Timing it right

A couple of years ago, when I was only just pregnant, I went to a birthday lunch attended by a range of extended family members who were, shall we say, of a significant age. At one point, I got talking to a woman who was I’m not sure how many cousins removed from me.  I don’t know how we got onto the topic of children - I was still within the 12-week wall of disclosure and hadn’t broadcast my condition - but she told me about her brood of children and how she’d had a fifth child  at the ripe old age of 40, well after her first four, who were evenly and properly spaced in her twenties. Bumping into an acquaintance at the doctor’s surgery while going to a routine check-up, she was told ‘Oh Mrs C_____, you’re the talk of the town!’

OK, it was a small town, but still. Clearly, even a married woman couldn’t avoid the gentle opprobrium of being the talk of the town for having what was thought to be an inappropriately-timed baby, a visible sign that the couple in question were still getting busy at an unseemly age.

This was, of course, a wee while ago now.  Mrs C______ was the talk of her town in the early 1970s, having had most of her children, as was the done thing, in her twenties in the early 1960s.

In New Zealand, as in a number of other western countries, the average age of first births has risen sharply since the mid-twentieth centruy. In the 1950s and 1960s, the average age of first births was much lower, averaging in the early 20s. In the 1975, the median age was 25. In 2012, Statistics New Zealand established, with the usual caveats that: "the median age of mothers giving birth to their first child is roughly 28 years, two years younger than the average across all mothers. The median age for both childbirth and birth of first child has remained steady since 2001. The median age of women giving birth to their second child is roughly 32 years.' Furthermore, women are, overall, having fewer children. 

Clearly, women’s consensus on when ‘the right time’ is to have  a baby has shifted in the last half-century. But this ‘consensus’ is not only the result of individual ‘choice’ (and biological capability), but also societal pressure. Teenage mothers are frowned on, as are mothers over forty. Even those past their early 30s receive some censure, not least in the description of their pregnancies. At 34, my first pregnancy was clinically described as “geriatric primigravida’ or, in other words, ‘way old at time of first pregnancy’ (humph!). Furthermore, societal approval or censure depends on who it is having children - if white and middle-class, you should be having children and are being selfish by leaving it late or not at all; if brown and poor, you should be having few to no children, so as to minimise bludging off the state.

But it is not simply societal pressure that polices ‘the right time.’ Finding ‘the right time’ - assuming a woman has some choice in the matter - to have children in order to balance the competing demands of career - and again assuming this is something a woman wants - and family has been a plank of second and third-wave feminism. And it varies from woman to woman, career to career.  Emily Monosson’s edited collection about the experience of women scientists, for example, traced the consequences for each mother in the timing of their children. Some had their children as graduate students, and several of those then had to negotiate ‘alternative career paths’ or effectively position themselves as unecumbered in order to fight for tenure (a couple had partners who took on the full-time care-giving role in order to do this).  Others had their children once they had received tenure, but had to either change the focus of their work - for example, pursuing a policy path rather than a lab-based path - or fight to be taken seriously by minimising the ‘distractions’ from their work. In no case did any of these mothers have an easy time of it.  Those who came closest were those whose partners shouldered the traditionally female role of primary care-giver.

There seems to be an idea that if only the magical right time can be found, women can plan their families and careers, with minimal financial and emotional penalties for motherhood.  But when is it?  Early, so you can physically recover more quickly, have more energy to parent, and years yet to decide on a career? Or later, so you can establish yourself in a career, negotiate good benefits and be a more mature parent?  There are pros and cons to both. On the web, parenting sites, medical sites, financial planning sites, life-coaching sites, and even respectable news sites too abound with varying answers to the question of ‘when is the right time to have children’?

It's a key issue covered by Anne-Marie Slaughter in her provocative 2012 article, ‘Why Women Still Can’t Have it All’, in which, among other things, she debunked the myth of ‘finding the right time.’ She comments:

The most important sequencing issue is when to have children ... the truth is, neither sequence is optimal, and both involve trade-offs that men do not have to make. You should be able to have a family if you want one - however and whenever your life circumstances allow - and still have the career you desire. If more women could strike this balance, more women would reach leadership positions, they could make it easier for more women to stay in the workforce.

A range of books by other feminist writers - Anne Crittenden, Madeleine Kunin, Marilyn Waring, to name but a few - have detailed exactly what these trade-offs are: loss of income, loss of status, loss of future benefits (such a retirement savings), increased insecurity in the event of marital breakdown. And an increasing percentage of women in western countries - up to 30% of women of child-bearing age - are apparently deciding - or failing not to decide - that the trade-offs are not worth it. 

