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.

We should be talking about breastfeeding, in public

The blog post I wanted to write yesterday in response to the latest ‘breastfeeding debate’ wasn’t about whether people should breastfeed discreetly in public, it wasn’t about whether we need more public awareness of the challenges faced by breastfeeding mothers, it wasn’t about the value of nurse-ins as public protest and it certainly wasn’t about whether ‘breast is best’. Other writers have covered those topics admirably well over the previous few days. (I particularly liked this post from Cristy Clark.) If there is any value at all in this recurring ‘debate’ (why am I even typing the word debate how is this even a topic up for debate I don’t even) it is certainly in the opportunity not only for education on the issues but for discussion of shared experiences and analysis of what it means to undertake the work of mothering whilst encountering casual sexism.

The blog post that was clamouring to be written was rather a response to this piece by Clementine Ford which, in part, took a similar bent to much of the discussion I saw on Twitter. (The latter, if not the former, can be summarised as it’s cool to be pissed off ladies but you know breastfeeding is just not that important an issue, right?)

The post I would have written would not have been for Kochie, but for feminists and feminist allies without children.

It would have said that when you measure the work that mothers do and the limited space in which we do it and find our work, not the space, wanting, you stifle us. When you perceive our passionate response to attack and our grass-roots protests as misguided and distracting, you patronise us. When you need to be reminded that the freedom to use our bodies for birthing and breastfeeding as we wish is as central a human right as the choice not to do these things, you devalue us.

It would have said those things, and more, except that I did not write a blog post yesterday because I was parenting for fourteen hours straight.

My daughter needs me now almost as intensively as she did as an infant. This feels like a challenge and a blessing both; what it does not feel like is a non-issue. Negotiating public spaces with a spirited child feels political. Navigating the world as a queer parent with a family structure that is more unconventional than most is not well-supported and it certainly is not an experience that is discussed with enough nuance in the media. I am not a breastfeeding mother anymore but I still feel an affinity with the experience of women asked to cover up their bodies and their babies; with women and children who are asked to take up less space.

What my partner and I do each day in mothering Bean is explicitly feminist and it is explicitly devalued by much public discourse.

Motherhood is not a niche topic. Our issues, as well as our breasts, have a place in the public sphere. I for one don’t plan to be discreet about that.

I, mother

My mum was a single working mother, a divorcee, in rural towns in the 1970s and 80s. I never really considered, until I had a child of my own, what that must have meant. She was talked about, certainly (Loretta Lynn was characteristically accurate about what it was to be ‘Rated X’ back then) and she was patronised — and sleazed on — by men who felt they were doing her a great favour. She was judged by other parents, discriminated against by landlords, and my brother was pitied for being a latch-key kid but rarely invited over to play.

I wonder, now, how much of her identity as a mother was about the fighting-for, the missing-out, the trauma. And whether that might explain, in some small measure, how she was able finally to give up mothering altogether.

Bean’s father moved out a few weeks ago. Unlike my mother’s relationship breakdowns, our split is what they call amicable. It’s a useful word: in my imagined etymology it means able to be kind to each other. The anger has evapourated. The drive, for both of us, is to protect Bean as much as we can as we try to start anew, apart.

But there were, as there always must be, some difficult moments. For me there was the wrenching fear of losing my child. Divorce meant the termination of my mother’s parental rights and that is some dark baggage to carry into my own custody negotiations.

I am quite comfortable being apart from Bean. I do paid work full time and she is well cared for at kindergarten. She has a loving and competent father. But I realised, in setting down my baggage and riffling through, that I don’t know who I am, if not foremost a mother. I don’t know who I would be, without my child. The thought of no longer having ‘Bean’s primary carer’ at the core of my position description for life gives me vertigo.

The loss of self that our culture promotes as inevitable for parents is, it’s possible, at work here.

But isn’t it also possible that the narrative of loss is entirely inappropriate? Only if one favours individualism above connection could it seem that being transformed by parental love is equivalent to losing one’s self. I rather think my self, in this mother-love, has been found.

