Mothers’ Day mourning

Mothers’ Day tastes of grief, to me.

I went to a teeny rural school. The other kids came from conservative families, traditional, married parents in stereotypical gender roles. My family was likewise conservative but there was one stark difference: my parents were divorced and I did not have — at least visibly, for the purposes of tuckshop duty and sports day cheering or even braiding my hair — a ‘real’ mother. I was teased for it.

Ours was a thrown-together family; my stepmother and father married suddenly when I was barely five years old and it never really felt like she fit into a maternal-shaped space in my life. So each year when we crafted glittery cards and picked chrysanthemums from the school garden for our mummies in that first week of May there was a hollowness in it, for me. Not that I didn’t love and appreciate the woman who fed and clothed me and administered band-aids; of course I did. But it was ambivalent love.

A wounded child needs her love to be unflinchingly returned. That is what we mean by the unconditional love of good mothers: it is not just that they love but that they know and accept children in all their faltering fragility, and that they know, most of all, that affection offered however ungracefully by a child is not a thing you should swat away. I saw my stepmother extend openness and warmth to her biological children but not to me, and that is how I learned to feel a little bitter about the chrysanthemums. (It was only recently when I saw how my own daughter was embraced by my partner in a starkly different way — different because my partner is consistently open and kind and loving with Bean — that I understood more fully the pithy root of that bitterness.)

When I was a child pretending to be normal at school, making a Mothers’ Day card was not optional. Ambivalence was not tolerated. Compounding the hurt was the failure of those around me to acknowledge that I had suffered any meaningful loss. My biological mother had wrenched herself from having a permanent presence in my life with such brutal surprise that there had never been time, or permission, to grieve. Everyone around us had rallied behind my father; they had pitied him in his imprudent first marriage and I grew up with the implicit knowledge that my dad was a good person and therefore my mother must have, somehow, been bad. I was not meant to cry over a bad person.

It’s not so simple. If she was, is, anything, it’s closer to broken than bad.

As an adult I became more cynical about Mothers’ Day. It’s a commercial invention. It makes money from the perpetuation of the myth of the perfect mother and the infuriating pinkification of everything. If you watch the TV commercials, it’s apparently about receiving slippers and nightgowns — or worse, domestic appliances — as if they magically compensate for being the designated toilet-cleaner for most of one’s life.

Of course, there are families for whom Mothers’ Day is an opportunity for genuine expressions of love; the kind that could come on any day but so often get lost in the rush. These are families I have struggled not to envy, pushing down the unbearable feeling of missing-out with critique and yes, cynicism.

It’s a hard day for a lot of women, certainly for anyone coping with infertility or pregnancy loss. When I desperately wanted a baby and was facing month after month of negative pregnancy tests, Mothers’ Day ads with images of fresh-faced children offering burnt-toast breakfasts in bed had me sobbing. It pretty much felt like a conspiracy designed to torment people like me: not only motherless, or childless, but both.

I guess I thought that a baby of my own would anesthetise me against the pain of past Sundays in May. And don’t mistake my meaning: Bean and the day she was born and everything about her is my Best Thing. Mothers’ Day gifts and cuddles are blessings like gifts and cuddles on any day are. And tomorrow I will steal a little of her weekend with her dad to smoosh her to my chest and catch a bit of joy.

But the joy of mothering, though healing, cannot really compensate for motherlessness.

I have a maternal shadow over my life: shadow, because it is absence more than presence that causes the greatest pain (although both of my mothers have inflicted pain more directly, too). It is hard to write about this loss, about the way it seeps into everything, the way it never fully recedes, without sounding ungrateful for the blessings I do have. It is difficult to admit the depth of my pain without seeming melodramatic. But I persist in trying to express it because I know there are others feeling it too.

On social media at this time of year, we motherless women huddle together in a wary kind of sisterhood.

I wish there more spaces for us to carve out alternative narratives to counter the nauseating Hallmark celebration of mundane maternal stereotypes. And mostly I wish there was safe harbour for those of us who find the bombardment of reminders of what we lost, or never had, particularly cruel. I am thinking of the abused and abandoned, the aching and bereaved. I am thinking of the lonely and bitter and grief-stricken ones. Lost girls. Adult orphans. Cast-offs from a would-be chain of maternal inheritance.