Yet that still means around 60-70% of women still are having children, planned or unplanned, old, median-aged or young, rich or poor, healthy or unhealthy, aware of the costs involved ... or not. These are for a range of reasons - familial pressure being a frequently cited one - but one could not really consider them ‘rational choices’ if the pros and cons were solely rationally weighed up. One of my husband’s former co-workers once said that ‘there would never be a right time to have kids if you ever really thought about it.’  Ensuring that both individual women and societies don’t ever ‘really think about it’ seems a given.

I mean, if a society really thought about what it takes to raise children then it would channel its tax dollars into measures that support families and encouraged the gun-shy (rather than coercing the downright ’nos’, of course) into parenthood: paid parental leave for all families, universal family support payments throughout childhood, paternity leave, properly subsidised and adequately remunerated childcare, and so on. 

Now, when is the right time to have that conversation?

Memories

Our girl appears to be learning to read. 

Well, to put it more accurately, she is in the early pre-reading stages. That is, she is learning to remember the stories that she hears over and over and can remember what lines go with which picture in which book. She has taken to sitting still - for a few minutes only, mind - open book on her lap saying to herself something like ‘On Monday he ate through one apple’ or "‘Don’t worry,’ cried Stickman. ‘I’ll soon set you free.”. She appears to remember things that happened in the previous days and weeks, but needs prompting for any longer time-period.

She is also approaching the age where she may well remember things that happen to her now in later life, particularly if they were outstanding or traumatic for some reason. Autobiographical memories sustained over a long time-period, though, are not thought to develop until around pre-school-age. Memory is not just one process, then, but a range. Various types of memory include declarative memory (such as facts or knowledge that can be consciously recalled), procedural memory (unconsciously retained skills such as holding a fork, drinking from a cup, getting dressed, going to the toilet), and episodic memory (specific personal memories organised cohesively into a narrative). Children are thought to have a dense amnesia for the first few years of life, and then a period of relatively sparse memories for a few years after that.

Some of the multiple explanations for the development - and, importantly, the retention - of memories include the development of fluent language skills and the development of a concept of self-hood. Of course, these processes are inter-linked. Subjectivity - a person’s sense of self - is defined in language. A subject is a person who speaks and says ‘I’, inhabiting that ‘I’ as their own real and discrete self. At the moment, our girl uses the variants of her name, ‘me’ and ‘my’ to describe herself. She is increasingly starting to use the pronoun ‘I’ now too, notably in the phrase ‘I want it.’ 

Very young children do remember things, then, but the things they remember don’t often become memories. What they forget - a process called childhood amnesia - also becomes part of the process of creating subjectivity. One of the processes that they forget - or, rather, it becomes unconscious to the point of seeming natural - is the process of becoming gendered.  This is why what children learn and experience when they are very young is so important to their subsequent development, as neuroscientist Lise Eliot has identified.

Memories can also be unreliable. Neuroscientist Karim Nader think this may be due to something called ‘reconsolidation’ or the recasting of early memories in the light of everything that has happened since. Editing in this way is part of the process of learning life lessons: remembering a difficult time in the past is tempered by the knowledge that things worked out all right in the end, for example. 

Memories are not only individual, but also collective. ‘Collective memory’ is sometimes used as another name for history, giving the later a sheen of naturalism. Collective memory becomes ‘common knowledge’, by which individuals - some individuals, at any rate - create social bonds and a sense of shared identity. Conventional histories, for example, have focussed on ‘great men’ and significant political events, rendering, for example, the domestic lives of ordinary people little more than a backdrop to the great concerns of the age. 

Since the middle of the twentieth century,  however, in response to the political concerns of a wide range of previously marginalised groups, historians (including feminist and post-colonial historians) started to dig deeper into these lives. One technique used to uncover previously excluded lives and pre-occupations is called ‘memory-work’. Memory-work actively seeks to question established narratives of the past, often by employing non-traditional methods, particularly oral histories, to re-establish the voices of those who have been excluded from traditional histories. Sue Kedgley’s account of the lives of Pākehā mothers in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries is one example of making visible the concerns and preoccupations of white settler colonialism from the point of view of women in the family.

As our girl increasingly displays her rapidly expanding feats of memory, she is consolidating her self-hood, a self that is anchored in a particular place in a particular time, with a particular cultural, linguistic, and historical inheritance. It is a self that is already gendered, and, as she becomes increasingly aware of how other people differ from herself, this process of becoming-feminine will intensify. The desire of other little girls in her class at kindergarten or school to exclusively dress in pink, for example, could well erase the memories that currently constitute her sense of self: that her favourite T-shirt is a grey one with a picture of a mountain on it, and that one of her favourite toys is a Thomas train set.  

But the memory process of reconsolidation means that she will also likely outgrow and revise her own past: in their turn, pink fairy princesses will become passé and baby-dolls will only be fit for babies. Memories might be the things that we remember from our pasts, but, in recasting them, they also might be what keeps us from living in the past, both individually and collectively.

