Category Archives: opionated

You can ‘ave zee chicken

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17

Apart from the title, which my husband shudderingly assured me is a misnomer (I presume he was once traumatised by some little Frenchpeople thoroughly besting him in a food fight), French Children Don’t Throw Food (titled Bringing up Bébé in the US) is an excellent parenting read. I don’t really understand all the resistance it’s received across the Atlantic. Oh, wait no, I do understand. If you’re an urban, middle class American parent, helicopter-parenting for all you’re worth while consumed by guilt, and you read a book in which you painfully recognise your tired self, your strained marriage, and your child-king kidlets, and discover that lo! there is another easier, and much more sanity-inducing way in which you could have been raising charming children while continuing to look chic and fancy your husband all along, it’s not remotely surprising that all that guilt transforms itself into vitriolic anger in less time than it takes you to say Baby Einstein. (Plus, British readers have the benefit of feeling smugly superior to the US throughout, since the utterly demented sounding Park Slope type parenting hasn’t caught hold quite as well among our yummy mummies. I’m sure that goes a long way to easing some of our pain.) All of which makes me suspect that the more angry this book makes you, the more likely you are to need to spend some serious quality time holed up with it and a set of highlighter pens.

Basically, I loved the book because it described largely how I was raised, and how I definitely want to raise any offspring that one day come our way. (It turns out that my mother is a Parisienne! Who knew? Actually, it was evident the first time we all visited that city, but I digress.) I also loved it because it was better than valium for soothing my residual anxieties about breeding. It’s tone is immensely reassuring: It’s OK to let go of your anxieties about which parenting theory is the ‘right’ theory, and just stick to one overall common sense approach! It’s fine to relish your adult life, space and time, and not automatically believe that this will have to be completely turned over to your children without feeling like a selfish, unloving prick! It’s downright recommended that women still remain sensual women and not automatically morph into some strange mumsy other being just due to having reproduced! Feel free to take a relaxed approach, and for God’s sake stop beating yourself up with guilt about everything! Just have some conviction in what you’re doing, and it’ll be fine, and JUST STOP WITH THE GUILT, ALREADY! It’s also hilarious in parts, and because the author basically starts off as a hot neurotic parenting mess, it doesn’t feel preachy, or smug. More, if she can do this, by gum, so can you.

It’s also more than common sense (although, ‘common’ sense ain’t so common anymore, at least not in my professional experience) in that many of the approaches that she puts forward are based in solid child development theory and research. And when in chapter four she started throwing around basic psychoanalytical principles that are thought to underly the development of a secure, resilient, integrated personality, as if they should make up part of every parents’ understanding of how they’re raising their children (they should), I was pretty much sold. The lady clearly knows what she’s talking about. What are we arguing about, then?

And yes, yes, it’s not only French people who parent this way. Pedants. (Case in point: my parents aren’t French. But I’m not buying the argument that small town America does all the same things. Small town America is fat, yo – so there’s at least one very evident, significant difference.) But the observational perspective felt so very true to me. When I wandered round Paris with one of my best friends last spring, both of our ovaries exploding with sap-rising baby fever, we spent an awful lot of time gawking at the women and families around us. They all seemed so… relaxed. The parents looked exactly like the childless adults of similar age. The children were so well behaved, and how on earth did they keep those ridiculously chic outfits clean?

So, even though there was little in the book that felt like genuinely brand new insights to me, that isn’t its point. What it is, is a lot of solid, scientifically backed, sane and soothing parenting sense packed into one well-written, highly readable little book. It makes the whole enterprise of having and raising children seem, well, doable. It shows a way that is straightforward. It highlights that it can be done without guilt and anxiety, and with many an uninterrupted nights’ sleep. Frankly, I don’t understand why we aren’t all moving to France tomorrow.

Read, reflect, rant

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14

I also think the very concept of ‘having it all’ is a terribly unhelpful one. What does that even mean? It’s an impossible ideal that keeps us all in a state of unhappiness as we’re constantly yearning for something ‘better’. Also, I think that starting from a position where one thinks of career and children as mutually exclusive concepts is a limiting one. From what I’ve seen of friends who are parents, parenthood is a game-changer. Your whole approach to life changes – I’ve certainly known both male and female friends with kids become remarkably more focussed and efficient after procreating, something that would only help my work!