Solidarity, sisters.

Breastfeeding support: less is not more

It’s been a bad weekend for media representations of breastfeeding.

Saturday’s Age and SMH ran a feature in the Good Weekend supplement detailing French feminist Elisabeth Badinter’s opposition to what she sees as the tyranny of motherhood, especially physically demanding practices like breastfeeding. Like Hanna Rosin’s, Badinter’s views on breastfeeding have been carefully deconstructed over the past few years by other writers. Take this piece by blue milk:

But then you can’t entirely blame feminists like Badinter for being nervous about any ambitions to elevate motherhood either. They haven’t seen much good come out of the institution of motherhood for women – servitude, guilt, martyrdom, rampant biological determinism and invisibility. Still, given that most women end up being mothers, and given that a good deal of us even strongly desire motherhood there is no point throwing that particular baby out with the bath water. We won’t elevate women anytime soon by denigrating motherhood.

Make no mistake — denigrating physiologically normal (though by no means universal) processes of motherhood, like the physical changes of pregnancy and birth and the work of breastfeeding, is denigrating motherhood. It is also, I think, a mistake to underestimate the level of maternal desire driving some of our choices. But more than this; assuming that the holy grail of feminism is solely an ability to centre paid work, alternative achievements and other relationships in women’s lives (as men have always been able to under patriarchy) is extremely limiting. Why not instead seek new ways of working, earning, living, doing mothering and making families which enable choices to stretch beyond the starkness of:  A) bottle feeding and long daycare or B) long unrewarded hours at home in an isolated mother–child dyad?

Those long hours alone can be devastating for a new mother’s mental health; I know this from experience. Even when a parent has company of some kind, they may feel figuratively alone if their actions are not supported with both compassionate reassurance and practical assistance. This is the concern raised by Beyond Blue’s deputy chief executive Nicole Highet who was quoted in The Mercury today. Dr Highet isn’t wrong in saying that breastfeeding difficulties and anxiety about feeding choices can contribute to the stress and even despair felt by many new mothers. In the early days and weeks breastfeeding is difficult for most (impossible for some) and severely overworked (because that is what they usually are!) post-partum women are particularly vulnerable to feelings of inadequacy. The physical pain of cracked nipples, mastitis, thrush or engorgement is all too real. So is the emotional pain of being confronted with choices which seem patently unfair and yet take on the importance of life-or-death decisions. Mothers in our culture are bombarded with all manner of ‘expert opinions’ and given the distinct impression that everyone — health professional or self-styled baby whisperer or mother in law — knows our babies’ needs better than we do and yet, somehow, when it comes down to getting the actual work of mothering done the buck stops with us. And when it comes to taking the fall for choices that are made, it’s all mothers all the time.

When was the last time you saw the mainstream media ask for fathers to step up and do something about low breastfeeding rates?  (Research shows that a male partner’s attitudes towards and willigness to assist with breastfeeding is the single biggest determinant of whether a woman will continue to exclusively breastfeed once she has left hospital, but strangely it’s mothers who are always targeted when feeding choices have to be accounted for.)

Although I completely deplore the employment of the term ‘Breastapo’ in that inflammatory Mercury piece, it’s important to acknowledge that the trend Beyond Blue has picked up on is real. Some women are, for whatever reason, experiencing pressure or negative attitudes about their feeding choices and that is harmful, both to those individual women and to the cause of lactivism generally.

Dr Highet and many others (including Leslie Cannold who tweeted the Mercury piece this morning) seem to take the experiences of women who felt that breastfeeding advocacy or advice given in hospital was shaming in some way as evidence that the ‘breast is best’ message has gone too far. I tend to draw the opposite conclusion.

At the moment, mothers (and actually when I say this, I mean mothers in the ‘Western’ world) seem to experience a particularly insidious form of blame-shifting. Women are told, usually repeatedly, by health professionals that breastfeeding is the best ‘choice’, and the vast majority believe it. (Over 90 % of Australian women choose to initiate breastfeeding). Breastfeeding advice, in many cases, seems to constitute little more than a bit of information about how to do it and a very clear intimation that it’s what good mothers do. What it all too often doesn’t include is sensitive, individualised, and knowledgable information delivered in a mother-centred way. What it definitely doesn’t come with (if it’s being delivered by a health professional or, well, just about anyone) is actual real-life support to achieve the mother’s breastfeeding goals.

