a mothers' day pillow book

in a departure from my previous mothers’ day posts - which were about the feminist origins behind a day steeped in sentimentality  and thinking about which mothers are celebrated on Mothers’ day and which aren’t - I’ve decided to model my thoughts about motherhood after the the Pillow Book by Japanese courtier Sei Shonagon. In a pleasing symmetry, Mothers’ Day also falls a week after the Japanese holiday Kodomo no Hi (Children’s Day) that takes place on May 5. 

The Pillow Book seemed to be everywhere in the 1990s. Well, okay in two places: the elegantly beautiful but really quite pointless Peter Greenaway movie The Pillow Book (1996) and as a framing device in Booker-nominee Ruth L Ozeki’s My Year of Meats (1998). Oh and I lived in Japan for a year towards the end of the decade.

Being hopelessly behind the times, I’ve only just managed to finish the actual Pillow Book - a collection of random and often whimsical thoughts by a court lady who lived over a thousand years ago (around 965) during the Heian period. While some of the book feels like a totally alien world - her worship of her mistress the Empress, for example - a lot of it feels very modern - for example, the sexual shenanigans of the courtiers. What was most startlingly modern, however, was its form: the constant use of poetry to communicate, particularly to amuse or seduce, compares with the quirky tweet or facebook status update, and the episodic and random nature of ‘the’ Pillow Book reads like a blog. Sei Shonagon’s writing style was so prescient she pre-empted the internet by more than a millenium! 

Shonagon was married at 16, and possibly at the time of her service to the Empress, divorced. She had a son, Norinaga, from her first marriage and is believed to have married a second time after her service ended. She had another child, a daughter: Koma no Myobu.  Shonagon did not write much about her son or motherhood particularly in the Pillow Book, but she did make some observations about babies and children:

Small children and babies ought to be plump. So ought provincial governors and others who have gone ahead in the world (p 78)

Adorable things: the face of a child drawn on a melon ... One picks up a pretty baby and holds him for a while in one's arm; ... he clings to one's neck and falls asleep (pp 168-69)

Presumptuous things: a child who has nothing particular to recommend him yet is used to being spoiled by people (p 170)

Hateful things: one is just about to be told an interesting piece of news and a baby starts crying (p 45)

She is perhaps best known for her meditations on ‘things’, the headings of some of which I am now going to shamelessly borrow to talk about motherhood-type things:

• Things that cannot be compared

Baby number one and baby number two, so similar in some ways but as different as night and day in others. Good days and bad days: if you try to figure out what worked in the former and not in the latter it will drive you crazy. 

Your pre-maternal and post-maternal life. 

And body.

• Unsuitable things

A baby and a plastic bag. My big girl’s choice of kindy clothes during a biting southerly wind.

• Things that make one’s heart beat faster

Wondering if your baby will stay asleep once you shift her from you to the cot. Watching your big girl climb further and higher saying ‘watch me’: it’s important she learns but you can’t shake the image of her falling off the table out of your head. The anaesthetic drugs for my caesarean with baby number two.

• Things that arouse a fond memory of the past

Taking out the clothes you packed away from baby number one for baby number two. Watching video footage of herself as a baby and toddler on my camera with my big girl.Having lunch in town where people wear clothes that don’t have food stains on them and have brushed their hair. 

• Hateful things

1950s-style financial dependence. People suddenly seeming much less interested in what you have to say now you are no longer in paid employment. Powerlessness. Sentimentalising motherhood, especially on Mothers’ Day. Books about parenting. Being compared to a car. Being compared to a cow. Internet memes that aim to guilt-trip mothers even more (that means you ‘Iphone Mom’). Anything that aims to guilt-trip mothers. 

• Depressing things

A baby who won’t sleep. A baby screaming inconsolably. Feeling like you will never sleep again. Feeling like you just don’t know what to do and have run out of ideas about how to stop your baby screaming inconsolably. Isolation. Being stuck in the house all day. The monochrome nature of things for little girls.

• Splendid things

An unexpected but much-longed-for night of semi-decent sleep. Making deeper connections with your community. First birthday parties. Having the odd hour to myself to blog or read or eat or use the computer or stare blankly into space drooling wondering where all my energy has gone. Mining the rich vein of feminist writing about motherhood.

• Annoying things

People who take down a parent's choice of baby carrier. Or choice of anything for that matter. Advertisements that don’t have a ‘skip ad’ option before the Peppa Pig cartoons on YouTube. When your baby prefers the packet food to the food you have taken the trouble to lovingly prepare yourself. When people tell you your baby’s hungry or tired like you don’t already know yourself and are trying your best to deal with her. Plunket.

• Things without merit

Media constructions of mothers that depict the perfect mother as a dead one.

• Shameful things

The time I gave my baby a small shake because I was nearly out of my head with frustration and then, realising what I had done, thinking that she would end up in CYFS care and I was the worst mother in the world. On really bad days, feeling like ‘I hate my life’ when I have many many things for which to be thankful.