…………………….

I was thinking of the overall consumerist focus of society, and how we’re all constantly being pressured or persuaded to spend on things that we don’t necessarily need. (You know, like BUY ALL THE THINGS in wedding-land, but it’s everywhere else too, really.) And how once you commit to a certain way of living, that then pressures you to earn a certain amount to maintain it. And then when you’re spending all this time and effort earning this living, you then need to spend on time-savers or leisure. And oh look! You need to earn more to pay for that, and so on and so forth. I don’t think we personally are very caught in this cycle (or at least I hope not!), because we’re aware of it and thoughtful about how we lead our lives. But I’m pretty sure ‘society at large’ is caught up in a lot of that, which to an extent drives a lot of people’s current need to earn.

…………………….

I have been getting all kinds of chatty and opinionated up in other people’s internet space about issues around working parenthood and balancing career and children. Not because I have any big news of my own to share yet (don’t get excited, chickens, we’re still working on it), but clearly it’s something that resonates for me, and by the looks of comment threads everywhere, also for a lot of us, whether we are currently knocked up or not.

Now, I enjoy an uninformed exchange of opinions as much as the next bloke down the pub, but I really like getting my thinking processes on an issue properly greased by reading a well-researched, thought-provoking tome on the matters at hand first. Hence, my invitation to all of you to join me in reading, thinking about, and then hopefully vigourously discussing the whole Pandora’s box of topics that I suspect Half a Wife may throw open for us about working parenthood. I have the book in my possession, though I have not yet started reading it, but this article (which I really hope you read before the Guardian took it down), coupled with all the interesting good sense that Gaby Hinsliff usually speaks on these and other related matters over at her blog, make me almost certain that it will not prove a waste of your time, whatever your views, and wherever you happen to currently be on the reproductive spectrum.

So, a show of hands from all who are up for some engaging discussion on this most thorny of issues in a couple months’ time, please! I am pretty sure that this is guaranteed be a good one.

P.S. If Amazon US is being a dick, Amazon UK might ship it to you. Otherwise, I’m reliably told that the Guardian Bookshop is shipping it overseas, and speedily. No excuses, ladies. None.

Fearless

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14

A comment left by Kristi in response to the first of my posts about my fears ever so long ago now got me thinking and, as is all too common round these parts, I found that I surprised myself. Because for all of my neuroses and anxieties, the one thing that I absolutely do not fear is mothering itself. Of that I am quite certain.

Sure, I know I’ll be anxious about a hundred little things at one point or another. At this stage I am incredibly ignorant about the practicalities of looking after infants – I do not know how to wash them and get nervous of handling very newborn fragility, diaper systems remain largely a mystery (although this brilliant post clears up a lot), I wonder how one knows how much to feed them, the idea of dressing them with all those hundreds of little layers and thousands of tiny poppers makes my head spin, and so on and so forth. But these are things that, in my view, are easily learnt, from books and blogs, other people, and with time, and I’ve never been one who’s afraid to put my hand up and ask for help when I haven’t the faintest idea what I’m doing. And after all, almost every parent seems able to grasp these practical skills quickly enough, so there’s no reason to doubt that I won’t (eventually, at least) pick them up too.

And yes, I do already think about issues like breastfeeding and giving birth, and hope that I will be able to stick to the methods that I’d like to use. But I also know that these things are not the be all and end all, and will not, for all the emotive newspaper articles and blog posts that they engender, make or break the entire future and well-being of my child. If I end up delivering by c-section and exclusively formula-feeding, even though not ideal in my view, I will not feel like less of a mother. Or at least, I won’t when I am being my rational self, which will hopefully be often enough.

And I have no doubt that there will be times, hundreds or even thousands of them, when my children, or other people whose opinion I care about, will do or say things that make me wonder whether I got it right, and whether I ought not to have listened to my gut. But I know that essentially, all parents are experimenting, just doing the best they can, with their children being the fortunate, or not, recipients of the mistakes and serendipitious happy outcomes that befall them. And while that may seem like an odd thing to be OK with, instead of aiming for a well-controlled and perfectly-executed outcome for my offspring, I think I’ve learnt enough from life by now to know that all you can do is your best, while simultaneously keeping your fingers firmly crossed for a fair following wind.

But there is one other thing that I do know, and I think it is all that really matters, in essence. I will know how to love my children. At least there is that, and that will more than suffice.

