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.

A few years ago our dog Ferris died. I wrote about it at the time, but it was an awful time, marred by burned landscapes and fractured nerves, and I don’t think even the writing helped me properly process my grief in amongst sharper traumas.

Ferris is, I admit sadly, still in a dusty little box in the back of a cupboard.

But for the first time, yesterday, I was able to talk about what to do with those ashes without too much heaviness because we’ve welcomed a new dog into our home and somehow it feels safe to acknowledge what we’ve lost.

Sally and Bean, BFFs

We adopted Sally from an RSPCA shelter. She is a ‘bitsa’ — the best kind! — and like Rosy in the beautiful Let’s Get A Pup, she radiates Good Intention.

Sally's scar

Sally (already her name when we met her) has had a difficult life. We don’t know how she got her scar but shelter staff suggested that she was a victim of cruelty (I feel tight in the chest just thinking about it so I won’t elaborate): this is not the first time she’s been ‘rescued’ and adopted. Her immediate past owner must have been gentle with her because, although timid, she has lost the raw edge of fearfulness. But he died, and so Sally is recently bereaved, and she comes to us with so much neediness that it soothes us all just to be together.

The simplest things make a good life; a soft bed, a full stomach, a kind word. It’s a gift to be reminded.

Bean has been bullied over her hairstyle. She loves to express herself through her clothing choices but I know that very often she considers whether her friends would approve of an outfit before venturing out in it.

All of these things are no doubt familiar to other parents and I am not the first or last feminist mother to wish that there was a picture book version of The Beauty Myth distributed to every small child. Although it hurts me that bullying behaviours focused on looks are hitting my daughter so young, I am also conscious of the need for perspective. I don’t want to squash her enjoyment of clothes or criticise her desire to ‘dress up’ or think about colour combinations or choose, sometimes, to be frivolous. My own explorations of fashion and style were laughed at and squashed and this didn’t have the intended effect; I didn’t learn that clothing doesn’t matter. I learned that it really does matter, but that only ‘pretty’ girls get to fully partake.

Is it possible that fear of ‘pinkification’ could also backfire on girls?

Lately I’ve noticed a lot of commentary promoting the idea that girls must strive for goals more worthy than prettiness; that instead of aiming for a celebrity look or a certain body weight, girls should be focusing on meaningful aims like career achievement and wholesome personality attributes. It’s well meaning and often exactly right.

But I fear there’s an underlying failure of understanding in some of this commentary.

Celebrity culture, weight consciousness, ‘sexy’ fashions, beauty ideals — these all impact upon young people. We know this — many of us revile this, and yearn for better role models and more diverse options, particularly for girls (although it is clear that all genders suffer from pressure to attain some superficial standard of acceptability).

But I simply do not believe that conventionally attractive is all that girls want to be.

Bean wants to be pretty — she wants to fit in, she wants praise for how she looks. But she doesn’t state ‘pretty’ as an ambition. She wants to drive a fire truck. She wants to be a doctor. She wants to be a mother.

I am frustrated by platitudes urging girls (or rather, urging mothers with daughters) to aim beyond pretty mainly because I don’t think pretty is actually viewed as a viable lifestyle choice. It’s viewed as a prerequisite for, or an easy route to, where girls actually want to go.

The fantasy of being thin (so beautifully explained in Screw Inner Beauty) is a familiar concept around the fatosphere. At its core, the fantasy of being thin is about denying the possiblities (and limitations) of the present reality in favour of (often literally) buying the rhetoric around what weight loss can bring. It’s the idea that if only something magical happened, all those other things could be possible. For those caught in the thrall of the fantasy of being thin, it’s not so much about the weight loss as it is about the new job, the new relationship, the overseas holiday, the devoted lover/s, the fabulous wardrobe, the one-day-I-will-be-worthy-of-all-this achievement. Very few people want to lose weight because they believe that a smaller dress size will, in itself, make them happy. They want what has been co-opted to sell them the diet shakes in the first place; they want their dreams.

The push to be pretty is not so different.

Girls are lead to believe that pretty finishes first. That attractiveness will help them gain popularity. That success comes with a bright smile and a fashionable haircut and definitely without acne or wonky teeth or stretchmarks or ill-fitting hand-me-down clothes.

Beauty is, perhaps, its own reward. I wouldn’t know.

But I do know that young people are not so vacuous and shallow. They don’t often have the extreme gullibility actually required to discount goals like career and family in favour of the pursuit of prettiness. Rather, they know, perhaps instinctively, perhaps because the teasing starts as soon as their peers are verbal, that what they actually desire may be easier to grasp if they can master the feat of being aesthetically pleasing whilst doing it.

I agree with Pigtail Pals that we need to show girls that they can be scientists, gymnasts, doctors, builders, writers. I agree with the amazing John Darnielle that Lego does girls a disservice when it regurgitates marketing hype about what girls want instead of catering to their needs as individual children unfettered by rigid gender roles.

It’s important to advocate for a rejection of the limitations of ‘pink’ and ‘pretty’ without patronising young people.

Like the fantasy of being thin, the desire to be pretty is backed by a multi-billion dollar industry and untold numbers of daily encounters with people who’ve swallowed the social pressures whole and made them their own mission to prescribe. Girls who desire a piece of the pretty pie aren’t misguided, inherently frivolous or lacking in ambition. They want to do stuff; it’s just they’ve internalised the message that they must look good doing it for it to count for anything.

And that is why the right to be ugly — the right to do and be without being gazed upon and always found wanting — is worth defending.