• Surprising and distressing things

A sudden feeling of invisibility once you are a stay-at-home-mother with no income of your own. Watching your baby have her first set of vaccinations and knowing that you consciously chose to inflict pain on her. Dropping your big girl off at kindy and knowing that she will have to ‘sink or swim’ by herself much more than she ever has before.

• Awkward things

Trying to breastfeed in the back of a shearing shed. Trying to breastfeed in public anywhere your baby won’t co-operate. Okay, pretty much breastfeeding in public full-stop.

• Things that give a hot feeling

Over-heated rooms. Engorged breasts.

• Pleasing things

Finding two socks that match. Taking maternity clothes to an op shop. The baby actually liking the food that I have lovingly made for her. The big girl actually doing what you ask her the first time you ask. 

• Things that fall from the sky

Donuts, hamburgers and broccoli in Cloudy with A Chance of Meatballs. My big girl liked the book so much we let her watch the film as her first movie. The fast-paced story and editing didn’t really seem to capture her and she kept asking ‘where’s the flying food?’

Rain, rain and more rain nearly every day at the moment.

• Adorable things

My big girl discovering the word ‘odd’ and continually using it to describe things by emphasising the ‘d’ sound at the end. The baby laughing at her big sister standing on the table and loudly singing ‘commotion in the ocean, ooh ahh’ while she is having her lunch. My big girl making jokes and laughing at her own hilariousness. My on-the-move baby looking so pleased with herself that she can now roll and shuffle to get to the toys, plastic bags and dropped bits of food on the floor that she wants. And about a bazillion other things too.

• Outstandingly splendid things

A baby who regularly sleeps through the night. Having two mostly happy, healthy girls and surviving to tell the tale thanks to the benefits and privileges of a ‘first world’ life and healthcare system. Dads who are very involved in raising their young children (where that’s wanted or possible, of course): getting the baby in the middle of the night, staying home from work when the children are sick, alternating parental leave arrangements, or being the primary care-giver for their children. When your baby starts to talk and, in time, says ‘I love you mummy’.

Happy Mothers’ Day!

review: Wonder Women

Given how much time I have for reading at the moment, let alone writing about what I’m reading, I think book reviews may be few and far between in my posts this year. Seeing, however, as I did manage to read the not very long and articulately written Wonder Women: Sex, Power and the Quest for Perfection (2013) by Debora L. Spar, I thought I may as well review it. 

But not because it has anything very groundbreaking to offer, I’m sorry to say.

What is it about books that reference the fabulous Wonder Woman in the title that leave me cold? The last one I reviewed - by Australian journalist Virginia Haussegger - was also disappointing and often for similar reasons as Spar’s. 

Like a number of high-profile American women writers - I’m thinking particularly of Anne-Marie Slaughter and Sheryl Sandberg here - Spar is concerned with the idea of ‘having it all.’ I don’t know why I get suckered into reading these books - maybe because I live in the hope that there might be a high-profile, best-selling book informed by feminism that offers a bit more to their wide readership than stories about the author and her friends.

Spar is the president of all-female Barnard College in the US, having moved there from a professorship at the male-dominated Harvard Business School - and some of the most interesting parts of the book are her comparisons between the two elite institutions and their different gendered styles and discourses (comparisons prefaced to the point of parody with ‘not better, not worse, just different.’) I was particularly interested in her accounts of decision-making styles, and mentoring students, as well as the ‘controversy’ over President Obama giving the commencement address at Barnard (‘why would he waste his time talking to a bunch of girls?!”) These could’ve have opened the way for a more specific and nuanced analysis of the way gender operates in higher education in the United States.

Sadly, these anecdotes were almost buried in her much more generalised main focus on beauty, love, sex, motherhood, housework and aging. Not that these topics aren’t important - and the section on aging was particularly interesting - but, given her background in government, business and economics, she could’ve also drawn on feminist research in these areas to look at the broader picture for women.

Like Haussegger - and also Sandberg and, to a degree, Slaughter - the main problem with Spar’s book is its assumptions. It starts from the individual but fails to ‘connect the dots’ and see how individuals are constituted as subjects within the culture in which they live. She does go one better than Haussegger, however, and uses the word ‘patriarchy’ all of once in the book. No other similar term for systemic gender and sexual inequality - institutional sexism, indirect discrimination, structural discrimination, or even rape culture - is used in the book. In fact, while the book looks at internalised violence - such as eating disorders (Spar is an anorexia survivor and writes poignantly about what drove her to this: the quest for perfection of the book’s subtitle) - it barely touches on violence against women, rape culture, sexual harassment and discrimination on the basis of sex.

Spar’s thesis then is that her generation of women have sacrificed themselves on the altar of perfection thanks to three main sources: their mothers (of course! for having expectations that their daughters will have careers as well as families), the media (about which there is actually very little critique), and ‘the feminists’ (not feminists, or feminism, or even named women with a feminist agenda, but ‘the feminists’ - there’s a distancing phrase if I ever I saw one!) (pp16-20). 