In short: most women hope to breastfeed. Most women are let down by a lack of practical support.

Complicating the picture is marketing from formula companies and ingrained cultural practices (like expecting babies to ‘sleep through’ or feed by the clock and expecting mothers not to feed openly in public) which make breastfeeding seem like perhaps the ‘best’ but not at all the ‘normal’ choice to make.

By the time a woman has been ground down by the sheer exhaustion of birth and her first week of overworked parenthood, ‘normal’ can seem pretty good. ‘Normal’ can seem attainable.

This makes me sad not because I am a genocidal fascist who wants to see mothers suffer through mastitis (for crying out loud, can we just stop with the Boob Nazi slurs?) Rather, I feel saddened by the alarming regularity at which women give up their desire to breastfeed because breastfeeding is not the ‘best’ way to feed babies. It’s the normal way.

The idea that breastfeeding is somehow extraordinary persists because we live in a culture where very limited paternity leave is normal, where an expectation to continue cooking and cleaning and exercising and socialising in the post partum weeks and months is normal, and where a perception that unpaid work (especially if it is physical and monotonous) is pointless drugdgery is normal.

What good breastfeeding advocacy has to offer mothers is more than admonishments and informational pamphlets. Breastfeeding advocacy is at its core advocacy for mothers and babies, and although many of the people doing it do not identify as feminists, their organisations frequently do work which could be described as feminist.

I find it odd when people choose to promote women’s choices by standing against grass roots lactivism. Organisations such as the Australian Breastfeeding Association and La Leche League are run by mothers, for mothers. They grew out of a need, identified by women who were living in the era of Betty Friedan, for woman-to-woman support. Volunteers run them, they do not make profits, and they can’t pay for the kind of lobbying and marketing that formula manufacturers buy each day before breakfast. In short; I don’t think they’re the enemy.

If mothers are experiencing pain and anguish from ‘all the pressure to breastfeed’ I think we need to be asking why, and certainly, we need to ensure that any breastfeeding advocacy is sensitive and shame-free. But I have a feeling that less support for and information about breastfeeding is not what will help Beyond Blue’s cause. (And not only because breastfeeding hormones can sometimes help stave off depression, although this was my experience.)

What we need are real choices, not rock-and-hard-place compromises. And for that to be possible, much more needs to change than the message they put on posters in the maternity ward waiting room.

On weariness

I want to talk about fatigue.

I want to talk about the second and third shifts. The don’t-even-look-at-the-dishes-in-the-sink fatigue. The double-booked because it’s too hectic to look at the calendar and now I’ve had to let someone down busyness fatigue.

I want to talk about gear changing. The weary rousing of oneself from work mode to parent mode and back again. The feeling that a day, any old day, without any juggling acts would be some kind of bliss. A selfish, perfectly selfish, bliss.

I want to talk about bone tiredness: the I-don’t-have-time-for-the-gym which becomes I-don’t-have-the-energy-anymore-ask-me-tomorrow. I want to talk about the physical slowness, the inward curling and energy slumping that comes from mental fatigue.

I want to talk about emotional wear. The sense of hopelessness that comes with never having enough left to give. The guilt, of letters unwritten and phone calls un-made. The frustration that the work of relationship maintenance so readily eclipses its rewards, or feels like it will.

I want to talk about pacing and rocking and please please just sleep for crying out loud just sleep for fuck’s sake please just GO TO SLEEP.

I want to talk about the need to do writing and not having time for writing and not having energy left with which to make more time because the rewards of writing, the energising release and the pleasure have all been doled out. The stores are empty.

I want to talk about email in-box anxiety and bursting into tears over upended laundry baskets.

I want to talk about the fatigue of being fatigued. The wearing down of it. The hurt of coming up against one’s limitations and having to remember, always remember, that they are there. That illness is there at the edge of one’s capabilities, or near.

