficial, anecdotal (not in a good way) and untheorised. The sections on work and childcare were particularly thinly sketched: her survey of a handful of other mothers she knew (i.e. white, upper middle-class, urban professionals ... in her neighbourhood) gave an extremely skewed picture of how women negotiate (or not) the return to work. This basically boils down to having a nanny.

In a a couple of brief sentences, she mentions that other middle-class woman use day-care, and the working-class nannies themselves rely on low-paid babysitters for their own children, but these experiences are not really explored. While Wolf acknowledges the racial and class divisions between the nannies and the ‘working mothers’, she only narrates her discussion with one nanny, and this feels a little like a guilty afterthought. In a book that is so avowedly personal as well, she does not discuss her own work and childcare arrangements, nor put her own marriage under the spotlight in the way that she does those of her friends (spoiler: all the so-called feminist husbands are really bastards. From her descriptions, it sounds a bit to me like they were bastards all along. Here’s a sample:

‘Here’s the secret, Naomi,’ he said. ‘All the husbands I know are good guys. They honestly want things to be fair in their relationships. They are hands-on dads, and they want their wives to be happy and fulfilled. But when it comes down to it, there is no way they are going to sacrifice a career opportunity .... Bottom line? We know they won’t leave us,’ he said. ‘A: They love us. B: Because of the kids.’ (p 225)

But I digress.)

More powerful were her sections on pregnancy and birth. Here, she does examine in detail her own experiences of birth and what they showed up about the high intervention rate of births in the United States (scary!) and the way in which births can be manipulated for the financial benefits of the hospitals and medics in attendance. Hospital protocols, rather than the woman and baby, stipulate how long women will labour for, and the alarmingly high rate of caesareans (accompanied by epidurals, and other interventions) is a nice little earner for all concerned in a user-pays health system (big cheer for socialised medicine!).

After her first traumatic experience, Wolf sets out to explore the other options, talking to natural childbirth advocates, midwife practitioners, and women-centred obstetric practices. For her second birth, she takes the middle route: an obstetric practice with hands-on midwives who work in partnership with doctors to deliver babies. Avoiding the highly medicalised and de-personalised route she went the first time, and eschewing a drug-free birth as overly masochistic, she argues for a middle way between medicalised hospital births and natural home births, with midwives and doctors working together to provide the best outcomes for mother and baby.

This cri-de-coeur - ‘why can’t they all just get along?!’ - struck a chord with me. Throughout my pregnancy, I felt like I was in an invisible tug of war between the medical profession and midwives focussed on natural childbirth.This is partly because a) I had a stupid GP who told me midwives were dangerous and b) I chose a midwife who practised, and was an advocate for, natural birth. I have written before about how I didn’t appreciate being treated as an object (a car!) by my initial doctor, nor was I that thrilled about hearing repeatedly how midwives had won a law-change so they could practice autonomously from my midwife. After having read about Wolf’s experience (women still giving birth on their backs ... and in stirrups!), I now have much more understanding of what the midwives had fought for, and am grateful they did manage to get that law-change. At the time, however, I couldn’t have cared less. Like Wolf, I wanted the focus to be on me and the baby, with both doctors and midwives working together, and not feel like I was having to choose the winning team (and hoping like hell I picked the right one).

In the end, I did see a lot of doctors, and had a range of interventions. But, throughout, and afterwards, I had the support of my midwife, who was fantastic. I only wish I hadn’t spent nine months feeling so pulled in different directions, not really knowing what was what nor who to properly trust, before I was actually pulled in different directions by my own birth experience.

memoirs of an invisible woman

One day I woke up and I was invisible.

There was no flash of eerie light, no potential nuclear catastrophe, and no attempts to blow up a cat. Just eyes that slid past me, spaces that didn’t accommodate my buggy-wielding self properly, and even friends and workmates who more or less forgot about me unless I, rarely, met them in public spaces or attended their events. I encountered a new world populated by other mothers of young children, one that had been invisible to me before I had a baby. Between nine and four, when others are at school or work, they emerge, gathering in cafes, at the library, in the park, at the playground. Like a certain invisible man (and, just to be clear, I’m not being so crass as to compare my situation to that of Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man), I had to re-negotiate how to live life as one of them: an Invisible Woman.