Despite the mention of ‘power’ in the book’s subtitle there is very little analysis of the way power is created and disseminated. For Spar, power simply seems to mean ‘being in power’, and her answer appears to be for career-focussed women to join the echelons of power and transform it from within. But if you only understand power as a construction of consciously rational individuals then the only way you can make sense of inequality is by resorting to the level of crude conspiracy theory: a bunch of rich white guys get together and plot to keep everyone else in the entire world under their thumb. Sure, this might be the effect of patriarchy and/or capitalism and/or white supremicist culture but it’s not really how it works nor why it persists.

The other thing that irked me was her attitude towards feminism.  She is at pains to point out at the beginning of the book that, even as she became highly educated and took on high-powered jobs, she actively distanced herself from ‘hairy-legged feminism’ (aargh - self-hating cliche alert!). Now that she’s older and wiser, and has tried to balance the main competing demands of being female (i.e. having a career and having kids), she’s begun to see that feminism might in fact have lots of interesting things to say about her experiences.

Mmm hmmm.

Her book then quotes from feminist research, gives a potted history of key moments in white Western feminism, and provides pithy epigrams from Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex as well as Tina Fey’s Bossypants. She writes that her book espouses a ‘revised and somewhat reluctant feminism,’ a ‘softer and gentler form’ that isn’t so invested in proving women’s equality and quits blaming men. And despite her book’s avowed interest in power, she actively says she’s not interested in ‘examining the power hierarchies that undeniably still separate men from women’ but rather in ‘practical issues’ (pp 10-11).

Doh! 

Is it just me or does she not really get what ‘the feminists’ have been not shaving their legs to tackle? What is the ‘softer, gentler’ feminism meant not to threaten? And as for not blaming men (yawn) see my previous comments about patriarchal structures. The quest for equality is not so much about proving that women can do what men can do, but dismantling the structures and systems that disempower women: substantive equality. I don’t know what’s ‘impractical’ about that.

Genuinely empowering women to be leaders in their communities is undoubtedly transformational, as numerous commentators including Marilyn Waring, Amartya Sen and even Sheryl Sandberg have pointed out. The crucial point, however, is in what leadership means. Spar et al seems to understand leadership as a means for top-down transformation within existing power structures, while for others it means grassroots action, self-determination or changing the nature of power itself.

In short, I’m kind of bored with these ‘can we have it all?’ books. Nobody has it all. Creating the desire to ‘have it all’ is part of the ideology of capitalism not feminism. I’d like to hear more from women who are less concerned about buying into this mythology - even if it to critique it. Today, for example, I read about research on the experiences of young Maaori and migrant women in New Zealand maternity services and the biases, barriers and stigmatisation they faced in accessing those services. 

At the risk of sounding like a conspiracy theorist myself, could it be that commercial publishers have much more of a vested interest in selling books that trade in desire and fantasy rather than changing the world?

Lest we forget?

Today, Friday 25 April, is Anzac Day.

The date marks marks the anniversary of the landing of New Zealand and Australian soldiers – the Anzacs – on the Gallipoli Peninsula in 1915. The aim was to capture the Dardanelles, the gateway to the Bosphorus and the Black Sea. At the end of the campaign, thousands of young men - and double the number of Turkish men than those from France and the British Empire - had died and Gallipoli was still held by its Turkish defenders. For the would-be invaders, it was a military defeat.

For the European powers, the Gallopli campaign was a sideshow in the main theatre of the First World War: the battles of Verdun, the Somme and Passchendaele on the Western Front pushed the number of casualties into the millions. But for Australians and New Zealanders, the campaign played a role in further developing a nascent sense of national identity apart from the British Empire. Today, Anzac Day commemorates all those who have died in battle and honours returned servicemen and women.

But as these servicemen and women die off, something intriguing is happening. Anzac Day is growing in popularity, rather than lessening. During the 1960s and 1970s, Anzac Day was a focus of anti-war protests. From the 1980s, however, it underwent a renaissance, and the number of younger people attending dawn services and commemorative parades has been steadily increasing:

Now, people remark on the number of young New Zealanders in the crowds. Some wear the medals their grandparents and great-grandparents won during war. There are now no veterans left from Gallipoli or the First World War. Bright Williams, who passed away in 2003, was the last, and the number of Second World War veterans becomes fewer each year. (' Modern Anzac Day', NZHistoryNet)

Furthermore, for New Zealanders on their OE, attending the Anzac Day dawn service on the Gallipoli peninsula has been elevated to the same kind of pantheon as running with the bulls in Pamplona or getting hammered at the Munich Oktoberfest: it is a rite of passage. On Anzac Day, the quiet peninsula is swamped by young Australians and New Zealanders, some of whose behaviour has been censured as disrespectful and reflecting poorly on their Anzac forebears. A 2012 Australian study found that Anzac Day was primarily seen as 'a party for drunk yobbos'. The dawn service at Anzac Cove is now so popular that attendance is decided by a ballot, and politicians and Prime Ministers also attend.

I have been part of this renaissance: as a young girl in the 1980s, I marched in the Anzac Day parade through the main straight of town, my Brownie pack trailing behind the returned servicemen and women, the cubs and the scouts, and just about everyone else; and as a expatriate living in the UK in 2000, I visited the Gallipoli peninsula (which is now a historical national park) - not on Anzac Day - while travelling in Turkey.  