Gottfried, Mrs Schischka, and me

This impressive-looking matron is my great-great-grandmother, Rosalie Schischka. She was one of a small group of immigrants from Bohemia in the Austrian Empire (now part of the Czech Republic) to the small village of Puhoi, north of Auckland, New Zealand. Along with the French settlement of Akaroa in the South Island, Puhoi is one of only a few distinctively European communities in New Zealand.

She appears here in a portrait painted of her by the world-famous-in-New Zealand nineteenth-century artist, Gottfried Lindauer. Like Mrs Schischka, Gottfried was a Bohemian immigrant to New Zealand, coming from the same area, Plzen (Pilsen). Both Gottfried and Rosalie, like their fellow travellers, were attracted by dreams of a better life, and, as it turned out, the tall tales of others who had already settled here. Like the similarly well-known paintings of Charles Frederick Goldie, Lindauer’s paintings are appreciated in the New Zealand art circles more for their historical and ethnographic value - though even that is apparently sketchy - than their artistic merit.

I only learned of the existence of this painting this past Christmas.  My father told me that his great grandmother had been painted by Lindauer - apparently news to him also - and that she had recently been sold for an undisclosed sum. The date of sale was 10 November 2011, my daughter’s first birthday. Intrigued, I Googled her as soon as I got home. Now in the Fletcher Trust Collection, Rosalie features on their website. Having never seen a photograph of her, I was curious to see what she looked like. Not to mention find out more about how a humble Bohemian immigrant was transformed into a semi-famous artwork.

With a click of a mouse button, there she was. My great-great-grandmother. Rosalie Schischka (née Schindlerova. Given that this is the feminine form of Schindler, are we, I wonder, any relation?). 

It’s hard to put into words what coming face to face with an unknown, and unseen, ancestress is like. It’s certainly not the same feeling as dispassionately appraising the work of a ‘journeyman painter’ who specialised in ‘romanticised images’, particularly of Mãori subjects, and portraits of people of substance (as Lindauer has been described).  It’s an uncanny sensation, of someone walking over your grave ... or out of theirs.  

Noting her age at the time of the painting - 73, and already widowed for 16 years - my first thought was the rather inconsequential ‘she must have had a good brand of hair-dye.’  Her tresses are still so improbably dark brown that they blend into the dim background. She wears mourning, adorned with two intricate pieces of gold jewellery, with dancing sparkles scattered around the top. Seed pearls, I guessed.

I searched her faces for traces of my own, but aside from the dark hair and eyes, I can’t see it. Putting my head to one side, and closing one eye, she maybe looks a bit like my dad, her great-grandson. Her face is fleshy and lined, but, for all that, she looks a youthful 73. While there are hints of impatience and not-suffering-fools around her mouth and eyes - perhaps there is a resemblance after all - there is also a slightly-raised left eyebrow. It’s as if she’s not at her ease, simultaneously thinking ‘hurry up and paint the picture already,’ and feeling tickled that she’s having her picture painted at all.

The blurb on the website - a little snidely, I think - says ‘this is a portrait of a woman of substance who went to some pains to ensure that her painted image reflected her status in the community.’ Hmmm, because it’s kind of crazy to get dressed up if someone’s going to paint your picture, right? Nor do the use of the tentative ‘probably’ and ‘probable’ suggest much knowledge of Rosalie’s life, nor of the community in which she lived. Most of the male immigrants from Bohemia were farm labourers, coal miners or town-labourers. Their wives cared for large families, while the single women were domestic servants and lace makers. And there are a couple of basic incorrect facts: the Schischkas arrived in Auckland in 1866, for example, not 1864, as stated. 

I don’t have a huge amount of knowledge of Rosalie’s life, or that of the Puhoi community’s either. But I can try and imagine the life of the living, breathing woman represented in the painting. Rosalie travelled with her husband and seven children to the other side of the world, leaving familiarity, family and friends, on the strength of a handful of rosy-tinted letters. These letters glossed over the difficulty of the terrain, the lack of any facilities beyond what the earliest settlers had built themselves, the isolation of the community, and its almost exclusive initial dependence on the local Ngãti Rongo people. 

Rosalie’s youngest child was two when she arrived in Auckland. I find a long car-trip with one toddler stressful enough. I can only imagine how difficult it must’ve been to cope with a large family, limited space and food, and the threat of typhus and typhoid fever, which killed four people on board. On arrival in New Zealand, her husband was held in debtor’s prison for three weeks as a result of various ‘misunderstandings’ over an early land purchase. I imagine Rosalie wondered what on earth she’d let herself in for ... and why on earth she’d let Lorenz talk her into this in the first place. I imagined her worst fears were confirmed when, on arrival in Puhoi, the first Bohemian immigrants there asked them, ‘what has brought you to this terrible place?’ Quick with his wits, her husband is said to have retorted, ‘Your letters.’  

