The following is a guest post by Kelly Hogaboom who writes and tweets with great wit and candour about rad stuff like feminism, non-punitive parenting, body image, cooking and sewing, life and love (and much else besides).
These days I’m a pretty hearty soul. I have a fair degree of equanimity that has been hard-won. Still, I’m only human. And as I pen this I’ve just returned from a lunch date with old family friends. I found myself, quite suddenly, stuck in a corner (literally and figuratively) while these old friends argued toward me about
If you’ve spent any time in the social wellbeing or social justice spheres you might have a more nuanced view than the mainstream media regarding: obesity (childhood and “regular”, ha), “healthy” food, and epicurean snobbery waged against the most socioeconomically disadvantaged. I hardly blame anyone who might read Michelle Alison’s piece, linked above, and find their belief system challenged – after all, most conventional wisdom out there is full of ableism, orthorexia, classism, adultism and mommy-shaming -
and more important to me, at root really, a profound lack of compassion and open-mindedness.
This conversation was no different. Within seconds I heard about “personal responsibility”, people who “sit around all day feeling bad about themselves and playing video games”, and the cheapness of whole grains – all this and more by a group of middle-class people eating a fifteen-dollar-a-plate meal of cheesy pizza, salads loaded with ranch dressing, and pop. I should note the video game comment was uttered by a man who misheard my mention of the
[US] “Farm Bill” as FarmVille – and who admitted he didn’t know what the Farm Bill is.
It would almost be funny if it wasn’t such tired, depressing, and well-trod ground.
Never lost on me is sameness of the script with which some of these parties speak. They will often cite a female ancestor who supposedly fed an entire family on just pennies and fed the neighborhood besides. They often require those the most marginalized or disadvantaged to eat and live a certain way, and be exposed to scrutiny and lectures they themselves do not practice nor endure. During one such conversation a friend of mine, a mother of one and an at-home wife to a man earning six figures, espoused the economy of beans and apples while slicing into the peanut butter pie made with full-fat organic ingredients and Gran Marnier (I shouldn’t have to tell you she underquoted the price of bulk beans and apples… because she doesn’t have to know those prices, naturally).
These conversations have thus far broken my heart but never more so than today, given I work quite regularly with recovering alcoholics and addicts and I see the hard work that goes into survival – and I hear the experiences of low-self worth they’ve often internalized. Many of those I work with got life’s start in the most profoundly disadvantaged circumstances (poverty, abuse of all horrific varieties, neglect from parent/carer, etc), and who today are working against many odds and in a temporary or semi-permanent state of Survival Mode – making the meetings that sustain them, shuffling court dates and problems with the law and job re-training, all while living on a fraction of what my partner earns and without an at-home partner (like myself) to soak those beans and slice those apples and knead that bread. (The confidentiality of this volunteer work is sacrosanct enough that, even writing off my home blog, the circumstances of my small-town dictates I don’t cite too many specifics.)
Suffice to say I am regularly exposed to and work hand-in-hand helping these individuals (I am a recovering alcoholic as well) – not all of whom can’t afford expensive food – and I see them as Human Beings doing their best – after all, longterm recovery from addiction and alcoholism is Personal Responsibility at a profoundly deep level. To think of the casual hate these people endure when standing in line with their packets of ten cent Top Ramen or with a bag of Arby’s for dinner just sucks.
Now, I’m not saying anyone at the table today was particularly hateful. It’s just, despite hearing these kinds of vitriolic arguments in public spaces and online I was still, somehow, caught off-guard to hear these thoughts echoed by my friends. I let myself get sucked into an argument I’ve in the past found deeply unproductive. Was it wrong I spoke up about my practice of compassion, and from my direct experiences working directly with those living on cheap food? No. Where I went wrong was to forget a lesson I’ve been served before: you cannot argue compassion into someone.
You cannot argue compassion into someone.
What can I do next time, besides committing this lesson to memory? Well, in my best self I would have retained a curiosity as to why these people felt so angry about those who “eat unhealthy”. I would have listened a bit more and been less quick to talk. Yes, I may think I know why these people said the same things I’ve heard so many times before, but today I didn’t ask questions but rather assumed The Usual Suspects: a buy-into the prevalent spiritual and emotional formations of Scarcity, the myth of the United States as a meritocracy, the desire to Other those less fortunate and therefore operate on a false sense of security, and perhaps the injudicious consumption of mainstream media with it’s obsessive and unproductive riverflow of War on Obesity rhetoric. Yeah, I might be most the way right about what I was hearing, but now I do not know if I was correct or incorrect – because I did not listen.