In shedding some anchoring points — wife/partner — my identity clearly has to shift and grow. But lately I have felt more centred and confident in the knowledge that I am, that I will always be, a mother, a friend, a teacher, a writer.

My own mother inadvertently gave me significant gifts: a strong desire for independence and the requisite resilience. So I think in this next chapter, Bean and I are going to be fine.

I’m still writing.

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.

Mother, daughter

My father died almost ten years ago. I have done my grieving in fits and starts. I think grieving is, perversely, rather like housework. It’s an inevitable, inexorable task. Some clean out their grief in a fairly regular, even constant, fashion. Others of us let it build, then binge, then rest a while.

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.

Maternal desire

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.

What ‘childhood obesity’ is really doing to kids

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.

The good news: children are people

So, here is a thing that made me smile. I don’t know anything about this guy, and the text is six years old, but it’s not the kind of story where that matters.
(You need to read to the end, so make a cup of tea).

I’ve been writing about the personhood of children (and don’t people love that: some of my most delightful troll comments ever have come out of this) and so it seems like a good time to talk about how great it feels, as a parent, to be able to listen to your kid. I’m not so great at it, sometimes, but when it works — well, those are the nights I go to bed knowing I have loved and been loved well.

In defense of children

Cross-posted at Feministe.

I was going to have a different post for you today but it’s been one of those days where I keep getting my Outrage Button jabbed so I’m going to have to write about child rights instead.

This morning I woke up to a three year old who had just brushed her teeth and gotten herself dressed and packed her own bag for creche (her father was up with her and had made her breakfast, but she did the other stuff herself because she wanted to.) She woke me with a kiss and a good morning mama and then I put the kettle on and opened up Twitter, where I was confronted by #youngkidsshouldbebannedfrom in trending topics.

You can check out the thread yourself, but I will say that these tweets could be loosely categorised as Intended as Gentle Humour (‘#youngkidsshouldbebannedfrom Twilight’); Outright Bigotry (#youngkidsshouldbebannedfrom speaking/#youngkidsshouldbebannedfrom any public places I can’t stand their screaming); Violence and Abuse (#youngkidsshouldbebannedfrom Everywhere except the gallows/#youngkidshouldbebannedfrom anywhere except a rusty cage); Slut Shaming (#youngkidshouldbebannedfrom wearing makeup/dressing slutty); Disdain and Erasure (#youngkidsshouldbebannedfrom the word love they don’t even know what it means/#youngkidsshouldbebannedfrom thinking they are grown); Parent Blaming (#youngkidsshouldbebannedfrom going outside until their parents teach them manners/going anywhere if their parents can’t control them) to what amounted to Rape Threats and ‘Jokes’ about Sexual Abuse (I won’t quote those).

Now, I included the little preamble about my daughter this morning here for a reason. My reality is that I live with a child. My reality is that I parent a child. My reality is that this week, when my husband is home from work and I have paid child care arranged for hours I’m actually not doing paid work is an anomaly. I’m the primary carer for a small person. Excluding her from places excludes me. Saying she is less than human in any way (incapable of real love, not deserving of rights) erases what I do and belittles me, as well as her.

I don’t care about questioning anti-child bigotry only because I am a parent (it is certainly true that plenty of parents don’t really recognise that children are people) but also because I am a feminist. Misogyny and child hate are bound so closely together (partly because most primary carers are women so in practical terms excluding or vilifying children means excluding or vilifying women) that they feed each other. If you’re all for calling out misogyny, then anti-child bigotry ought to be on your list too.

The #youngkidsshouldbebannedfrom hashtag genuinely upset me, and not only because it included some violent, triggery stuff (although, making jokes about child abuse is on the same level as making rape jokes: that is, scores about a billion on the douchebag metre). It upset me because the bigotry was so blatant and yet it exists in a world where so many continue to deny that anti-child bigotry is A Thing. Substitute any group of people for the words ‘young kids’ in that hashtag and then tell me it’s not bigotry. Read through how many of the responses sound like stuff you’ve heard said about children and parents, even stuff you’ve heard said about children and parents on Feministe or other feminist sites, and tell me we don’t have a problem.