The Invisible Man in Memoirs of an Invisible Man had to re-learn how to live his life in his newly invisible state: how to dress, how to drive, and how to work. Similarly, I had to figure out when I could shower and dress (before my husband went to work? while the baby had her morning nap?), what I needed for the baby in order to get out of the house (practically everything) and where to hang out in the days with so many minutes to fill (see above). Inhabiting my previous life as an autonomous subject in control of my own destiny, it was a new challenge figuring out how to structure the day when there was no particular place I had to be, and a small person with a large appetite and no control of her bodily functions to look after.

And then there was the outside world to navigate. Like most new parents, I can tell you the exact location of the small handful of decent parents’ rooms in the CBD are, I know which cafes to avoid due to their cramped space and appalling bathrooms, some of which were unfortunately old favourites, and my first check on entering a new place is whether there is a change-station and a debris-free space for uninhibited crawling. Thanks to helpful websites like City Wrigglers, this information is now available online, before you need to venture out. There may be a dearth of such facilities, but at least knowing where the half-way decent ones are makes venturing out a little easier.

So much for accommodation of my new priorities. But what about my personal feeling of invisibility? Until I made it back into the outside world after the baby had been born, I was not aware how much of my sense of self was dependent on having a job and earning my own income. I have been financially independent since my late teens, and didn’t even let my first date pay for a movie ticket on my behalf. Now, aside from a small weekly allowance that I had saved up for myself over the preceding nine months, I had to look to someone else to pay the bills and provide. For someone accustomed to paying her own way, it felt very retro, and not in a good way.

Despite the adage ‘every mother is a working mother’ the message that a mother’s (unpaid) work is as of much value to the economy and society as those in paid employment just hasn’t become a reality. In New Zealand, new mothers who intend to return to work are entitled to receive fourteen weeks’ paid parental leave. This is a relatively recent, and welcome, development. Yet the amount received is less than the minimum wage, sending a clear message that looking after a new-born baby has even less economic value than the most poorly-paid positions available in the job market. It’s better than a poke in the eye, but not much.

Feminist Naomi Wolf writes about her ‘demotion’ on becoming a mother in Misconceptions (2001):

As my life slowly resumed, I received one tough lesson after another in my sharp demotion of status .... From both men and women, from young baby-sitters to plumbers to cable installers, I noticed a new flippancy in relation to my time: it was newly valueless. People who would never take for granted that my husband should sit around waiting for them seemed to assume that I had nowhere to go, and nothing important to do. (179)

Carrying her analysis further, she describes how the geography of cities, as navigated by women with small children, makes clear how little their role is valued: she encounters bathrooms with limited or no change facilities, and playgrounds without shelter from either the sun or the rain, some even without fencing and gates, or bathrooms.

I can certainly relate to this after my trip to the supermarket this morning: the only trolleys that could carry a child were the absolutely massive ones for which there is virtually no room in the aisles. When I went to pay I had to manouevre awkwardly between the checkouts, knocking my legs and hips painfully several times as I had to squeeze back and forth to get my shopping out. Why couldn’t the space between the checkouts be wider? Or the smaller trolleys have child seats? Occasionally, help is offered - and gratefully received - by those without babies. But it feels frustrating to be dependent on help for things you know you could do yourself if the environment had been built differently.

Wolf observes:

The message you receive from your work environment about how valuable your work is affects your psychological well-being. Every day I was getting the message that the work the women I knew and I were doing had little value: the needs of people sitting in bus shelters and municipal lobbies ... were more carefully met than were the needs of moms and kids in the places in which we gathered. (178-79)

We are repeatedly told that looking after small children is the most valuable job there is. And yet where are the policies, and structures in place to make this an economic reality as well as an emotional and moral one? By this, I mean extended paid parental leave that is more than a token amount (including paid leave for fathers of newborns - this is currently unpaid), more actual rather than merely nominal flexibility in work places (so many new mums I know who have tried to return to work have been told it’s full-time or nothing - facing such a choice most have opted to resign), and easier public spaces and services to navigate (this is slowly changing, not least because of such things as the Accessible Public Transport Inquiry).

And in the meantime? The Invisible Man had to learn to live with his condition, as I have to live with mine. He managed to make it work for him though, eventually becoming a millionaire through fraud.

As for me, I’m still buying Lotto tickets.