As an epilogue: I did end up feeling a bit better shortly after this lunch gone awry. Back in the car with just my own children I felt rattled for a moment as I turned over my engine. But sitting for a minute the deepest experience of gratitude washed over me, because I have a few assets: including my two children and the human beings they’ve evidenced themselves to be. They are, today, entirely generous, whip-smart, and so incredibly less likely than I to let others’ angst affect their values and their practice of love. It might sound like I’m veering into bragging about my parenting; I’m not. My children and their compassion aren’t supplied here to justify my performance as a mother – I am relating that they give me a great deal of hope. They are two human beings who evidence great intelligence, a desire for right speech, a commitment to friendship, and, often, a peace that passes human understanding.
Two human beings who, today, hug my drug-addict friends and my middle-class grouchy foodies – beings who all suffer in their own ways – with earnestness, deep affection, and a profound spiritual centeredness.
I might not always get it right. But I have some pretty good mentors to help me along.
Plans, I have them! I haven’t made any New Year Resolutions to blog more regularly (or any resolutions at all, really; they’re a little bit bullshit) but I am hopeful that I’ll have a little more time and space for writing and that means, maybe, for here too. Even though I regularly get the urge to delete all of my posts, I’m still here. And I plan to be back from time to time.
But for now, I have a treat — a guest post from one of my favourite bloggers coming right up.
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Cross-posted at Feministe
I have identified as a feminist for about fifteen years but I’ve only really understood what that meant, to me, in the last three. Because of my relative privilege I am somewhat sheltered from the worst effects that kyriarchy can have — has — on families. But I became acutely aware even before my daughter was born that my convictions were going to be tested more than ever by the experience of motherhood.
As I wrote in Feminist Mothers, there are still many ways that becoming a mother is (generally) a socially sanctioned choice in the culture in which I live. And insofar as it is a choice (we know very well that not every parent chose to be a parent or chose the circumstances or timing!) it is generally sanctioned by feminists as well. We have the right to choose, right?
And yet, the desire to have children and to spend time with those children, the yearning for it, even if that means having one’s career or other markers of ‘freedom’ and ‘success’ eclipsed by child-rearing, still gets kind of a bad rap from some feminists. Or rather, perhaps it’s become a bit of an unmentionable. It’s not uncommon for high-profile feminists to characterise babies and children as little tyrants. Freedom-suckers, equality-trashers, self-actualisation deniers. And whether they intend to or not, this often leads to a characterisation of middle and upper-class mothers, particularly those who choose to practise a form of attachment parenting, as selfishly indulgent, or tragically duped and downtrodden, or both.
This doesn’t come from everybody. Asserting that choice means that the owner of a uterus has the right to say yes as well as no to pregnancy, childbirth and breastfeeding is important to many, I know.
And yet.
I think sometimes this dismissive attitude towards certain types of parenting is just a slightly more genteel manifestation of a latent fear and loathing of mothers, of maternal bodies, of any woman who doesn’t conform to ‘what women want’ or appears to conform too closely to ‘what women want’. This is otherwise known as misogyny.
A while back a joke about Michelle Duggar circulated amongst some friends of mine, some of whom self-identified as feminists. It included the words ‘vagina’ and ‘clown car’. Add that to the ‘humour’ leveled at Nadya Suleman, and it becomes pretty clear that in my culture, women who willingly choose lots and lots of babies are treated as a heady blend of ridiculous and monstrous. A slur about clown car vaginas can hurt any person with a large family or multiples and, frankly, it’s awful. It doesn’t need to be said that it’s pretty anti-feminist. (I’m not endorsing the choices of Duggar and Suleman here, beyond saying that as a pro-choice feminist I believe their bodies are their own, their wombs are their own. Some critiques of the phenomena attached to these women may well be legitimate but there is no value in shifting critiques, even obliquely or accidentally, onto all women who have or desire to have a lot of children. And there’s definitely something wrong with humour that implies maternal bodies are gross.)
Does this treatment of women who are especially fecund belie attitudes to mothering and childbearing in general?
I have heard, more than once, young women describe themselves as ‘bad feminists’ for aspiring to motherhood. I don’t think this is only because of ingrained notions of feminism meaning a focus on career and financial independence (although feminism sometimes still means these things and that’s not always a bad thing.) I think it’s also because women who love babies are liable to be stereotyped as ditzy, unambitious or sentimental at best. Sometimes they are seen as emotionally voracious or, well,gross.