Pleasure doing business with you

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22

Layne reminded me in the comments to my last post that I’d not yet watched the 2008 documentary about maternity care in the USA The Business of Being Born. So I promptly corrected that major oversight on my part, and then proceeded to re-watch it multiple times over the following few days, like a woman obsessed.

I was expecting a Michael Moore-esque polemic, sure to make me angry and horrified in equal measure, and was pleasantly surprised to find that the film was actually a gentle and informative, admittedly slightly biased, but often movingly beautiful exploration of the option of midwife-led care, and home birthing in particular, aimed at the average elective Caesarean-section demanding American woman, like those shown in the first few minutes of the movie. Which is not to say that it didn’t include some fairly shocking statistics about the current state of affairs around birthing practices in America, and a particularly brilliant segment about the unintended cascade of medical intervention after intervention potentially unleashed by a single procedure, such as chemical induction of labour, or an early epidural (a segment which, on its own, really ought to be mandatory viewing for every single pregnant woman). Those statistics were certainly driven home, and misconceptions about Caesareans, and obstetrician-led care being an ‘easy’ or ‘safe’ option were addressed head on. But what I especially enjoyed was the overall feel of the movie, that it did not seem to be about making women who chose to have Caesareans, or epidurals, or hospital births necessarily feel badly about them, or to push vaginal births as better just because they were ‘natural’, in some masochistic feminist (to quote one of the obstetricians in the film’s first few minutes) kind of way. But rather, the aim seemed to be simply to ensure that women were making informed choices, and had really understood and explored all of their options in the process of making decisions about birth. And it did a spectacular job of addressing (and, in my case, largely eliminating) the fear surrounding vaginal birth, instilled by all the cultural images that the stupendously dramatic (and stupendously incorrect) Casualties and ERs and Houses and Grays Anatomys of the world place in the minds of those of us to whom this is all virgin territory.

And, I know, I know, I’m getting waaaaay ahead of myself here, kind of like the pre-engaged crew stalking wedding-planning sites, but can we talk about me and home births for a second? Because, after reading a series of articles, blog posts, and chapters of books, and definitely after watching this movie, I have now done a full about-turn, and gone from thinking of them as disgustingly messy (and this is a topic for a whole other blog, far less a side note for a post, but why are we as women so often taught to be disgusted by the completely normal products of our bodies?), inconvenient and the preserve of the hippy-dippy earth mother, to considering one an absolutely valid, and in fact my preferred option (should I ever get pregnant and then be fortunate enough to have a totally unremarkable pregnancy, that is) for giving birth to my children.

So far, so fantastic. Except for the fact that the Boy is irreconcilably, adamantly, wholly against home births. Or, more specifically, against me having one. And thus far, I haven’t even been able to get a coherent explanation from him as to why this is the case. It’s unusual for him to hold a view this strongly, which, along with his seeming inability to verbalise it, makes me think that it is based in some unconscious fear. But I’ve reached a point of being demedicalised enough about all of this to see birth for what it is: a completely normal event, albeit one with transcendental benefits to most, and enormous risks to a few.

Given how wonderful I found this film, both from a medically rigorous, and an incredibly emotionally uplifting point of view (I dare you to watch that amazing woman giving birth in the pool in her living room, with her toddler holding her hand, or the stupidly beautiful mixed race woman bear down and give birth to her child, or Ricki Lake herself, naked in her tub exclaiming over her newborn, and not sob your eyes out at how damn joyful birth can be), I think my next step is to try it out on the Boy, and see what kind of effect it has on him.

As for you, if you haven’t watched it yet, it certainly comes with my whole-hearted, unreserved recommendation, purely for its educational value if nothing else. So, by all means, go watch it, and then do me the pleasure of getting straight back here and letting me know what you think.

Lobotomised

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22

Last weekend, the boy and I went to a toddler’s birthday party. It was thrown by the first of my friends to get swept up in this recent epidemic of parenthood that a significant sector of our social circle has been experiencing; a friend whom we’ve somehow managed not to see for just over a year. (I now wonder whether that may have been significant…) We recently spent time with lots of our other friends who’ve become parents, and found ourselves deeply reassured by these encounters, as they still seemed to be their awesome selves, just with this new role of mum or dad tagged on, without anything crucial that we could sense having been taken away. (Underslept, underfed, and underwashed at times? Yes. But still, essentially, themselves.) However, all of them had ventured but recently into the fray, so we were very interested to see what had become of the parenting pioneers two years out.