The latter visit was an interesting experience: on arrival at Istanbul, the customs officer took one look at my passport and said 'Ah Anzac' with a big smile. The Turkish guide on the peninsula itself was very positive about the relationship between Turkey, Australia and New Zealand, telling us that since our countries' sons were buried there, they had become part of Turkey. And we learned that, no less than for Australia and New Zealand, Turkish involvement in the First World War had played a crucial role in national politics and national identity. The old Ottoman Empire was more or less overthrown by the end of the war, and the modern Republic of Turkey was established in 1922.  

The group that I travelled to the peninsula with were emotionally primed for the visit, not by a documentary, nor old soldiers telling their stories, nor footage from the First World War, but by the mostly-accurate-but-fictional  Mel Gibson film Gallipoli (1981). The people sitting behind me were transfixed, occasionally breaking off to murmur 'such a waste', and 'so awful', and 'bloody Poms'.  Of such fictions are national myths made.

In the 1990s I had a disagreement with my flatmate about the significance of Anzac Day. She was disgusted by the militarist and patriarchal values in which it seemed to glory. With two younger brothers, both in their late teens at the time, I found the idea of thousands of young men being slaughtered deeply upsetting, and thought the injunction 'lest we forget' was a profound statement against war transmitted from those who had directly experienced its horrors. Now, I think we were both partially right, but that there are still other elements in play.

In New Zealand, for example, I think it says something quite significant about cultural unease with New Zealand's actual national origins and originary warfare in the nineteenth century - a story of promises made, agreements broken, invasion and resistance, dispossession and alienation - that means modern New Zealanders seek, whether consciously or not, to make Anzac Day into a national day. Every year, it seems, the call to make Anzac Day our official national day, rather than Waitangi Day (which commemorates the signing of the Treaty of Waitangi) is repeated (see, for example, this opinion piece published just hours ago). The same rhetoric is repeated: Anzac Day is unifying, Waitangi day divisive.  

The call to unity is a call to subscribe to a totalising national narrative. The 2012 Australian study noted above sounded a note of caution: such unifying calls are also potentially divisive, particularly as the multicultural composition of the nation increases. What of those 'new' New Zealanders and Australians who don't share this history? What is their place in this national narrative or does this dominant national narrative say that there is no place here for them?

Blood sacrifice on distant battlefields that resulted in heroic defeat is a much more romantic national narrative than that offered by Waitangi Day or by increased multiculturalism. And, as my flatmate pointed out, it is overwhelmingly male. I don't wish to sound trite, or to disrespect the young men who lost their lives during this campaign, but what of the women on the home-front - those who raised children or worked for the war effort? What of the working-class men in essential services (during the second world war both of my grandfathers fell into this category - my maternal grandfather, who was a wireless operator, went to Japan as part of the J-Force after the war as part of the occupying force engaged in re-construction rather than destruction)? What of the conscientious objectors who suffered for their pacifist beliefs on the Western Front? In We Will Not Cease, pacifist Archibald Baxter describes how he was subject to 'crucifixion' in No-Man's land for his beliefs. Essentially, that is, left to die by his 'own side'. A new drama - Field Punishment No 1 (2014) - released this year also tells the story of Baxter and 13 other 'conchies'.

Which brings me to why I am writing about Anzac Day on a blog about feminism and motherhood. In Of Women Born, poet Adrienne Rich wrote about the historical role of mothers to 'raise sons for the army' ... and  to raise daughters to continue to produce sons for the army. Women were expected to bring forth life, to continue the species, in order to offer it up for sacrifice at the appropriate moment. To do so, until relatively recently, they risked their health and potentially even their own deaths. In modern terms, 'raising sons for the army' means raising patriarchs, boys who will become men who reproduce - no pun intended - the norms and values of patriarchal culture. Patriarchal culture valorises and commemorates the sacrifice of young men in wars waged by men, and only intermittently recognises the price paid by women or those men who do not conform to patriarchal values.

In every town and city in New Zealand, there are phallic memorials in the centre of town to the young men who died during the First World War. These cenotaphs are the focus of Anzac Day commemorations and the maintenance of the nationalist narratives of blood sacrifice. 

But where, I wonder, are the memorials to the women who 'raised sons for the army'? The women who died in childbirth, of puerperal fever or birth complications? The women who died from botched back-street abortions?  

And, in this moment, when childbirth is much less risky and abortion is, for now, legal and safe, what about the women who suffer and die at the hands of men - usually men they know - every year?  Imagine what might happen if we also said 'lest we forget', heard the melancholy strains of the Last Post, and listened to the words of 'For the Fallen" for them: 

They shall grow not old, as we that are left grow old:
Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn.
At the going down of the sun and in the morning,
We will remember them.

