Pitting mum against mum; a story of our (hollow) times

That Time cover.

We’ve all seen it (but if you haven’t here it is; http://www.time.com/time/covers/0,16641,20120521,00.html ).

That Confronting Image! That Divisive Headline! That Crazy Story!

Pitting mum against mum in a scurrying race for two minutes of sensationalist ad-selling notoriety. It sure sold copies of Time mag, certainly got readers to their site and undoubtedly made their advertisers happy for a day.

But why that, why now?

I couldn’t help but notice that the controversy centred almost exclusively around boobs, and who’s they are. Should kids be breastfed that old? What is this brazen hussy thinking, using her child to fulfill her unmet needs for nurturing, power, whatever? Should women be allowed to bare their (shhh, say it quietly…) breasts in public?! Should any babies ever use their mothers’ breasts for feeding and comfort at all?

One survey reacting to the article had 7% of respondents saying that breastfeeding a baby under 1 year of age is ‘unacceptable’, and 29% said that feeding a 2 year old is unacceptable, despite this being the World Health Organization’s minimum recommended age of weaning. Breasts are meant for mens’ pleasure, and to advertise cars and photocopiers and magazines. How perverse to use them for such an unnatural purpose as feeding babies!These weird misguided hippies, spoiling kids and creating a generation of me- first soppy tree – huggers!

The world average age of weaning is over four years, so that makes the breastfeeding element of the controversy at least seem odd. And why was it so very explosive?

The story is undeniably about breastfeeding duration and parenting style (two things I do intrinsically care a lot about) but it strikes me that those particular issues are, while important in themselves to countless millions of individual children and families, just the lava flow and not the huge magma chamber feeding the volcano here.

When I was pregnant with my now three year old daughter, I wanted, from a sense of intense excitement about being pregnant and having a baby, to Do Everything. I wanted doctor visits, ultrasounds, Baby Things, magazines, bag packing for hospital, a hossie stay with visiting relos and irritatingly large numbers of floral and soft toy gifts. I wanted to talk about details of birth (to my partner’s enduring dismay I continue to find this topic magnetically interesting), look at pictures of foetal development and read accounts of how my inside baby was whiling away her time in there growing nostrils or a spleen or sucking her tiny thumb (or toe, they’re very flexi!).

All of this turned out to be something to file under the heading ‘Be Careful What You Wish For’, because in the end I got five ultrasounds, two stays in hospital, an induction, an episiotomy, a ventouse extraction, a retained placental bit (which stayed in there for 18 months, tenacious little placental bit!), pain breastfeeding for the first few months, and a partridge in a pear tree. Oh, and a perfect baby daughter, did I mention that?

I spent so much energy focusing outward that I forgot to listen. Perhaps because I was dead scared that my body just wouldn’t be able to do any of this. Despite the fact that it seemed to be actually doing it just fine.

The whole thing got me thinking.

And reading. I did so much of these things that my views on a lot of things were … refined. My pregnancy with my son last year involved no more than hiring a beautiful midwife at 22 weeks, a doula at 36 weeks, and quietly birthing our perfect baby boy on our back porch one afternoon last November. Or maybe not quietly, but certainly with little fuss and no intervention. Just a lot of swaying and humming and a bit of swearing at the end. I felt his first kicks at 14 weeks and knew him intimately, even feeling that he was bigger than his sister had been. He was breastfeeding about half an hour after birth and never looked back, packing on 440g in his first ten days. Before he was born, I dreamed that he was a boy.

What does all this have to do with That Article?

It’s Inside / Outside stuff, really.

To me, the article put the grassroots natural parenting movement neatly back in its box, or rather neatly back into glossy printed sellable packaging, slotted handily on the shelf with all the other consumer items that comprise our existence. To me such a thing could only have been generated by our part of the world, a part that values lazy individual centred consuming of stuff, thneeds (thanks, Dr Seuss!), above all else. Because if we care about other things, if we start feeling things from the inside, we might not need thneeds so much anymore, and we might not be so keen to spray our dollars around.

I think that we buy these things, these thneeds, (including neat ethereal ultrasound pictures of our unborn children sucking their thumbs and twisting away from the screaming intense blast of sound which they can actually hear) so much because we are just a bit empty, and that makes us scared and distrustful of ourselves, each other and our bodies. All of which doesn’t feel nice. So we do two things; buy Thneeds to stuff in the hole, and employ Experts to tell us how to feel and to do things to us to make us function because our bodies don’t work.