Maybe we ought not to have bothered, because the experience was pretty disturbing. By the end of the evening, when I had been asked for the 50th time whether the party had put me off potentially ever having kids, I was sorely tempted to answer fuck, yeah!* but perhaps not for the reasons that they might have expected. Yes, 20-odd pre-school children running around in one flat make a lot of noise, and generate a lot of mess, but that part I was fine with. It’s what kids do, and it seemed to me that, of all people, their own parents should be used to that by now. No, the bit that had me really quite distressed, and in desperate need of dinner immediately thereafter, in the most grown-up, child-unfriendly restaurant that we could find, was their parents. Every last stereotypically lobotomised one of them.

I turned up at the party, and was quite surprised to find that I was that woman – the one with the too bright lipstick, wearing a too short skirt, drinking a beer, and occasionally cursing within range of the poor innocent (mostly pre-verbal) angels’ ears – while everyone else wore Laura Ashley, politely drank coke, and talked only about their children, their childcare options, their birth experiences, or their horror at their GP’s lack of knowledge about the precise potential effects of the various components of the swine flu vaccine on their unborn child. Sure, I had expected to feel a bit out of place as one of the likely-to-be-few childless adults at a kiddies’ party, but I didn’t expect all the grown-ups there to be so reluctant to engage in what I consider to be normal adult conversation and behaviour, once their littles were happily occupied and needing only minimal supervision. And yes, I knew that these friends of ours are a bit older than we are, and always were a touch more conservative, but I didn’t expect the generic mumsiness, the uniform dullness, that made me feel like a teenager hanging out with my mum’s friends. (In fact, scratch that, my mum’s friends were pretty cool, and I always enjoyed hanging out with them. Make that my grandmother’s friends. The judgy church ones.)

Particularly hard for me to see was the change in the now-mum. She’d morphed from an intrepid, ballsy, overeducated, high-flyer, into a full-time, stay-at-home, playdate attending, cupcake baking… well, mum. She had no other identity that I could identify. And there’s nothing wrong with that, per se, and this isn’t about judging the women who do make the choice to give up careers to look after their children, because I think that is a completely ballsy move, and one that I wouldn’t have the gumption to try. We have other friends who’ve done the same thing, and I feel nothing but admiration for them. No, what scared me about this transition in particular, was the fact that there seemed to be not even a shadow of her former self remaining. Zip. Zero. Nada. While interestingly enough, dad seemed relatively untouched by this life-altering transformation that had revolutionised his household.

I find it absolutely terrifying, this notion that I somehow have to lose myself in order to gain a child, and while I know that inevitably aspects of my core self will change with motherhood, I was hoping that it would be more in keeping with the changes that have happened as I’ve tied my life to my husband’s. Growing and maturing, strengthening and bettering adaptations, not suppressing, minimizing or reducing ones. And yes, I know that there is an inevitable loss of the sole soul – I don’t see how it can be any other way once another person has actually inhabited your body – but I never expected not to be able to recognise someone, on the solitary basis of their having become a mother.

And I know that it doesn’t have to be like that, but it worries me that this might still be the norm, and where most of my knocked up friends might be heading, once they’ve spent enough time with all the other Stepford Parents that they meet at playgroup. I’m hoping that this is really how it always was for our friend, underneath everything else, and that the experience of motherhood has finally allowed her to become her true self, which she couldn’t express before. I’m clinging to that hope like a drowning man to a liferaft, because otherwise, how terribly sad, to see someone lose the very essence of themself. And how terribly frightening if it means that this is where I’m inevitably heading, one fine toddler-fun-filled day.

*I guess I’d better start that swear pot now, to save up for my new, newly lengthened, more appropriate wardrobe.

Touching a nerve

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15

So… Judging by the rather wonderfully overwhelming response to bringing these meandering musings of my bambini-fixated brain to light, I’m guessing that I’m not the only one for whom these issues are somewhat relevant. To be completely honest, I’m not at all surprised. But to those of you who privately got in touch to thank me for starting to say the things that you’ve been thinking about, but felt completely unable to say, for one reason or another, I want to thank you for making me feel big and brave and ballsy, and like the poster-girl for women who might be thinking about having children, but are wondering how the hell one does this thing thoughtfully and intelligently*, without automatically making it a terrifying mission of military precision. As if just the possibility of turning your life upside down by actually having children isn’t bad enough in the first place.