Next year, it will be 100 years since 1915. 100 years is an arbitrary marker but, no doubt, the centennial commemorations will dwarf even those that have taken place in the past few decades. Will we, I wonder, find room in that spectacle of national commemoration to remember what else patriarchal and nationalist violence entails?

confessions of a dairy cow

Last week I was buttonholed in a cafe by a guy with time on his hands who wanted a chat. I was trying to breastfeed the baby at the time, and, frankly, just wanted to be left alone. The baby is easily distracted at the moment, so - while I am committed to trying to feed her in public - it is not always easy and unwanted attention at the wrong time doesn't help. 

This guy's son was playing with my elder daughter in the cafe's play area, which provided him with a licence to chat. During the course of this mostly one-sided conversation - my responses were mostly 'mms' and 'that must've been difficult' and 'reallys' (which, I was told, meant that I was 'shy'. Too 'shy' to tell him to just bugger off and leave me alone, I guess). Apparently, Mr Cafe was not an acute reader of high-context communication. During the course of his monologue, he told me about his son's mother - they are separated - and her struggles with breastfeeding. She had had a difficult time with it - for which she had my sympathies ... and not only for her breastfeeding woes. He then described her as a 'cystic cow'. 

I misheard him and thought he'd said a 'stink cow'. 'A what?' I said. 

'A cystic cow,' he repeated. 'Do you know what this is?'  Without waiting for my answer he told me that a cystic cow was one who can't be milked. 

Nice. 

Whatever may've happened between them, he referred to his ex-partner, who had clearly struggled with breastfeeding - and quite possibly because of mastitis given his choice of imagery - as a sick animal.

I was offended on her behalf and didn't even bother producing my half-hearted rejoinders after that. A passive response, to be sure, but then I was still sitting on the couch pinned in place by a nursing baby, while he was standing. Once again, having a baby made me acutely conscious of my physical vulnerability  ... and hers. 

He eventually got the message that I was no longer interested in listening to him, however, and left.

This encounter got me thinking about cows more generally.  

'Cow'' can be used a comparatively mild insult for a woman (as compared with, say, 'bitch', another animal insult). It has a variety of uses: it can refer to size, especially if someone is blocking your way, intelligence ('stupid cow') or unkindness ('mean or nasty cow'). It can even be used as a means of expressing pity for someone ('poor cow').

And, apparently, if you breastfeed it can just be straightforward term of description. 

I've never been referred to as a 'cystic cow', but I have been jokily likened to a dairy cow because I was breastfeeding more than once. 

Images of human female breasts and dairy cows are frequently conflated: just try to Google 'milkmaid' like I did to find an image for this post and see what you come up with. Believe me, my choice is at the very modest end of the spectrum. Images of buxom women with their breasts on display while milking cows were prevalent.

Or recall the character Nursie from Blackadder Two. Still present at Court as a blatant figure of ridicule (she is big and stupid, a stereotypically bovine woman), Queen Elizabeth 1's wet nurse is described as having an 'udder fixation' and every year dresses as a cow  'with lots of lovely udders' for the fancy dress ball. Whenever she tries to contribute to affairs of state, she is silenced - 'mouth is open Nursie, should be closed' - not least because she can remind the monarch of when she was young, vulnerable and dependent on an unlettered poor woman for sustenance. All of a sudden, she doesn't seem quite so funny.

But on examining my feeling of insult at being likened to a cow, I realised that I was also buying into the notion that cows are inferior.  Because actual cows, as opposed to women described as cows, are not stupid or unkind. They may be big, but that is the way their bodies are made. They do not raise or exploit another species of animal for the production of food and drink and they do not insult each other by calling each other 'humans.'

Animalising a human being is a way of seeing them as less than human, for sure, but it is also a way of reinscribing the supposed fact that humans are superior to other animals, of suppressing the fact that we are animals ourselves.

I began to feel empathy for actual dairy cows, whose calves are weaned early and who are kept artificially lactating so people can consume a vast array of dairy products. For a breastfeeding feminist, veganism seems a logical ethical choice, as these bloggers articulate (here and here). 

While I can intellectually relate to this call to abandon dairy products in solidarity with actual dairy cows, I have to confess that my dependency on cheese and yoghurt has meant that I have not yet put my money where my mouth is. It is salutary to reflect, however, that many people consume a dairy-laden diet, but there is a general squeamishness about products made with human breastmilk. 

I'm not suggesting that we all need to abandon ice-cream for breastmilk yoghurt, but thinking about the links between humans as animals - breastfeeding being an obvious link between humans and other mammals - and dairy cows shows up the contradictions and hypocrisies that drive industrial farming. And that's before we even get to artificial hormones, dodgy feed and other illegal practices. 

Regardless of my new appreciation of veganism as a feminist practice and my growing understanding of animal rights, I still don't like being described as a dairy cow because I'm breastfeeding.

Maybe I'm just a stubborn cow that way.

'to help the mothers and save the babies'

I think Plunket, who provide free well child checks for New Zealand babies, have decided I am a woman on the verge.  Due to my sleep-deprived state, they have decided that I need help ... presumably in order to save my baby too.

‘To help the mothers and save the babies’ was the official motto of the Royal New Zealand Plunket Society, founded in 1907 to address the high rate of infant mortality by Sir Frederic Truby King. The motto is engraved on a plaque by his mausoleum in Wellington (see picture), alongside his old house and garden and the remainder of the Karitane formula factory. 