Don’t work? How the hell did we get here then? How did the countless generations of our ancestors get us to this place with such malfunctioning survival equipment that it didn’t allow them to birth or feed the next generation?

Pregnancy should surely be the time in a woman’s life when she feels fuller than ever. And more connected. You’re never closer to another person than you are to that scrap of perfect humanity curled inside you, all potential, and you’ll likely never have another opportunity to love anyone as profoundly as you can love your child.

So why do pregnancy and the idea of parenting in a loving attached way, with the Ancestors’ Seal of Approval, fill us with such terror, such odd emptiness? Why articles like this that hit back at a movement promoting warm, loving, biologically normal parenting? Why do these intrinsically connecting things, pregnancy, birth and parenthood, make so many women clinically depressed, result even in suicides, and make us so very sure that if we keep our kids close and respond to their needs, feed them from our bodies and raise them with attentive love and respect we will ‘spoil’ (get that word; to  wreck something…) them?

Well… at the risk of sounding All Spiritual and airy - fairy, I have to say that I think the answer is simply this; because people who feel that way, people who were raised feeling connected to their family, with a sense of continuity and community and trust in themselves and in other people, folk who’s intrinsic needs for love, security and attachment have always been met don’t really have much of a hole to fill with thneeds and stuff.

So, to be honest, I think the whole Time article thing is a red herring. While making people like me who are passionate about attachment parenting and breastfeeding feel a bit warmed in the cockles because our views have had a bit of a public airing, it still manages to make us and our ideas looks wacko, divisive and just a bit wrong, and give the impression that they are just really threatening on the whole. A posed, artificial and somewhat sterile looking picture of what I call a natural duration breastfeeding relationship and a headline that suggests that mothers who parent this way are superior and judgemental is clear in its intent.

To me, an attack on attachment parenting, natural parenting, gentle pregnancy, birth, and parenting, call it what you will (I’d call it normal) is about something more than a good old fashioned magazine – flogging debate. It reflects the need to preserve a deeper social problem, a series of cracks that are chasms which actually power the flimsy veneer of consumerism, a problem that keeps us driving on the long straight road of more and more thneeds, using up fuel and polluting the air as we go (I know, a somewhat laboured metaphor there, but I like it ;-) ).

I’m not suggesting that attachment parenting will Save The World, or that individuals who choose not to or who are unable to breastfeed until their kids are three or who push them about in a pram or put them down to sleep in a cot care any less about them than I care about mine. What I am saying is that the cult of detachment underpins more than just our society’s preferred parenting style. It’s an expectation, a way of feeling and being that leaves us handily open to the religion of thneeds.

I’m not a conspiracy theorist, nor am I a socialist, I’m simply a pragmatist who realizes that everyone has an agenda. Very simply, the agenda of big business, of any business in fact, is to sell something. The bigger the business the more power it has to push it’s particular stuff, and if it’s multinational it has the even greater edge of being able to do so by exploiting desperate people who will work for peanuts to make thneeds cheaply in one country, then sell them for a breathtakingly rude profit to the more fortunate denizens of richer nations. I’ll let you judge whether that’s bad or good, but it’s certainly how it is.

What is bad though, is the undermining of our integrity, our wholeness as human beings to hollow out an ever increasing empty bit that we feel compelled to buy a fix for. It’s part of the relentless and bewitching idea that the only way we can keep having stuff, consumer goods, thneeds, plasma TVs and takeaway food that gives us cancer and destroys our hearts, is to keep expanding, growing populations, buildings, cities…. And stuffing them with things. We even try to buy health in a convenient pill, injection or operation, rather than just living in intrinsically healthy ways.  I’m not saying here that there isn’t a time and a place for allopathic (ie ‘Western’) medicine, just nowhere near as much time and space as its getting right now.

And do we (back to me…) have thneeds in our home? Of course we do, some. Mostly from opshops (and I have to say that I love the internet buy swap sell phenomenon – reusing thneeds is at least better than endless parades of new ones), and not much by most peoples’ standards. No TV, no computer games, no microwave.