Like most early European immigrants to New Zealand, the Bohemians benefitted from the policies of settlement and alienation of Mãori land pursued by the Crown. The Schischkas received 220 acres - more land than they could ever have dreamed of owning in Bohemia - and established themselves as farmers. I suspect Rosalie’s later ‘status in the community’ was due to the hard work she and her family put in to making their farm a going concern, and, with others, helping to feed and provision the new community. Not long after they arrived, Rosalie had an eighth child. In addition to feeding, clothing, and educating her existing children, she now had to cope with pregnancy, birth and infancy in a new and unfamiliar place. 

If she is not entitled to a little pride and self-satisfaction at the end of a hard life, then when would she be?

As you can tell, I had a somewhat defensive reaction to the way this picture is described on the Fletcher Trust Collection's website. My response is to the person in the picture as the subject of the painting, rather than its object. She is not just some old woman in a gloomy picture, indicative of the limitations of early New Zealand art, she is my great-great-grandmother. I found myself not only fascinated by her, but also feeling protective of her and wanting to shield her from the the distancing analysis of art critics. At moments, I even entertained thoughts of buying the picture myself - like Claire Huxtable in this episode of the Cosby Show - but the rumoured price-tag stretching into the thousands quickly extinguished those plans. Also, I don’t think it would match the carpet.

Why am I posting this ‘meditation on an artwork’ in a blog about feminism and motherhood?  Because the unusual reaction I had to this painting reminded me of the marginalised histories of motherhood that various feminist writers have tried to uncover. It reminded me of the history of settlement in this country, where my ancestors and me are located in it and how we have benefitted from it. And it reminded me that portraiture, even the sentimentalised Victorian kind, can be a powerful means of engaging with the past, especially with our foremothers, without whom none of us would be here. 

review: Cinderella Ate My Daughter

My gender-myth-busting holiday reading this year was the entertaining Cinderella Ate My Daughter: Dispatches from the Front Line of the New Girlie-Girl Culture (2011) by US author Peggy Orenstein. Orenstein not only questions the narrow, gendered nature of products aimed at young girls, but also the commodification of their nascent sexuality.

Perfect Christmas reading.

With a rapidly growing and increasingly independent daughter to guide, Orenstein navigates her way through literally thousands of gendered products that peddle narrow and confining definitions of girlhood. They seem to offer the pursuit of physical perfection (for later pursuit of a perfect prince) as virtually the only route to female empowerment. Mass commercialisation has spread that message faster and younger than ever before (or so I’m told in the book’s dust-jacket). Knowing all this - or, at least, fearing it - what do you do when you’re confronted with the reality of young daughters who want princess dresses, glittery make-up, Bratz dolls and Hannah Montana CDs?  

This book is Peggy Orenstein’s attempt to answer that question.

Orenstein’s mode of address is intriguing in its mix of the confessional and investigative. She opens by confiding to the reader ‘why she wanted a boy’. As a noted public commentator on raising girls in a number of earlier works, she was suddenly stricken at the thought of having to put her money where her mouth was. Or, as she puts it, ‘What if, after all, I was not up to the challenge myself? What if I couldn’t raise the ideal daughter? With a boy, I figured, I would be off the hook (pp 1-2).’ In an earlier post, I blogged  about how I had had similar, if temporary, misgivings.

The more personal parts of this book are tales of her ‘trial-and-error’ approach and rueful admissions of what appears to be failure (e.g. finding out that her three-year- old daughter was fully conversant with the story of Snow White - when Orenstein herself had never told her the story - and was able to use it to manipulate other kids to find her ‘the right princes’ among the little boys present pp 11-12). As the review in the New York Times noted, she argues with herself, questions her assumptions, attempts a answer and then has second thoughts. It’s as if you’re right there in the consciousness of a another parent, not a detached ‘expert’ of the kind I’ve discussed in a previous post.

Orenstein traverses a number of topics in this book: 

• the pinkification of a little girl’s world as represented in an annual industry toy fair displaying thousands of pink products (‘why has girlhood become so monochromatic?’ p 35); 
• the craze for princess-everything (considered by a number of parents to be a ‘safe’ outlet that ‘fends off premature sexualisation’ p 24); 
• the development of Disney Princesses from 2000 onwards (ever noticed how they never look at each other when they’re pictured together? Disney Princesses are emphatically not about friendship and female solidarity p 23); 
• fairy tales (including the ways in which their narrative tropes recur - particularly, as the title makes clear, that of Cinderella, who is swept off her feet by a handsome prince. Twilight, anyone?)
• child beauty pageants - admittedly well-trodden ground but Orenstein takes a different angle: reality programmes like Toddlers and Tiaras offer audiences a voyeuristic experience: ‘They also reassure parents of their own comparative superiority by smugly ignoring the harder questions: even if you agree that pageant moms are over the line in their sexualisation of little girls - way  over the line - where, exactly, is the line, and who draws it and how? (p 76)
• and, bringing the book right up to date, electronic media including the gendered use of virtual worlds and social media (which can lead to increased bullying - and studies have shown that girls are more subject to online victimisation than boys)

Adding up all these things, Orenstein (and the reader) can’t help but conclude that conventional cultural scripts concerning femininity for girls are ambivalent at best, and an impediment to healthy development at worst.