I want to talk about the work of wishing to be healthy. Of trying to think of shopping and cooking and eating well, of filling prescriptions on time and seeking recommendations and referrals and making appointments and dreaming of finding a yoga class and thinking as if there will ever be time.

I want to talk about the shame of even talking of doing too much when others do so much more. And about how maybe too many of us do so much that there can only be a deficit between doing and being.

I want to talk about all of that. But really, I’m too tired.

Intermission

I’ve not been writing. Don’t feel neglected: I’ve not been studying, or cleaning, or ticking off errands either.

I’m not feeling well, again. I’ve felt it creeping up and so I’ve been pushing the depression back and back but that only works for a little while and that while has passed, for now.

Like Fat Heffalump says in her post on the Black Dog, most people go quiet when passing through a patch of bleakness. I’m no exception.

Some talk of how depression feeds their creativity, how darkness is a source of ideas and catalyst for expression. Not so for me.

For me, it is all dimness and brainfog. Inactivity and fatigue feeding each other. Lack of concentration. Headaches and a feeling of heaviness; too-quick anger and too-slow smiles. Stagnation.

I don’t know what to write, except this.

Mother cupboard

*this post is my first contribution to the Writing Workshop over at Sleep is for the Weak. I chose Prompt #4, clear out a cupboard.

“Only a mother could love that face!” You know that your mother doesn’t love you, before you have words to say what it is that you know. “Remember, at least one person loves him – his mother!” It’s an ugly kind of knowing; a shameful kind. “There is no love like a mother’s love.” You push the knowledge right to the back of the forgetting cupboard. “God could not be everywhere, so he made mothers.” It is knowledge that sets you apart, marks you as unlovable. It is better not to show that you know.

***

When I was about three years old my parents held some sort of party at our house. My mother, annoyed that I had interrupted her talking, deliberately dropped the hot ash off the end of her cigarette as I stood between her and a friend. It hit the delicate skin of my shoulder and burned me. I don’t think I retain this memory because of the searing ash. What I remember is her intently watching the ash fall, the look on her face, as she realised she had actually hurt me. Blank. And the look as I began to protest, bottom lip quivering. I knew at that moment, as she vehemently denied burning me at all, let alone on purpose, that there was nothing – nothing – I could say to make her feel sorry.

This reads like a melodrama, or a twisted and childish fantasy. Don’t think I don’t know it.

I wore the cigarette scar for many years, and I would show it to people, sometimes. There was no one who would accept it. It was an invented story altogether, or it was an accident, but evidence of callous disregard from the woman who was meant to care the most? You need to show a lot more than a few little white marks to prove that. Some people won’t ever believe that lack of mother-love exists in nature, searching for alternative explanations even when a child dies.

Beyond what was acceptable as discipline in the early eighties, I wasn’t beaten. Beyond what was acceptable in fat-shaming at that time, I wasn’t starved. I had things, I had sunshiny days and icecreams. Some days, I had love, or an indistinguishable facsimile.

One of my other earliest memories? My mother wiping my bottom. Being so young that I needed help with toileting, I remember calling for her, I remember her careful touch. I also recall the day I had my first serious asthma attack, when I was left in the corner at kindergarten, terrified and wheezing. Picking me up at the usual time (they hadn’t called for her to come get me, despite me turning blue) was the maternal lion you’d expect: the furiously protective and anxiously attentive mother I know I would be if Bean became ill when out of my care. But that kind of mother only made fleeting appearances for me.

It was probably self-defensiveness as well as mental illness which turned this sporadic affection into an even rarer disposition after my parents became estranged. Eventually the wounds of separation formed a callous against further sentiment. Blank unfeelingness became the default setting, punctuated by cruelty.

I believe she burned me that day, and abandoned me not long after, and inflicted me with hateful words over the ensuing years, because she was ill. I believe if she could have loved me: if her narcissism wasn’t so overwhelming, her grip on ‘normal’ thinking so tenuous, then this would be a different story.

But this is not a Choose Your Own Adventure. This is how the story went – and goes – and I cannot change it, no matter how far back into the cupboard I push these dusty memories.