But I do have little warm hands, grins, tired soft heavy baby bodies sleeping on me, next to me. I have the knowing that my very own body grew these little people, birthed them, made them fat and strong and thriving and trusting. I have that simple simple pregnancy, that no-one told me how to do or suggested I might not be able to do or might need help doing. I have that simple grand birth on our back porch that gave me back some of the dignity and wholeness that so many things that are a normal part of a world focused on stuff had eroded. I have over three years of a beautiful, sometimes tough and triumphantly rewarding breastfeeding relationship with my daughter, and a still going strong one with my chubby thriving lilttle homeborn son.

Please, when you look at that article, that photo, look beyond the sensationalist image (drawn, the photographer explains, from religious iconography … er, why?) and the confronting headline. Think about the stuff it’s trying to get you not to think about.

And maybe give a moment or two over to wondering if our need for thneeds, our soul cracking empty bit, couldn’t perhaps be at least a little healed by a generation of children parented with attentiveness, warmth, individuality, instinct and nurturing rather than rules and schedules and artificial baby milk that nets it’s manufacturers billions of dollars every year. Perhaps big business knows how appealing that warmth is, how in some place inside us most of us yearn to go back to a place where we know each other, nurture our children instinctively, trade on a human level and feel the strength of our cultural and familial roots. Maybe that’s why this style of parenting, this way of being, has to be painted in fool’s colours, why the power of women, mothers, parents, has to be continually eroded and undermined. Because if we knew how powerful we really are, we might decide not to need their thneeds any more.

Blessingways, opening the door to re-magicking birth.

Written Oct 2011

My belly is huge and rippling with the new life inside it. Soon, within some weeks, I’ll be facing for the second time the most transformative and gruelling journey that most women experience, birth. It is said that the veil between the spiritual and physical worlds is at it’s thinnest during birth, that it is the closest we’ll get while living to experiencing another kind of reality through our physical bodies.

I feel so lucky, then, to have been blessed on my journey.

Sadly, our society usually deems that the best we can do to prepare our mothers, our future – makers, for the profundity of this transformation is the sharing of birth stories involving pain and disempowerment, and the throwing of a baby shower. What the baby is to be showered in, it seems, is a collection of competitive gifts including plastic lights – and - sounds toys, tins of artificial baby milk and chemically scented disposable nappies (perhaps so the child can leave a lasting legacy in the local rubbish tip before even leaving infanthood). The women collected can share stories to frighten the gestating mother into anticipating unbearable pain and invasive medical interventions in her near future, and play inane games such as competitions as to who can drink the fastest from a baby bottle, or races to hang clothes on a line with a plastic doll tucked under one arm. Apparently it’s all about speed.

A perceptive reader will no doubt have guessed by now that I avoided a baby shower for my first child.

I went it alone.

Last Sunday, though, I really was blessed. The birth of my daughter nearly three years ago didn’t only make me into a mother, changing me in the most profound way by bringing me a love that I could never have imagined previously.  It also opened the door to a community of wiser, more connected people who I feel privileged to have shared my early parenting journey with. These women introduced me to the concept of the blessingway, and a thing that originally seemed nice but kind of quirky and hippie has come to feel like the ideal and most real preparation for a woman’s birth time.

Blessingways encapsulate the kind of emotional and practical support and genuine love and community that baby showers seem to me to be the very antithesis of, with their focus on distraction by materialism and fear. Perhaps this sort of ceremony has fallen out of favour for the very same reasons that birth has been relegated to the masculine realm of western medicine, and women disempowered by this in the most disturbing way.

I am hoping for a very different experience this time, for the entry of my second child into the world earthside. This pregnancy has been very different from my first one, with none of the scans, needles, tests or invasions that became the focus of that experience. Just a few visits with the midwife who will walk this journey with me, in the safety of our own home when our baby is ready. It has put me into a very different space.

My first pregnancy felt like a series of waitings from one test or visit to the next to reassure me anew what I could have felt anytime I’d chosen to; that my body and my baby were doing just fine. I’m reminded of the book, ‘The Tentative Pregnancy’ by Barbara Katz Rothman, which begins exploring the idea that the more we give our bodies over to science to tell us what’s going on inside ourselves, the more disconnected we become from our own bodies, and the less able we are to be part of the bodily wisdom, the knowing and loving of our unborn child and our own nurturing body that is supposed to be one of pregnancy’s most profound gifts. Perhaps our willingness to give ourselves over to medicine like this is only a reflection of what society expects from us anyway, that we should find meaning through things, and safety in authorities outside of and intrinsically alien to ourselves.