With her defence of ‘broader people’, Julie Goodwin has set herself apart from other media personalities who are all too often keen to self-flagellate about their failure to attain physical perfection. This is delightfully sensible and refreshing; I hope the huge support she seems to have received is reflective of a tiny shift in consciousness about both body image and health.

Even so, I heartily wish that there was no imperative for women to do the magazine-covershoot-swimsuit-reveal in the first place. When can a woman get a break from being judged on whether she looks fuckable in her bathers? How is her body shape even relevant to what Goodwin does, and who she is? But we are still in thrall of the suffering ween, apparently (sigh), as well as the stand-in scrutiny provided by other women.

This profoundly-felt obligation to be pretty, this imperative to commit time and money and energy towards some ever-shifting and always unattainable (because not even models look like models) beauty ideal — it isn’t going away. I’m already noticing its toxic effects on Bean, and that’s heartbreaking.

Unfortunately, what passes for commentary on body image issues in popular media generally takes for granted the scrutiny of women’s appearance as right and proper, if inconvenient. I used to indulge in a little Oprah from time to time, and I sometimes liked it, too. If there was one thing that Oprah was good at it was the promotion of public displays of emotional vulnerability. But every time Oprah was about to well up, she’d make some crack about ‘the ugly cry’. When the cameras are rolling, one can’t be ugly. No matter how ‘real’ and raw the moment is supposed to be, we can’t have any screwed-up-face-mascara-running ugliness, at least not without self-deprecation thrown up as a shield. Emotions are good, seemed to be the message, but women can never, ever, let up on themselves when it comes to appearance.

It’s okay to have confronting feelings so long as you stay cute, folks.

I’ve been thinking about the ugly cry a lot lately; it’s a pernicious example of how women’s behaviour is constrained by the imperative to ‘look good’, as well as by ingrained notions of feminine conduct. Grooming protocols and fashion policing, it seems to me, are closely related to decorum and manners and, well, come along with a whole lot of sexist (and racist, ableist, classist) baggage. They also rely upon a false dichotomy between beauty and ugliness and fail to allow space for interrogating the very notion that appearance matters.

A lot of fat activism centres around fat visibility; the message that fat people exist and have the right to take up space is pivotal. More than that, the notion that a fat body can be beautiful and desirable is at the core of some body positive work. And these things are important. But there is, I think, a deeper cultural problem here that can’t be solved just by widening (literally, even!) the definition of beauty.

Sometimes, frequently, I have no interest in attaining any standard of beauty. It’s not churlishness: yeah, I don’t meet any aesthetic ideal and I’ve been derided often over the years for exhibiting various forms of ugliness. And sometimes that has hurt. But my interest in exploring the potential for the reclamation of ugly is not merely personal.

I can’t remember a time when I didn’t feel that I had some kind of obligation to be, if not pretty, then passable. Palatable. And if not that, then invisible.

In taking a kinder, more accepting disposition towards my physical self, I am finding that I feel rather invested in my right to be ugly. And I am far less critical of others. Letting go of any judgement about ugliness means it can start to look kinda beautiful, too.

That’s why I’ve enjoyed Definatalie’s explorations of Ugly Cute.

Sometimes, refusing to hide (or hide from) my ugly might be about finding a safe space in invisibility, or it might be about nothing more than pleasing my own damn self by privileging comfort over appearance or prioritising self-expression over fashion. Or sometimes, it’s political. It’s here I am, don’t erase me. Here I am, don’t judge me. Interrogating one’s own choices with regard to personal presentation is a little exhausting and it can be excruciatingly boring, too. But I think it’s important work for feminists — for anyone — to undertake from time to time.

None of us has an obligation to be conventionally attractive. We all have the right to let go of, if only briefly, the imperative to strive.

Letting yourself be enough, just as you are; now that is a beautiful thing.

Like housework, it never ends. But it gets easier with practice.

A few weeks ago, Bean asked me where my father is. He died, I told her. She let that pass without comment and I had assumed, as we so often do assume about the very young, that such a concept was really too far beyond her comprehension.

I should know my daughter better, by now. She had been taking some time to turn the notion over in her mind and waiting, it seems, for a quiet space.

Today we went for a walk together and she found that space. Into our companionable silence she spoke, Mama, is your daddy dead?

Yes, he died. He got very sick, and he died. It was a long time ago.

That’s not good. Oh mama, that’s not very good.

No. It was awful. I miss him, and I feel sad sometimes.

Yes Mama, that’s sad. But now you have me, and you don’t have to worry about your daddy. If you feel sad, you can always cuddle me. I will always be here for you to cuddle, any time.

I have been trying to compose a sentence that will properly express how much this confidently uttered and completely sincere statement of compassion and support, coming from a child of only three years of age, stunned and shocked me into heart-swelling, tear-welling joy, but I can’t manage to do it.

This — this, this is not the post I was planning to publish today. And this is not the kind of post I was going to be writing at all, anymore. But some stories tell themselves.

Before Christmas, a letter came from my mother. Like the other times, her words inconveniently inked their way under my skin. But I have, now, the requisite strength to offer my compassion. At a point in my still-short enough life when I am questioning almost everything, I can believe in kindness. And so I did what I thought would be kind, and eased some of the anxiety I know my mother could not adequately express, and sent her a Christmas card. It’s okay, I wrote. It’s okay.

Today, another letter, and a handful of old photos, and a row of kisses across the bottom of the page, and a child-like expression of hope.

I do not know how, from here, I should write on, but I do know that in kindness there can be solace.

And I know, because Bean showed me today, that a daughter can mother her mother for a moment and come away beaming, satisfied, ready to skip into the sunlight.