Perhaps part of the problem is a lack of articulation of what it is like to want children, and the ways in which this interacts with one’s feminism. Although my approach to motherhood is quite cerebral, my experience of maternal desire and ultimately maternity was very much in the body. The experience of childbirth was for me transformative and empowering but it is not easy to convey that convincingly without sinking into cliche. Breastfeeding my daughter taught me more about misogyny, feminism, community, consent and a million other things that I could never have imagined. It made me want to write poetry (and a blog) about milk! But how does one put the physicality of parenting up to the spotlight, without fueling terribly harmful essentialising narratives? How do you stand in awe of the experience of parenthood without teetering towards being a ‘bad feminist’? (You don’t pretend for a second that your experience is universal, is the short answer, I think.)
Perhaps what we need is more interrogation of these experiences in unexpected places. Parents — mostly mothers — are often accused of being boring. What is infuriating about that is that we are saddled with this label without regard to the societal forces which might make this so. Mothers are frequently left with all the extra work but little of the recognition and then reviled for even the slightest sign that we are living ‘vicariously’ through our kids. Additionally, parents and non-parents often peel off into cliques, partly because we have been herded into distinct consumer groups, and because we are encouraged to keep to discrete family groupings in a culture where individualism is prized. And online we can be confronted with twee marketing-laden speak (‘momversations’ — ew) which, frankly, puts me off too, in place of real dialogue between women who may or may not be mothers.
‘Boring’ is often shorthand for someone whose passions do not match one’s own. But when the day-to-day reality for many women is mothering, it makes sense that a passion for women’s rights is aided by an insight into parenthood.
I am hopeful that we will find new ways to negotiate the experiential divide between parents and those without children, especially in feminist spaces. I hope that ‘admitting’ to either a desire to mother or to be child free can be less loaded, less fraught, more free in all kinds of spaces. And I hope that we can come to more readily expect not only the right to choose, but the right to be actively and meaningfully supported in each instance.
Cross-posted at Feministe
The story of Raquel Nelson, an Atlanta woman who witnessed her four year old son killed by a drunk driver and was subsequently convicted of vehicular manslaughter is the ‘Outrage of the week’ over at Lenore Skenazy’s blog Free Range Kids. And, frankly, what I feel about it is a shit-ton of outrage.
In brief: An Atlanta mom and her three kids got off a bus stop that is across a busy highway from her home. She COULD have dragged everyone to the next light, three tenths of a mile up the road, but it seemed to make sense to try to cross. Not only was her apartment in sight across the way, but the other passengers who disembarked were crossing the highway right there, too.
So she and her kids made it to the median, but then the 4-year-old squirmed away and got killed by a drunk driver. The driver was convicted of a hit and run. The mom was convicted of vehicular manslaughter.
Nelson’s conviction carries a possible jail sentence of 36 months.
What isn’t mentioned in Skenazy’s account (although a link to this piece by David Goldberg is provided) is that the bereaved mother, Raquel Nelson, is African American. Goldberg asserts that, by contrast, the jurors were middle-class white people who drove cars rather than riding the bus. Goldberg’s piece also tackles the problematic nature of placing personal responsibility on a mother who was struggling with a difficult set of circumstances. (Ever tried wrangling three children and shopping on and off a bus? I’ve not, personally, but I know it’s not easy.) What is most infuriating, to me, is that these are not unusual circumstances, they are not circumstances that a reasonable person could not for-see.
When basic provisions of public safety and amenity (like safe pedestrian crossings) don’t exist, and a child dies despite the efforts of his/her mother, and we blame the mother anyway? Outrage seems like a fair response.
Cross-posted at Feministe
‘Gosh, she’s sooo heavy!’ is not really an exclamation you want to hear uttered by someone as they lift your child onto their lap. Especially if that someone is loved and respected by your child and in a position to influence her. And when you are a fat mother, and a feminist, and that person is a relative (whom you love, but don’t always understand), it makes for a pretty tense moment. Which is fucked up, I realise, because my kid is heavy, and remarking on it shouldn’t be any different to remarking on her eye colour. But it is.
My daughter, for the record, is not ‘obese’ or fat. Not that I should have to state that here, since it’s not anyone’s business nor particularly relevant. (Really, I shouldn’t have to, and I’ve written and deleted that sentence multiple times, but I do state it because I know some of you are wondering and I know that, sadly, in this ridiculous climate of obesity panic and parent-blaming, it’s just going to be that way). She is, however, tall for her age and she has a large head and solid limbs. She’s strong; she has heft.