I’d love to think that blessingways are part of the way back.

Blessingways are full of ritual, symbolism, genuine warmth of feeling, and the absolute certainty that pregnancy and birth are part of each woman, part of our life, our selves, and not owned by the AMA, or the local hospital, or even the midwife who walks with us. These experiences are ours, part of our physical and spiritual inheritance, and birth is something that almost everyone can do with just the right kind of loving support and gentle wise guidance. ‘Trust your body’ someone has written on one of a string of little flags that hang in my birth room, and ‘don’t push the river, it flows by itself’. Not only was I princess for a day, pampered, decorated and loved, possessor of two birthing necklaces strung with beads symbolising my birthing wisdom and power and the women who’s spirits will walk with me on the journey, my blessingway also left me feeling that I am walking a path well trodden by countless millions of women before and after me. And so it is.

Ina May Gaskin, mother of a deeper kind of feminist movement that reclaims all of our femininity by reclaiming our right to good births, to empowered and even ecstatic births and the transformations they bring, makes the point that we wouldn’t be here if our foremothers weren’t successful birthers, and that we have inherited this ability to birth our babies safely. Ninety six percent of the many thousands of women who have birthed at her community, ‘The Farm’, over many years have done so without any kind of medical intervention, and the c-section rate there is 1.4%. Not only is this cheering, but her books are filled with normal birth stories, those of many ordinary women who have had the extraordinary experience of what used to be just normal; birthing their children without medical interventions and with the support of wise and experienced women supporters.

Now it would be silly to as it were, throw the baby out with the bathwater and suggest that western medicine has no place in birth. Of course it does, at times, and in the appropriate context. But we live in a reality where medicine has no respect for women or for babies. Where c-section rates in hospitals vary from 25% to 40%, where about a fifth of births are induced and many more augmented with artificial hormones and artificial rupture of membranes. Where it is more normal to have your baby pulled from you with a plastic vacuum cup or steel forceps clasping her head than to push her out yourself, and where the most common and deeply held association is that birth is a horrifying and agonising experience that only the most powerful drugs, injected into the birthing woman’s spine or bloodstream, can prevent us from feeling.

Something has scared us into believing that birth is something we need to be saved from, not something that we can do, something that can be healing and beautiful and profound. Something has scared us into beginning our parenting journey steeped in fear, and imbuing our children with the notion that only adhering to strict rules about separation from nature and nurture will protect them. Only having our children endlessly weighed and measured and fed from bottles and separated from us when they most need us and forced into routines will save them, save us, from whatever horrors await us when we just let go a little.

The history of how a male centred medical system has come to have dominance over birth and other things essential to women (once the keepers of health) is the subject of another blog, but I feel that the return of ceremonies like the blessingway, which unite women in love and positivity and allow us to reclaim the experience of birth, are a step on the path back to some vital knowings that we have lost in the race to industrialise, to materialise our existence. Blessingways aren’t about stuff, they aren’t about fear, and they leave an imprint of strength and nurture that is rare, certainly in my experience. Mine has helped me gain confidence that I can do this, I can touch spirit and join it with my body, my senses, my animal self to bring my baby into the world in the way that women have always brought babies into the world, and in the safest place; at home.

Am I being unrealistic, sentimental, endangering myself and my child with all this lovey dovey hippie nonsense? No, not when so many huge well structured research studies show that not only is home birth and natural birth as safe as hospital birth, but in several important ways it is actually much safer for mothers and babies. Not with a willingness to trust that I know my body and trust my midwife, that I will know if there is a reason to use western medicine’s particular kinds of knowings, and that I will know when it is not required. For that’s the key. Not dogmatically sticking to a preset approach, but knowing, trusting that I am almost certain to birth normally given the right support and an environment that I feel safe in. That I can birth with joy, even ecstasy, as well as with physical work and practical guidance and emotional support when the going gets tough.

I’m glad, so glad (and so is my lovely partner who respected the female importance of it all and supports me in his ways), that I am setting out on the journey this time with the strength of a blessingway behind me, not the fear and vulnerability of going it alone that we knew last time. Many candles are lighting the way, many beads reminding me of the blessings that we can bring to each other if just we learn to let go a little, trust a little, and connect to whatever is real rather than what takes us as far away from ourselves as we can manage to get.