But, having identified all that, what is a parent to do? Lock her daughter up like a latter-day Rapunzel? Be the parent who says ‘no’ to everything? Or makes her daughter into a figure of fun - or, worse, a target for bullies - amongst her peers?  Orenstein doesn’t offer firm or glib answers, but a narrative of her own attempts to answer those questions.

One example of Orenstein’s confusion is when she learns of a friend’s 14-year old son’s nonchalant response to a topless photo from one of his female classmates (and not even one he knew well). Orenstein was initially torn between amazement at the girl’s bravado and apparent body confidence but also a nagging suspicion that ‘something didn’t sit right’ and that this might be old-fashioned sexual objectification dressed up in the more modern guise of Facebook and (pseudo-)empowerment. An expert in human sexuality studies helped her articulate what was behind her mixed feelings:

Girls like the one I have described are not connected more deeply to their feelings, needs or desires. Instead, sexual entitlement itself has become objectified; like identity, like femininity too, it, too, has become a performance, something to ‘do’ rather than to ‘experience.’ Teasing and turning boys on might give girls a certain thrill, even a fleeting sense of power, but it will not help them understand their own pleasure ... [or] allow them to assert themselves in intimate (let along casual) relationships. (pp 170-171)

I enjoyed this book a lot, although it had some limits. It sometimes spoke a little too much of its own bubble - a privileged, Californian, liberal enclave - to be totally relatable. It also focussed almost exclusively on the gendered experience of girls, something Orenstein acknowledges at the outset. This is largely because she has a daughter and not a son, so the issues are more personally pressing for her in a way that those affecting boys aren’t. I’d be interested to read a similar account that focussed on boys. 

When it comes to talking about the construction of gender, however, focussing on girls is not an intrinsic weakness. The process of gendering girls and boys is linked. In her landmark 1990 book Gender Trouble, theorist Judith Butler describes gender not only as performative but also as productive: it forms part of a heterosexual matrix, which juxtaposes ‘approved’ heterosexuality with ‘subversive’ homosexuality. In the normative view of the relationship between sex, gender and sexuality, conventionally masculine males are meant to desire conventionally feminine females. Masculinity and femininity - which comprise the 'gender ' part of the matrix - are most heavily policed as the visible signifiers of sexuality. A feminine male therefore becomes suspect, as does a masculine female. This is called the shaming and policing of gender, and it affects boys and men as much as girls and women. Orenstein’s book might focus on the gendered world of little girls, but this also impacts little boys, not least in how they will perceive their female family members and friends, and, later, potential partners (well, if they’ve got the script ‘right’, that is ...)

On the plus side, I appreciated Orenstein’s wit and self-awareness: in ‘It’s All About the Cape,’ she lamented the dearth of female super-heroes who could provide alternatives to the mania for princesses. Looking back with nostalgia on her own Wonder Woman phase, Orenstein wanted her daughter to experience a similar sense of invincibility, freedom and power. A little later, however, she admits: ‘I did a little digging about Wonder Woman. It turns out her real name was Diana, daughter of Hera, queen of the Amazons. That makes her, of all things ... a princess.’ (p 158)

What I most appreciated about this book, however, is that Orenstein put herself out there: her ideals, her rude awakenings, her daughter’s (sometimes unwitting) challenges to her deeply-held beliefs. She doesn’t advocate total abstinence from a gendered, consumerist culture - as if that were possible - but rather taking an informed and aware approach (advertisers are not your friend). She closes by sharing the insight she has gained along the way:

Our role is not to keep the world at bay but to prepare our daughters so that they can thrive within it. That involves staying close but not crowding them, standing firm in one’s values, while remaining flexible ... I’m not saying we can and will do everything ‘right’, only that there is power - magic - in awareness. If we start with that, with wanting girls to see themselves from the inside out rather than the outside in, we will go a long way toward helping them find their own happily-ever-afters. (p 192)

Let's see how it works out ....

on conspiracy theories

Happy New Year 2013 - according to the Gregorian calendar at least! I’ve been struggling to think of a suitably innovative post that would reflect ‘new year’s resolutions’ or ‘turning over a new leaf’ in some way to kick off the blog for the year, but it’s just not happening. So, in a new twist on the new leaf cliché I’m going to leave it un-turned and jump right back into blogging as usual.

Which brings me to conspiracy theories.

‘Gosh, that was a big jump,’ you might think. Or, if you were less charitable (and also well-read), ‘that was a complete non sequitur.’