One of the issues is that children are so often erased in our culture. There are places you expect to see children (schools, playgrounds, maybe the supermarket, children’s books, movies and televison) and places you don’t expect to see them (a lot of other public spaces, as well as books, movies and television made for adults). And this means that many non-parents (and some parents) lack reminders that children are diverse, well-rounded, fully realised (though still growing and developing) people.

I’ve recently watched Season Four of The Wire (yeah, I’m really slow) and I found it particularly compelling because, unlike just about every other television series I’ve watched lately, it treated children and teenagers as characters in their own right. I had some pretty big misgivings about the potential for stereotypes (particularly with the ‘white teacher saves children of colour in rough school’ narrative) and there were many problematic elements (the ‘good’ mothers are white, and almost all of the mothers are blame-worthy) but on balance I think the show did a pretty good job of illuminating ways that systems like schools, welfare and foster care let children down, often precisely because children have no voices. ‘Kids don’t vote.’ But I don’t think that the (perhaps heavy-handed) political message was the most important aspect of the season’s treatment of kids. What mattered to me as a viewer was that they were there. They were interesting, they had personalities and internal conflicts and they were given some screen time in their own right.

More depictions of children and teenagers as individual human beings in popular culture won’t solve systemic problems like child abuse and neglect. But it would help, I think, if more of us asked why we don’t see children and teenagers in positive or at least nuanced portrayals in media that is meant for adult audiences. Why don’t we consider children to be fully realised characters, or their stories to be compelling?

What would also help make the world a better place for children (and ultimately adults) is if more people took it upon themselves to push against this insidious form of bigotry. You don’t have to be a parent to know that prejudice, hateful language, physical and sexual abuse and discrimination is not okay. And you don’t have to live with a three year old, as I do, to know that children are people. Those of us who care for children and practise feminist parenting could do with a little help on this one.

But the first step to dealing with a problem is acknowledging that you have one, right?

Take a step.

Further Reading:
Television’s Kid Problem by s.e. smith at this ain’t livin
Adult Privilege Checklist by anji at Mothers For Women’s Lib
The radical notion that children are people by me at Spilt Milk

(Comments closed for now at Feministe. Those of you who’ve seen past threads on this stuff know why. I’ll keep them open here though because I know some regular readers might have something to say.)

Guest post at Feministe: Feminist mothers

Cross-posted at Feministe.

A few weeks ago an article by Clem Bastow, writer and feminist, was published in two major newspapers here in Australia, and subsequently responded to in op eds and countless blogs. In her piece Why having a baby is not the pinnacle of a woman’s life, Bastow wrote frankly of her lack of maternal desire and the ways in which she is judged for her choice to be childless.

As my 20s have run themselves out, the line of questioning from extended family members has shifted from “Are you seeing anyone?” to “And what about kids?” I’m 29 today and I expect the urgency with which the question is delivered to only increase once next year’s birthday rolls around.

Her piece struck a chord. Immediately I noticed a flurry of tweets praising what was perceived to be her bravery in speaking out about the pressures on women to conform to the maternity track. Given that it’s only a year since Chally wrote here about our former Prime Minister Kevin Rudd commenting on the responsibility of women to set aside time for childbearing, it’s pretty clear that the judgements Bastow wrote about are real. It’s no surprise that many young feminists felt her piece spoke for them. In a mainstream media filled with schmaltzy references to maternity and the message that the path to fulfillment is heterosexual breeding bliss, voices like hers need to be heard.

But there was another kind of flurry in my tweet stream. A lot of the people I follow who blog primarily about parenting were perturbed, not so much by Bastow’s piece itself (I didn’t see anyone asserting that the choice not to have children is not valid) but by the strength of the FUCK YES! response it was getting. There was an implication in the surrounding discourse that the pressure to have children was coming from, or at least upheld by, women who were mothers. And there was also a clear implication that pursuing career and creativity is still requisite on remaining child free, at least for a good long period. It had a whiff of old conflicts about it, and I’m not surprised that there was uneasiness.