But a couple of you said it right. There seem to be those people who suddenly, out-of-nowhere, oh-my-god-I-didn’t-even-know-that-was-remotely-on-your-mind become pregnant. And then, Poof! just like that, the chat is all about the pregnancy, and the baby, and all that wonderfully exciting jazz, and any opportunity for talking about how on earth one reaches the position of being ready to go there, and all the myriad other concerns that have been spinning through my pretty little head recently, is lost.** Or, of course, there’s the other extreme, where you’re subjected to a minute record of someone else’s health, and eating habits, and bodily secretions, and temperature, and timing of coital activity/use of the turkey baster, and the whole process just seems to lose any residual spark of joy, or romance, or spontaneity, or life. And if it’s not that, then it’s all about an obsessive level of pre-pre-pre-preparation-and-planning that you couldn’t hope to keep up with just for the day-to-day, far less for some proposed project of enormously significant proportions, about which you may-or-may-not have quite ambivalent feelings deep down anyway. So before you know it, there you are feeling guilty and inadequate as a mother, and you haven’t even got started on the fun stuff of having a baby (hello? crazy amounts of hot sex, anyone?) yet. And then you want to go and gouge your eyes out, or devote yourself to a life of defiantly decadent childlessness, because oh-dear-god, just planning for pregnancy seems so horrible, and like such painfully, totally unfun, bloody hard work that no sane person ought to venture there at all.

Because here’s the thing, I wish it could be as simple as for me to ‘accidentally’ find myself pregnant one morning a couple weeks after a rather excellent shag. That would be much more in keeping with the pragmatic and relaxed attitude with which I hope to be able to approach parenting one day. But in this day and age of super-effective contraceptive methods, and one that, in my case, required a medical appointment and a cringe-worthily intimate examination to reverse, the act of having a baby (for women like me, at least) becomes an active (and actively terrifying) choice. Sure, maybe now as things progress over the next few months, and the gravity of the decision that we have made becomes less acute, I may find myself having such a ‘happy accident’. But somehow I doubt that the psychological effect of over a decade’s worth of deliberately doing everything within my power to not get pregnant, ever, will suddenly be erased in one magical moment. And so I find myself pretty much forced to think about it, despite my rather more laissez-faire instincts, and to plan for it, because now I’m making responsible adult choices, and then where is it that I draw the line before, oopsy! I’ve crossed it and started to unhealthily obsess?

So, how then to balance it out? How do I reconcile the fact that this was a very serious decision, of life-changing proportions, made by two responsible adults mapping out their hoped-for life plan, with the fact that I think that a spur-of-the-moment, spontaneous, what-the-fuck, life-is-too-short-let’s-do-it-anyway kind of mentality is absolutely vital, not just for raising healthily-minded kids, but more importantly, for maintaining my own fragile sanity through the wonderful madness ahead?

Obviously, I don’t have the answer to that question, and I’m not sure I ever will. But I sure as hell needed a place to think it through and sound it out. And I sure am glad to discover that it seems I was not the only one who did.

*I am under no delusions about being the first woman to tackle these topics sensibly. Nor do I believe that I even come close to the writing of these women. So just go, read them already. And, of course, there are places where one can talk to other women about these issues. But my (admittedly brief) experience of them so far has been that the conversations degenerate into one of those extremes pretty damn quickly.

**Clearly, everyone has their own boundaries and requirements for privacy, and I respect that. But, I still wish that we all felt it was OK to talk about this stuff, so that more people would feel able to share their thinking. Just cause I’m all selfish like that.

It takes a village

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16

So this is kind of what I was getting at, when I was wondering about the need for secrecy in planning to have and having babies.