Why conspiracy theories?

Well ... it all started when I was eating my lunch at work last week. One of my colleagues is seven months’ pregnant, so, naturally, the subject turned to babies, bibs and ... giving birth. Luckily, my colleague had attended births before - something she described as the best form of contraception there is - and had some idea what to expect. In good spirits, she was pretty clear that she would have an epidural as there was no way she wanted to go through the kind of pain that her sister experienced (and she witnessed). She did, however, ask me the dreaded question ‘what was it like for you?’

Now, as I’ve blogged previously, my birth experience is not really something you’d want to share to rally and support an expectant mother. While a traumatic birth is certainly a possibility, what I experienced was far from routine. I have therefore struggled on a number of occasions to think of what the best response would be to someone about to give birth who asked me this very question.

It's tricky. You don’t want to to sugar-coat, but you don’t want to scare the bejesus out of someone either - especially, as in this case, at seven months pregnant, the die is pretty much cast. Not to mention the fact that women are different, their babies are different, and their experiences will be different. ‘Telling the truth’ about childbirth might be the catch-cry of any number of books on motherhood from Kate Figes to Eleanor Black, but it’s also a lot harder than it seems. One woman’s truth is another woman’s fiction.

I 'ummed' and 'aahed' a bit before saying something ineffectual like 'it's good you've been to births before - that should give you an idea of what to expect'. This searing insight was followed up with something like ‘mine didn’t go so well, so it’s probably not a good guide as to what might happen.’ 

The understatement of the century.

But what is the thing to say?  It’s harder than you might think. One friend did have a straightforward natural birth that went pretty much as she wanted it. If I’d had that experience, I’d gladly tell anyone who asked. Other times, I’ve more obviously dodged the subject and said little to nothing at all. The so-called conspiracy of silence is less ‘government cover-up’ and more ‘if you don’t have something nice to say, don’t say anything at all.’

The double bind I found myself in at lunch the other day reminded me of the scene in The Deer Hunter (1978), where Michael, Steven and Nick encounter a Green Beret at the wedding reception. The three friends are just about to leave for Vietnam and they encounter the returned Green Beret drinking quietly - and heavily - by himself in the bar, as everyone else carouses in the main hall. In high spirits - both literally and metaphorically - Michael, Steven and Nick try to connect with the returned soldier. They tell him that they too are soon to 'go airborne' and ask ‘what’s it like over there?’ He tries to ignore them, preferring to deal with his demons privately. The more he does so, the more they want him to answer. Eventually, surrounded, he turns to them, raises his glass, and toasts them with a wry ‘f*** it.’

Caught between the desire to warn and be helpful, and the desire not to scare someone and potentially impact the positive frame of mind they’ll need to get through the experience, mothers have been accused of perpetuating a conspiracy of silence, particularly in relation to childbirth and the relentlessness of parenting. 

In 1997, Australian researcher Carol McVeigh published the results of a study of 79 first-time mothers, many of whom spoke about the conspiracy of silence, bewailing the fact that no-one told them what to expect, (as I myself did in an earlier post). Since McVeigh published her research, there has been an explosion of mummy-literature - books and blogs, academic research and novels - that not only exhort us to ‘tell the truth’ about motherhood, but also proceed to ‘tell the truth’ about the author’s own experiences. With all the truth-telling going on, it’s a wonder that the idea of a ‘conspiracy of silence’ still persists. 

Perhaps it's as my midwife said, that ‘women just don’t want to hear it.’ I know when I sat down to read Kate Figes’ Life After Birth while I was still pregnant, I quickly abandoned it after reading the back cover, as it just seemed too depressing. I also know that recommending her book to me was one way that a mother I knew had tried to break the conspiracy of silence for me. 

This blog is, I guess, my way. 

Next time, a bright-eyed mum-to-be asks me what my experience was like, I’ll know what to do. Instead of trying to capture the highs and the lows, the joys and the pain - while simultaneously trying not put them off all together - I’ll say, ‘It’s hard to sum up in just a few sentences. Here, read my blog instead. It’s the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth. Oh, and 70, 000 words and counting ...’

Or perhaps I should just offer the Green Beret’s toast instead?

'tis the season and all that

We are officially on holiday.

The office Christmas parties have been and gone. The Christmas tree has been shedding its fake fir finery over the floor for a few weeks (and that alliteration wasn’t even on purpose!) There are only six windows left to open on our Advent calendar. 

And this will be my last post of 2012 (‘amen!’ sigh the readers in relief)

I’ve been thinking about what to write for this year's final post. Last year, I took a light-hearted look at labour and childbirth in the original Christmas story. This year, I’m not feeling quite so jolly, or, at least, not yet. Each day seems to bring a fresh horror visited on the children of this planet: they are victims of war in Syria, Palestine and Israel, Afghanistan and the Congo (to name a few), a mass-stabbing in China, another US school shooting, as well as the less-headline-grabbing victims of child-trafficking, recession, and poverty.  And even some of those children who are privileged by comparison spend the holidays negotiating new family configurations, and experiencing the stresses and strains of the holiday season. 