Although his training and experience was primarily in pyschiatric care (interestingly, he visited the feted French neurologist Jean-Martin Charcot, who was famous for his treatment of female ‘hysterics’), Truby King was one of the key proponents of a scientific approach to child-rearing, one which had the effect of divesting mothers of their instincts.  As Linda Bryder comments in A Voice for Mothers: the Plunket Society and Infant Welfare 1907-2000, ‘mothers were ignorant of the correct methods of child-rearing and needed to be educated’ (p ix). Initially, Plunket focussed its efforts on Paakehaa or white women, who were required to produce children to do their patriotic duty for race, nation and empire. (Seriously. Sue Kedgley documents this in Mum’s the Word). It grew and thrived in New Zealand due to the support and voluntary work of a number of women, including the ubiquitous Plunket nurse.

While Truby King himself advocated breastfeeding, his methods were interpreted in the form of rigid rules about scheduled feeds and deeply strange ideas about when and how babies should be breastfed that basically meant that many women were not able to get breastfeeding established. In Mum’s the Word, Sue Kedgley notes that following the normalisation of hospitalised births in the early twentieth century, women were told to only breastfeed their babies for two minutes for the first few days, not to feed at night, and to delay the first feeds (p 89). Once home, mothers were ‘handed over’ to Plunket nurses who visited them at home and provided advice and support (not much change there, then). 

While Kedgley is careful to note that many of the mothers found this support invaluable - and we’re talking principally of Paakehaa mothers here - some felt they were being monitored and found wanting. Mothers were encouraged not to ‘spoil’ babies, leave them to cry, and to establish routines for their days and nights. Plenty of mothers ignored this advice, while others twisted themselves inside out to follow it religiously. This regime enabled the government in 1924 to report that it, in conjunction with Plunket, had gone ‘a long way towards ensuring a uniform, authoritative advice in regard to matters bearing on family life, and the rearing and treatment of children in health and disease.’ Kedgley observes that, by 1927, with approximately two thirds of babies  under its care, ‘the government was able, through the Plunket society, to effectively control how Pakeha babies were brought up.’ (p 90) 

It is somewhat ironic that as well as ditching the patronising motto (I mean who are the babies to be saved from? Their mothers? The redemptive religious tone in the phrase is also striking), Plunket now advocates ‘breast is best’ and to feed newborn babies on demand. The Plunket society is now complemented by a range of health organisations who also offer well child / tamariki ora services, so it no longer has a monopoly on infant care. This is reflected in its funding, which is forlornly trumpeted as a ‘unique three-way partnership’ between business, the community and government. Or, in other words, they are expected to carry out the functions of the modern surveillance state, without adequate funding to do so.

This walk down the path of history has caused me to reflect that while Plunket is, in general, a more benign and less rigid institution than it was for much of the twentieth century, several similarities remain, not least in its monitoring and compliance function. Although our Plunket nurse is personally quite nice, I’ve noted every single time that she has ‘ticked off' my responses to her questions in a lengthy form: tick for exclusive breast-feeding, cross for sleeping through the night. My individual responses will be crunched down to produce a range of collective statistics that indicate how well or poorly New Zealand mothers are ‘performing’ at this thing called mothering. It gets my back up everytime I notice it, and I am tempted to lie just to be perverse.

The uniform and authoritative approach to childcare has not quite died a death either. These things I have been told by various Plunket nurses, either in person or via Plunketline, wouldn’t have been so out of place in the last century: 

• not to feed the baby to sleep (of which I am unapologetically guilty)
• that I have been breastfeeding my baby too much (to which, I responded, ‘how much is too much when you’ve been advised to feed ‘on demand’?) 
• to let the baby cry (a mixed one this: I’m not prepared to let my baby scream uncontrollably for ages, but some crying is inevitable in tiny creatures who have few other means of communicating)
• not to co-sleep with the baby (oops, too late. I’ve even lied to their faces about this and I bet I’m not the only one. Surely it would be better to give advice about how to safely co-sleep rather than scare-monger about the dangers of co-sleeping? It’s not like in the high-profile cases of infant deaths in which co-sleeping is a factor that there are other aggravating factors: drugs and alcohol being the most significant, I would’ve thought) 
• to be alert for the signs of post-natal depression (I don’t want to minimise the risks of PND but at my first few visits I felt like they thought I was just about to crack up any second because in answer to their interrogation about the family networks we had locally for support I said ‘none’.) 

Very seldom have I been encouraged to trust my own ‘instincts’.  And, while they note that my baby is healthy and happy, very rarely has anyone said ‘you’re doing well, especially given what you’re dealing with at the moment.’

But are ‘instincts’ a reliable guide either? Recently, I have blogged about the extreme sleep-deprivation we’ve been experiencing and my instincts tell me that my baby, who barely six weeks ago was sleeping through the night (aah, bliss) doesn’t now need food every one to two hours in the night. But that logical belief is pretty hard to communicate to an inconsolable baby in the wee hours of the morning. And so I feed her. Because it works.