I too am ill, though differently. Although there doesn’t seem to be a permanent way to change that, there is no choice for this mother but to write a radically different narrative. And so I am, crafting our days in ways that I hope won’t have to be pushed into dark memory-cupboards in years to come. Sometimes, this task seems unspeakably difficult. And there is no thing in this world that is more terrifying to admit to feel to say to hear to write
to live
than that.

**
I owe a debt of inspiration to isabelthespy for this post. This wonderful piece from her helped me to unjumble some of my thoughts around parental love.

On mental illness

Let me talk to you about my brain.

It’s not working so good right now. It’s soldiering on and getting me through the days but on the whole, it’s pretty down and a bit anxious. I’m more aware now of the ways in which this is different to feeling normally down and feeling normally anxious and I want to talk some more about that. Because, I guess, sad and negative feelings and worry are natural human emotions and everyone experiences them so it can be difficult to understand how this is different when they are caused by an illness rather than just occuring in response to life. And the way I recognise and understand that is through experience. Like this

* It is 2 pm and Bean is finally asleep, which is good for me, because my head feels foggy and everything is a little tough today. Someone raps on the door and I go down to answer it; a woman is there from an electricity provider, trying to sell me service. Because things are foggy in my head, it takes me a while to understand what she is actually saying so when she asks me for a copy of our bill I decide that the easiest thing is to just go fetch one, because then I can get a moment to think. Of course this is a mistake, because she takes it from me and tucks it on her clipboard and it’s clear that the speil she gave me about ‘not really needing to change companies’ was a total lie, and she wants me to go through the whole process of switching supplier. I don’t want to do this, and I tell her so. She ignores me. The conversation goes on and I start to disassociate a little: I can see myself just standing there like a big lump, not knowing what to say. I’m thinking what if I had a disability that made standing here difficult for me? What about elderly people, she could frighten them half to death. Why won’t she just leave me alone, this is my time to rest and I need to rest and she’s in my personal space. I try to say these things to her: that she’s intrusive, she’s bossy, she’s not welcome, she’s wasting my time. But I don’t because I know I will cry if I do. I feel about four years old. It is only when she raises her voice and wakes Bean that I have the strength to grab back my document and close the door on her. Bean has a tantrum because she was woken up, and I am so angry at myself for letting it come to this. For hours afterwards I feel pathetic, cowed, weepy. I’m big and smart and articulate and three decades old but none of that matters because I can’t even fight through the fog to say what I mean out loud.

* It is some time in the morning and I’m trying to get Bean dressed to go out. She wants to go, she’s been begging me, but she won’t lie still and I can’t dress her. She’s jumping naked on the bed, squealing, laughing: it’s a game. But not to me – today I am all hardness. Sudden rage bubbles up, and I yell and yell until she cries and lies still. In a moment she’s bouncing and happy again but for me, the shame smarts all day. (Actually, it still does now, still makes me weep). I want to tell her: that wasn’t me. I’m never that angry at you, I would never hurt you, I never want to frighten you. And I do say it, but she’s two years old so there’s no way of knowing what she’ll remember.

* I have had a difficult day. Everything got on top of me, the house was a mess, The Fireman was late home, dinner was late and disastrous and not the right thing to satisfy my hungry body. But that is okay, I think, because I’m off to a study meeting and I will be out of my house and out of my own head for a few hours. Adult time. Except that I’m still reeling from the day but I don’t know it, and the night is dark and the street I have to park on unknown, narrow, windy and steep. I can’t see where I could park my car safely, another driver blinds me with highbeams, I’m not as early as I hoped, but none of these things is insurmountable. I’m a grown-up, I can drive just fine, I can meet new people, I can get on with it. Except that I can’t. My teeth start to tingle which is the first sign that I’ve been hyperventilating without even noticing and so I have to do breathing exercises and try to navigate my car at the same time because there is nowhere to pull over. I feel light-headed and nothing seems real. And then I am crying and shaking and ashamed and I just drive home and sit in the driveway and weep because what kind of pathetic person can’t even do a simple thing like go to a meeting and when will I ever be able to do anything in my life if I can’t even do that?

I’m getting some professional help for my brain really soon; and although I feel worse than I have for months and months, it’s not so awful, really. Except that I am exhausted from limping through the days. Some cruising would be nice. Some sunshine.