As I was wondering what to write about this year, two items on the internet caught my attention: one an opinion piece by a mother on her contented child being the result of good parenting rather than just luck, and the other President Obama’s speech following the tragic school shooting in Newtown, Connecticut. 

In the first piece, the mother of a young son wrote about the way in which she bristled whenever people told her how ‘lucky’ she was to have such a settled baby. Luck, in her view, wasn’t the whole story, as ‘according to the parenting books, we haven't exactly been the ideal parents’. With a similar antipathy towards parenting books to that described in my previous post, these parents have sought instead to respond to their baby’s cues for food, sleep and clean nappies, rather than try and conform to someone else’s schedule. As a result, the writer concludes, they have a baby who sleeps ten-plus hours a night, has been sick once in ten months and has met or exceeded every developmental milestone. While I wasn’t over-fond of her implied judgement of other parents whose offspring weren’t so co-operative - there are plenty of parents who feed on demand and let their children sleep when they want to sleep who don’t get a good night’s sleep, for example - I liked her broader point about the way in which the work of parenting was met by dismissive ‘you’re so luckys’ that rendered it invisible and inconsequential. Good parenting does matter, it is hard, and everyone - regardless of whether they have children of their own - will reap the benefits from it.

In the second piece, one which will no doubt be read and heard by a great deal more people than the first, President Obama spoke about the need for the US to do better by its children. Without ever mentioning the word ‘gun’, he clearly indicated that it was time for the US to change its gun culture, which, in Newtown, resulted in the murder of twenty six- and seven-year-olds, along with some of the adults who took care of them. President Obama spoke at length about raising children, and about the ways in which children were brought up not only by their parents and immediate family, but also by the wider community. He said:

"It comes as a shock at a certain point where you realise no matter how much you love these kids, you can't do it by yourself, that this job of keeping our children safe and teaching them well is something we can only do together, with the help of friends and neighbors, the help of a community and the help of a nation.

And in that way we come to realise that we bear responsibility for every child, because we're counting on everybody else to help look after ours, that we're all parents, that they are all our children.

This is our first task, caring for our children. It's our first job. If we don't get that right, we don't get anything right. That's how, as a society, we will be judged.

And by that measure, can we truly say, as a nation, that we're meeting our obligations?"

Obama’s conclusion was ‘no’, that there was more to do, and he was going to do everything in his power to try and achieve that. History will show whether he - and the wider communities that he leads - will be successful.

Both pieces resonated with me: the former emphasised individual responsibility, and the need to ‘teach your children well’ (as Crosby Stills Nash and Young once sang); the latter reminded its listeners of their and our collective responsibilities, that ‘teaching them well is something we can only do together.’ 

It is fitting that both these reminders, albeit the latter in tragic and totally un-wanted circumstances, come at the beginning of the holiday season. 

Christmas - the holiday with which I am most familiar - may be starting ever earlier each year as shops groan under the weight of consumer goods to go under the tree. But, in celebrating the exchange of gifts and the sharing of meals, it is also drawing on something more powerful and less ideological than mere capitalism. In the 1920s, French sociologist and anthropologist Marcel Mauss wrote in his most famous work The Gift that the exchange of objects established and cemented relationships between groups and between individuals in a variety of societies. This exchange established the central principle of reciprocity and fostered social solidarity as well as self-interest. In doing so it created obligations, responsibilities and duties between people, families, adults and children.

While we’re counting our presents along with our blessings these holidays, we would also do well to remember the relational responsibilities that are inscribed in every gift: those new socks and chocolates (to our immediate family, friends and neighbours), that yummy lunch (to all the people - locally, nationally, and internationally - that had a role in preparing it), and that statutory holiday (to the national community).

Because if children are a gift, and a gift to their communities as well as their parents, then we all have obligations for their care and wellbeing.

And, on that note, Merry Christmas, Happy Holidays!

Books etc

Have no fear, I am not about to launch this post by saying that my two year-old is now able to read. She certainly enjoys books, and a combination of the pictures and (incredibly) repetitive reading means she can now reel off by heart the words in some of her books. But proper reading of unfamiliar words - in fact, of any words - is still a ways off yet.

No, the subject of this post, is books about child-bearing and child-rearing, more particularly, my antipathy towards them. I’m not the only one it seems. Novelist Rachel Cusk describes them in this way:

There are books about motherhood, as there are about most things. To reach them you must pass nearly everything, the civilised world of fiction and poetry, the suburbs of dictionaries and textbooks, on past books about how to mend your motorbike or plant begonias and books about doing your own tax return. Childcare manuals are situated at the far end of human experience, just past diet books and just before astrology.