I must’ve seemed like a zombie when I reported this to the Plunket nurse at a recent visit, because she set various processes in motion to provide support to us: a visit from a Karitane nurse to offer advice on sleep training, a food-run from a charity called Bellyful who supply free food to parents of newborn, young or sick babies, and also strongly encouraged me to contact the Post-natal distress support line. 

All of which showed concern and did offer some help and I hasten to add that I’m not ungrateful. We’ve managed to improve the night waking, but it’s still not great. To which, I guess, Plunket could say ‘they’ve helped this mother and saved her baby.’ Or, to be more paranoid, have they just ticked a box to say support was provided and they can therefore wash their hands if anything goes badly wrong now?

Yeah, we don’t have much additional support. Yeah, we’re not getting enough sleep at the moment. Yeah, we’re not doing everything perfectly. But it doesn’t necessarily follow that I’m a woman on the verge.  

It does mean that looking after a young baby is hard, unpredictable and challenging on just about every level. Perhaps the most helpful thing that I’ve learned in the last few weeks was not from Plunket. And that is to try and let go, to give up the illusion of control, and to not resist the idea that the baby will wake in the night. Just because I think she shouldn’t doesn’t mean she won’t.  

The most supportive comments have come from another mother whose baby doesn’t sleep through the night either. Instead of telling me what to do or try, she simply said “I hear you! Some babies just don’t sleep’ and ‘Sleep will come back. All will be forgiven.’

Sometimes being heard is better than being 'helped'.

on reclaiming public spaces

 I've just finished feeding my baby. 

This time, I was feeding her in the comfort of my own home, in bed, snuggled up together, one of us, at least, pretty sleep-deprived. The other, just hungry.

As she fed, I had time to wearily think. I've blogged about breastfeeding before: about feeling coerced to breastfeed at all costs while I was pregnant,  about my own ambivalence towards it, whether it is feminist or not, and public shaming of women's feeding choices that create unnecessary and hurtful divisions between mothers. I wrote these posts largely in retrospect. The first was when my older daughter was well on her way to weaning, the others once she was long weaned. This time, I'm thinking and writing about breastfeeding as a mother going through the challenges and joys of exclusive breastfeeding for a baby yet to properly wean (although she has just had a first taste of pureed apple so there is a dimly-glimpsed light at the end of the tunnel.)  That means it is still round-the-clock, time-consuming, physically demanding, and provided solely by me. 

I'm not saying that to be a martyr, and absolutely not at all to criticise bottle-feeding, just noting that this is our reality at the moment. My tired reflections on breastfeeding that follow are similarly not intended to critique any other feeding practices, rather to think about the more radical implications of breastfeeding, specifically, breastfeeding in public.

Confession time. I  don't like breastfeeding in public very much. 

It makes me uncomfortable to be 'on display' and is often physically uncomfortable too given that public spaces do not always contains sofas, armchairs, beds or cushions. However, it would be totally unrealistic for me to stay at home most of the time. And I don't want to, either.

I've tried timing feeds to make it to a parents' room, or a trusted cafe with sofas, so I can at least be comfortable. And I've even sometimes used the old-blanket-over-the-head to not feel quite so exposed. From my experience of this, I agree with blogger Katharine McKinney's thoughts:

There are many people who suggest a nursing cover as an acceptable alternative. I invite those to please commit to eating all meals under a blanket. It's hot, it's annoying, and most babies will scream, squall and push the blanket aside. Not exactly discreet.

What is making me uncomfortable? Although I've noticed averted gazes and the odd look of discomfort from others, I've never been asked not to feed, to go somewhere else to feed, or to leave a place because I am feeding. Is my discomfort, then, just in my own head?

Partially. But it also comes from a wider culture that is very conflicted about women's breasts, and the fact that women breastfeeding in public spaces is not as normal and everyday as it is for the woman in the photo above (nor this breastfeeding mother talking to Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez). There are plenty of stories about breastfeeding images being censored on Facebook (while images of more 'normal' sexually objectified breasts still roam free) and women being asked to cease and desist from feeding their babies in public to support this view. Ideas about what is 'normal' for breasts on display relate more to bras than babies.

With this idea of normal, it can be easy to forget that basically, before the twentieth century, breastfeeding - and breastfeeding in public - was so normal, that nearly everyone who was alive owed their lives to it. Even the Virgin Mary did it (apparently).

Events like the international Big Latch-On, which takes place during August each year, seeks to empower breastfeeding mothers to come out of the private sphere - the domestic space thought to be the 'proper' site of mothering - and feel comfortable about feeding in public. As a secondary aim, it seeks to make public breastfeeding a more normal sight, one not shrouded in discomfort and embarrassment. In making breastfeeding a normal part of the public sphere, these mothers send the message that breasts aren't just meant to sell cars or lingerie. They aren't just there for aesthetic appeal. They work, they do something; in fact, they do one of the most important things of all: they sustain the life of another human being.