Unfortunately, (though unsurprisingly, given the way news sites generally go) some of the comments on the article were hateful, amounting to either (and I’m paraphrasing) ‘this is why feminism is responsible for everything that is wrong with the world’ or ‘what would you know about life choices, you selfish, barren, immature slut?’ As the writer pointed out on Twitter, it was striking that much of the negativity appeared to come from mothers, when she had explicitly not criticised anyone’s choice to have children.

I suspect Bastow didn’t fully anticipate the effect of raising any issue which carries a ‘mummy war’ vibe. I know from my interest in breastfeeding advocacy that when it comes to any sensitive question about which parents are impassioned, defensiveness and anger are easily stirred. It’s common to blame teh over-emotional wimmenz for this state of affairs but clearly, when a group of people are operating in an environment where societal judgement is harsh, swift and has serious consequences, as modern parents are, it is too simplistic to condemn all such over-reactions. Because whilst Bastow is absolutely right that childbearing is a socially sanctioned choice (for straight, partnered, cis women), what wasn’t within the scope of her piece to address was the ways in which that choice remains unsupported in real terms.

It’s one thing to be handed a cookie for breeding. It’s entirely another thing to be handed actual, concrete assistance, understanding, and genuine respect for one’s mothering and sadly the latter is too rarely in evidence at a societal level. Importantly, there are many parents who get no cookies because they do not meet the criteria of ‘good parent’; that is, they dare to have children whilst being poor, or disabled, or non-white, or queer, or trans, or too young, or too old, or too fat.

I certainly agree with Bastow’s assertion that in the mainstream media the voices of women who are childless by choice are frequently distorted or silenced. But her piece did not speak to me. I feel that, in the spaces in which I move online — in feminist spaces — there is no bravery required to ‘admit’ that one doesn’t want to have children. Rather, there is often a privileging of the voices of non-mothers. There is a continued emphasis on feminism’s relationship to a kind of personal freedom that apparently comes with career, economic success and time that is one’s own: all things that theoretically can be achieved with a baby at your breast and a toddler on your hip but which, portrayals imply, rarely are. In discourse about reproductive rights there is an emphasis on abortion and contraception which far overshadows discussion of fertility treatments, birth choices and breastfeeding rights even though these are also intimately tied up with the core concern of bodily autonomy. In considering the role of blogging in social justice, there is often a devaluing or erasure of those who write about babies and children. The term ‘mummy blogger’ is infantilising, dismissive, and all-too ubiquitous.

I want to remind everyone that there are many fantastic writers who are blogging about the intersection of feminism and parenting. As the series on feminist motherhood hosted by fellow Australian and fellow milk, blue milk, attests, parenting is a rich seam to mine for feminist gold. But it is mostly other parents who comment on (and presumably read) parenting-focused blogs. Obviously, the blogs you read do not ultimately define you but if you’re into feminist blogs and never choosing those which focus on parenting, at all, ever? I think that needs to be challenged.

The intersections of social justice, parenting, child rights and family are — or should be — central feminist concerns. I don’t think it’s okay to leave birth and breastfeeding rights as a fringe issue, one usually only discussed by uterus-having people who’ve already given birth. I don’t think it’s okay to perpetuate negative stereotypes about motherhood or particular parenting ‘trends’ in feminist spaces, although this is a thing which still happens. And I really don’t think it’s okay to leave the task of raising and looking out for the interests of children almost solely up to to parents when we’re talking about the next generation here. The incoming wave of feminists.

Here is just a very small sample of posts of parenting interest from great bloggers. If these blogs aren’t already on your reading list, please check them out.
Why attachment parenting needs feminism by blue milk
Feminist readers, have you leveled up? at Underbellie

Extended breastfeeding in Islam by wood turtle
Sex education and my son at Womanist Musings
Dear Erica Jong at Raising My Boychick

And please share other links in the comments, too.