But for now, I have a treat — a guest post from one of my favourite bloggers coming right up.

I hope you can make it, we’d love to see you!

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.

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.

‘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.