That is why I'm trying to get over my discomfort - which is really my pre-emptive feeling that I am discomforting others - and put myself out there, literally and metaphorically. Trying to be more sanguine about public feeding means my baby is also likely to be more relaxed about feeding in public, and I'm less likely to experience the 'double embarrassment' of wrestling with her to try to get her to feed.  

So here's a list of public places I have breastfed recently, and tried to feel beatific, calm and relaxed:

- the back of a shearing shed propped against a wooden beam for back support (yes, it was pretty much as uncomfortable as it sounds)
- in an underwater observatory watching trout, salmon, and slightly menacing long-finned eels swim by
- on not one but two different boats
- in several different cafes (some furniture more supportive than others: yay for the sofa in Glenorchy cafe, boo for the backless stools and tiny buggy-unfriendly spaces in Vudu cafe)
- on an airplane, and at the airport (yep, baby and boob have both recently been on holiday).
- in the staffroom at work
- at the library
- at the local rec centre while watching daughter number one play
- at the playground
- on the beach
- and in the back of the car.

Pope Francis has recently been lauded for encouraging a woman to breastfeed in front of him. That's great, but it'd be good to hear her side of the story too (and isn't just a wee bit weird that a celibate man is being lauded for granting 'permission' for her to feed her baby in public?) 

Many women are attesting to their experiences of breastfeeding in public, seeking to make it normal, end the embarrassment, and come out of the toilet. McKinney opines that if you don't support breastfeeding in public, you don't support breastfeeding.  Kate Fridkis in the Huffington Post is one of many mothers who acknowledge the radical aspects of breastfeeding in public, but affirms that she feeds in public not to 'be a rebel' but to meet her baby's most basic need. And, brilliantly, poet Holly McNish's impassioned verse on her embarrassment about feeding in public concludes:

So no more will I sit on these cold toilet lids
No matter how embarrassed I feel as she sips
Cos in this country of billboards covered in tits
I think we should try to get used to this.

Speaking of reclaiming public spaces, I have decided to make the time to write posts from the front-line of mothering a very young baby. In my previous post, I wondered how I would juggle blogging with all my other tasks, with the implication that it was likely to fall by the wayside as the 'least important' of them. Sure, it's not keeping someone alive in the way breastfeeding is. But blogging is helping me through a difficult time, so it is playing an important role too. 

It is also reclaiming a small part of the public (blogger)sphere, for the 'private' experiences of a breastfeeding mother. It's a modest part to be sure, but it is in small acts like feeding our babies in public, like speaking or writing about our experiences 'warts and all', that mothers can work to transform the public sphere, to influence damaging attitudes about women's bodies that affect all women and girls (not just those who breastfeed), and, most importantly of all, fulfil our babies' most basic right: to be fed.

on juggling

What a difference a couple of months can make. 

In my last post, I was the hopeful parent of a baby whose sleep was getting better, and whose three year old was still in child care three days a week.

In this post, written several weeks after I'd intended to write it, my baby's sleep has regressed to a newborn pattern of two and three hour stretches at night, and the three year old has finished childcare and is yet to start kindergarten. 

I'm nearly at my wit's end. Definitely sleep-deprived, possibly a hazard to fellow drivers, and feeling like I'm winning if I make it to the end of the day and everyone is still alive. 

At the moment, we have some help: grandparents are visiting and husband is at home. But, in a couple of weeks time, it will be back to me, myself and I looking after daughters one and two. It was hard enough with seven hours' sleep a night, but feels positively daunting on four or five broken hours. Serenity now, serenity now!

While pregnant, I asked a number of mothers of two or more children what it was like managing two children. If there is a conspiracy of silence around birth, as some have opined, then there is surely one around looking after more than one child. The nearest anyone came to describing how demanding it was, was one mum who repeated her own mother's advice: one child is a hobby, two is a job.

And what a job! Baby and three-year-old like to tag-team. If one needs to be settled to sleep, the other decides she needs help with the potty. If one needs a feed, the other decides she wants to play hide and seek. The core 'problem' to be solved in this job is how to divide your attention between the one who physically needs you to keep her alive, and the other who needs you to help her make sense of life.

I know, I'm sure there's a sense of 'well, cry me a river' about this. I know I've got blessings and am counting them. And I'm slowing getting to use to the difficult juggling act of managing more than one child. Revisiting some of my earlier posts on being an invisible woman, breastfeeding, striving for mediocrity, filling the days, maternity plays, among others, has helped refresh my memory of just how challenging I found the first year of motherhood. It also helped me see differences: the challenge now is less about filling the days and feeling invisible, so much as it is about juggling competing needs and dividing my attention. Where I had to remind myself to 'strive for mediocrity' before, I now almost constantly feel like I really can't do everything and am stretching myself pretty thin already. Mediocrity feels like it would be a pretty awesome place to be just at the moment.

So my blogging in 2014 is likely to be quite sporadic, at least until baby number two's sleeping sorts itself out. In the wee small hours, awake and feeding, I have been pondering many things, not least about feminism and motherhood and life, the universe and everything, that I would like to share. 

The challenge now is learning when to throw the blogging ball up into the air so I can juggle it along with all the others.