It is possible, I sense, to make a specialism out of anything and hence unravel the native confidence of those you address. The more I read, the more my daughter recedes from me and becomes an object whose use I must relearn, whose conformity to other objects like her is a matter for liminal anxiety. (A Life’s Work, p 111)

I don’t want to totally slate these kind of books, nor criticise people for relying on them. At times, particularly in the first year of my baby’s life, I was as much in need of support and advice as anyone. I have talked with many people - other new mothers and fathers, experienced parents, health professionals - and I have read a few books, looked online and dipped into books and magazines. But my forays into child-bearing and rearing manuals - no matter how well-intentioned - have led me to conclude that Cusk, in her supercilious way, may be right: that they can work to undermine confidence even as they seek to reassure; that they can serve to distance a parent from their child - who becomes an object to be analysed or a problem to be solved - even as they emphasise responding sensitively to each child’s individuality and difference. 

I’m not suggesting that this is necessarily a conscious agenda of disempowerment on the part of the writers - much as it isn’t on the part of self-help books that exhort you to ‘Love Yourself’ and then give you tips on how to get your hair and makeup just-right. Rather, it seems to me that these contradictions help drive a process that effectively polices parents, especially new parents, and especially mothers. 

Recent research by historian Angela Davies has shown that childcare manuals by authors from Dr Spock to Gina Ford have been setting the bar too high and, for 50 years, mothers have felt more powerless, not less, after reading their words of wisdom. Davis carried out 160 interviews with women of all ages and from all backgrounds to explore their experiences of motherhood. In Modern Motherhood: Women and Family in England, 1945-2000, she says every manual designed to offer support and advice to women has had the opposite effect, leaving them dispirited and feeling inadequate. She says:  

Despite all the differences in advice advocated by these childcare 'bibles' over the years, it is interesting that they all have striking similarities in terms of how the experts presented their advice. Whatever the message, the advice was given in the form of an order and the authors highlighted extreme consequences if mothers did not follow the methods of child-rearing that they advocated. Levels of behaviour these childcare manuals set for mothers and babies are often unattainably high, meaning women could be left feeling like failures when these targets were not achieved. So while women could find supportive messages, some also found the advice more troubling. (Davis quoted in the Guardian)

Ordinarily a lover of books, I haven’t immersed myself in these ones, not least because in the weary times I wasn’t caring for my new baby, the very last thing I wanted to do was read about caring for babies. In fact, one of the first books I read after leaving the hospital and figuring out which day of the week it was was not What to Expect in Your Baby’s First Year but Please Kill Me: The Uncensored Oral History of Punk! I have dipped into them in times when I wasn’t sure about something - or done the online equivalent - but something stopped me from devouring them in pursuit of the secrets of good motherhood. 

Now, as this blog attests, this didn’t stop me reading about experiences of motherhood itself. Far from it. I have read books by novelists exploring their own experiences of motherhood, whether fictional (Margaret Drabble) or non-fictional (Anne Enright, Rachel Cusk). I have read about the experiences of professional women who have combined the insights of their working lives with their personal experiences of mothering (Sarah Blaffer Hrdy, Stephanie Coontz, Sue Kedgley). I have read the polemical works of feminist mothers (Adrienne Rich, Naomi Wolf, Elisabeth Badinter). And many more besides. 

Where these books - of which, it sometimes seems there are numbers now to rival the What to Expect, Baby Whisperer and Contented Baby ilk - differ from the how-to manuals is that, where they move beyond the ground of personal experience (and not all of them do), they seek to empower rather than undermine, to foster solidarity rather than individually guilt-trip, to analyse and critique rather than simply accept. One could argue that some of these approaches may alienate mothers who don’t wish to engage with the more political aspects of mothering, rather than the day-to-day business of it. That may well be the case. But what they don’t do is tell you how to do it nor imply consciously or not that you could be doing it wrong and you should be thinking about how you will get it right or pay the consequences at all times.

Elsewhere, Susan J. Douglas and Meredith W. Michaels trace the ways in which parental advice books have proliferated since the 1980s, as part of the ideology of what they call the ‘new momism.’ This has happened in parallel to the increasing dominance of neo-liberalism and the development of ‘turbo-capitalism’. As Susan Gregory Thomas outlines in Buy Baby Buy, this period also saw an explosion of toys and other materials aimed at parents. Similarly, the profusion of how-to books offer up the enticing proposition that good parenting can be bought and sold, that the secret to raising happy children is as simple as making the right purchase. And no matter how well the books of such high-profile feminists as Naomi Wolf might sell, they would be well below the sales figures and brand proliferation enjoyed by the likes of the What to Expect range.

When it comes to childcare books, it seems that making parents feel bad is pretty good for business.