I was like that as a kid. I thought I was hu-ugely fat by the time I was a pre-teen but photographic evidence shows me that I was not. The fat came later, long after the bullying began.
People who comment on my daughter’s solidity don’t necessarily see her as fat, with all the judgement and stigma that unfortunately implies, but we know that young children are becoming increasingly vulnerable to experiencing weight messaging as a hit to their self esteem . And I know that as a fat parent, I am doubly scrutinised. The shape and weight of my child is, for some, tied directly to the strength of both my morality and my parenting skills. It’s also true that as she grows, my child will comprehend the stigma that is attached to having a body like mine and, because stigma is awful, she may fear it falling on her. Whatever kind of body she grows into, she may suffer because of other people’s lack of sensitivity and compassion, as well as the general public’s lack of real knowledge of the relationship between fat and health. That hurts to know.
I was once told that I had an obligation to become thin (as if I could just choose to be and, voila!) because my kid will grow up looking at me and thinking that fat is a way to be. As if, somehow, she would catch my fat, no matter how our family lives and eats and moves and no matter what her genetic predispositions. (This person assumed, as many do, that thin is objectively healthier and ‘better’ than fat.) Some people think children should be kept from the terrible knowledge that contented fat people exist because that would, by some sorcery, mean that the notion of fatness would never occur to them and they would always remain thin. Some people just don’t believe fat parents can possibly provide a healthy home. Some people think parents of fat children are by definition lazy or incompetent or unloving. Some people are ignorant. Some people are arseholes.
Some of those people have been in the media this past week talking about a study which, it has been widely reported, recommends that very fat children be removed from their parents and put into foster care. One of the problems with this is that the study has been widely misrepresented: have a read of this break-down by Dr Samantha Thomas if you’re interested. I’m not in the least surprised that the media haven’t been more accurate and sensitive in their handling of this ‘news story’. That’s par for the course when it comes to ‘obesity’ and they do love to parade us fatties as cautionary tales. Unfortunately, what could have been an opportunity for some serious discussions about systemic barriers to good health and the ethical problems with performing gastric banding surgery on minors, became a great big festival of fat hate with a large helping of mother blaming. Especially poor mothers, cause they’re really easy to hate on, apparently.
Opportunities for bonus misogyny aside, childhood obesity is a juicy story, but that doesn’t mean it’s okay to conveniently forget the facts. In Australia at least, rates of ‘childhood obesity’ have plateaued and we’ve known that for a few years now. On the other hand, rates of body dissatisfaction and unhealthy behaviours like yo-yo dieting are increasing in young people. But it’s far easier to scapegoat parents — most often mothers who are more typically charged with cooking and shopping — than to consider some of the nuance here. There is a strong case to make for changing the story from one about ‘childhood obesity’ to one about ‘childhood poverty’ (because yeah, fat kids can be undernourished kids) but that would involve facing up to some ugly social inequality and who wants to hear about food deserts when we could see a glossy grab about how Happy Meals are killing our children, amirite?
Hyper-awareness of childhood ‘obesity’ leads to shit like the absolute violation of privacy and trust that is public weigh-ins and fat shaming in educational settings. It increases the stigmatisation and bullying of fat kids but apparently not even prominent anti-bullying advocates give a shit about that, so would should the media?. Unless the bullied fat kid ends up in a viral video, and then the mainstream media will run stories about how he responded to that bullying the wrong way.
I know some readers may see this as contradictory: one minute I’m saying that kids are everyone’s responsibility and then the next I’m saying that we shouldn’t subject them and their families to undue scrutiny! Oh my!
But actually, I ask people to care about children and young people and about mothers and parents, and that implies reserving snap judgements. I ask people to approach parents with compassion, to educate themselves enough to understand the pressures that families face, to realise that individual circumstances vary, and to recognise that systemic barriers to ‘good parenting’ and ‘lifestyle choices’ exist. This complements an acknowledgement that children have the right to live free from abuse and bullying, from undue coercion and from deprivation. And it makes it harder to keep foisting the responsibility for society-wide health concerns onto individuals.
Whatever your beliefs about fat and health (and hey, I know you’ve got ‘em), you’ve got to acknowledge that stigma is harmful. There is no value from a health-promotion perspective in further stigmatising fat people, and certainly not fat children. Most people can’t self-loathe their way to permanent thinness (and certainly not to good health). Fat hate won’t amount to a positive contribution to society, no matter how many ‘reality’ TV shows imply otherwise.
My kid is three years old and she’s already learning what it means to have a heavy body in the midst of ‘obesity’ panic. You cannot tell me that’s for her own good.