Upper-middle-class white people make SUCH A BIG DEAL about pregnancy and babies. They have to read a million books about how to get pregnant, and then they have to make so many decisions about how to have the baby, and what food they should eat, and then after the baby comes they have to buy organic, and they have to plan out care options, and they have to make sure that the child is being stimulated intellectually, and they need to hover around it on the playground to make sure it doesn’t fall down or to point out interesting things that it should look at and learn the word for. It’s easy to forget that in other cultures people just have babies because that’s what happens when you have sex. And they just give birth because it turns out our bodies were made to just give birth already. And then they just raise the baby. And everyone around them helps them raise the baby, because it is just one more member of the community. And how amazing would it be to have a gigantic extended family where everyone just pitched in and took care of each other and made fun of each other and asked too-initmate questions and that’s just the way it was?

It’s also partly what I was thinking when I said (among a whole heap of other incoherent tripe):

I really feel sad thinking about how my own (much more financial resource-rich in comparison) situation will be. That extended network of family & friends, where a baby can be safely passed from one loving carer to the other, freeing up the mother to get on with what she needs to do, and not be bored, sitting at home feeling she has some duty to martyr herself to her child? I won’t have that.

in a comment to this post.

And, strangely enough, despite this entire blog being, in essence, a pretty upper-middle-class, obsessively self-centred bit of navel-gazing about (for now) the possibility of motherhood, that relaxed attitude of just getting on with things with a baby on my hip, and of feeling free to share my experience with friends and family in a completely honest and unembarrassed way, is exactly what I’m aiming for here.

Thank goodness there are these other smart, articulate women out there, who can say it so much better.

Oversharing

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Holding a decision this big, and this potentially life-changing, all to myself, is driving me slightly batshit crazy. And I’m no good at keeping secrets. Cue: the overshare.

So far, in no particular order, I have told: my mother, because d’oh!, she’s done this before; my trio of best real-life friends, because they have known all my inner adult workings, and it felt bizarre not to share this enormous leap in my thinking with them; a couple of currently/recently/planning soon-to-be knocked up/or just generally downright sensible online friends, so that I can safely vent some of these thoughts that are all up in my head, all the time; and then today, I let slip to my mother-in-law.

Of all the inappropriate people in the world, my mother-in-law? I mean it felt sensible at the time, since she was talking about helping us (read: the family communal) buy a new car, and was mentioning really rather small makes of car which might not be so sensible for the Boy and I to use if we were three instead of two. But honestly, I think that’s just an excuse for the fact that I wanted to tell somebody, anybody, and she sufficed because she was there. I mean I almost told my dad just after that as well, which would have been even more poorly judged.

But what of these boundaries, and this secrecy? I have no intention of telling everyone* what we’ve embarked upon (well, not yet anyway), but why is it that here in the west, there seems to be the expectation that such an enormous decision should be held exclusively between the couple? (As evidenced by the rather startled reaction of my poor mother-in-law to my hesitant disclosure.) We only felt emotionally married when we made our vows to each other in front of our community of family and loved ones, and heard them make vows of their own to help and support our marriage as best they can. So why not be able to share such an important step in our married life, and one which might potentially be so detrimental to our relationship, and therefore require calling in some of that promised help and support with them?

Clearly, there are all the issues surrounding the loss of privacy that comes with others watching closely for signs of pregnancy, wanting regular updates, and giving unwanted advice about how to speed things along. Butting in where it’s not appropriate is not something I advocate or encourage. However, I can’t help but feel that this deafening silence on matters reproductive doesn’t help the newly-planning-to-be-parents’ cause. It’s hardly any wonder to me that so many new mothers and fathers nowadays find the process of pregnancy and new parenthood isolating and terrifying, if we feel unable to even talk about when we’re thinking about launching into it, and thereby get some real-world feedback on how it might impact on our lives, and the things we could potentially do to maintain our sanity throughout that.  Just because every couple has to work their own way through things, doesn’t mean we all need to do so by reinventing the wheel. And really, there aren’t any prizes for discovering the secret of parenting happiness (or just, sanity), and then keeping it all to oneself…

In this situation, as in all others, I’ve just got to do what feels right. For us. And for us, that seems to be letting some of our nearest and dearest in on this enormous next step of ours, right from the get go. I’m thinking that this can only be a good thing, so that, god forbid, should we need any of that promised support while we’re on these first baby steps** of our journey, we can call on it. And be the stronger as a couple for knowing that we’re not doing this all on our own. After all, as they say, it takes a village…

*Oh yeah, except that I’ve started a blog so it’s ALL OVER THE INTERNETS. Sigh. One day I’ll understand myself.
**See what I did there?! See?!