That isn’t safety, it is fear, and fear is no sort of thing to steep the start of a new life in.

Reflections

Reflections…

Children are our mirrors.

It occurs to me that the very simplest argument for treating children with kindness, love and respect (apart from that it feels right) is that they always reflect these things back to us their parents, and to everyone they interact with. The time and energy that we put into them is not a sacrifice. Our children are not drains that suck away our energy and life, they are the most potent mirrors of who we are, and the return on our investment of time, love and understanding is many fold.

I’ve picked up a great book from the local library (kudos to our local libraries for stocking gentle parenting books!) called, aptly, “What Your Pediatrician Doesn’t Know Can Hurt Your Child”, by Susan Markel MD. Her chapter on discipline is headed simply, “Treat Me Like I’m Someone You Love”.

Treat me like I’m someone you love. I see children being treated as the enemy. I see them being shamed, belittled, yelled at, told they are wrong, can’t do, must do, slapped, berated and used as whipping dogs for their parents’ angers and frustrations. I see them tucked away out of sight in prams and ‘baby buckets’, where their cries of increasing distress and outright loneliness can be zoned out as background noise. Only rarely do I really see children being treated as someone their parents love. And like. And as though they are actually seen as a person.

Storytime at a local library recently was utterly ruined for me by the other mothers. One told her child loudly, 5 or 6 times, that she was ‘stupid!’ Another roughly snatched glitter off her tiny daughter, told her that she can’t do this and shouldn’t do that (we were making turtles out of old yogurt containers, I felt a little experimentation and creativity might be an acceptable part of the process), berated and bullied the child into a belligerent response (the mirror), then ignored the three year old while she wandered out onto the footpath next to the highway for 20 minutes. The little girl was then shouted at for ‘running away’, threatened, told she was naughty, and to ‘get in the car NOW!’ Another mother at a shopping centre change room roughly slapped her little boy for moving about too much while she changed his nappy.

What will these children learn from these interactions with their parents? Will it make them ‘good’? Oh, and doesn’t that open the proverbial worm can. What is good? If you ask the average parent to outline what a good child is, what will the answer be? Almost certainly, the measure of a ‘good’ child is compliance. Is that the measure of a ‘good’ adult, and if so what does that say for the oft quoted ‘all it takes for evil to flourish is that good people stand by and do nothing’? If by good we mean compliant, if we all learn that the only choices are to be ‘good’ victims or to be bullies, then the usual round of unsatisfactory and violent human interactions continues.

While the modern connotations of the word ‘discipline’ make me reluctant to use it, its actual meaning is ‘to teach’. Every single interaction we have with our children, with other peoples’ children, teaches them something about the world, something about themselves, whether we know it, care about that, or not.

When a tiny child is hit by his mother, the person he loves and trusts most in the world, for following his irresistible bodily need for movement (at what happens to be an inconvenient time for mum) what does he learn? In this case, he said, “sorry mum” in a little sorry voice. Perhaps he learns that those who are bigger and more physically powerful than he is can control him, and he must appease them to be accepted. Perhaps he learns to feel shame in relation to toileting. Maybe he learns that his natural impulses are wrong and bad and will bring him pain – both physical and by the withdrawal of approval and love. What seems most unlikely in this scenario is that he will learn to co-operate with others out of mutual respect, because there is no respect involved in hitting a tiny child, and he cannot learn, cannot mirror, what is not shown to him. This mother may wonder what is wrong with her boy when he hits children in the playground later. Maybe she will hit him for hitting other people.

It is easy to see this mirror effect in other peoples’ interactions with their children. It’s much harder to see what you are doing yourself, because that means going behind the mirror, looking below the surface of the view we have of ourselves, of the version of our self that we want others to see, and finding the heart of the matter.

When I am stressed or distressed, when I am exhausted and at a low ebb or at odds with important people in my life, my daughter gets the short end of the stick (although I never treat her with anything like the kinds of physical and emotional violence outlined above). I lose my patience too easily, I grit my teeth when I should just bend with her, I get snappy over spilled things rather than calmly saying “That’s ok, let’s pick it up”. When I do the latter, she picks it up every time, gracefully, willingly, with me. When I can see clearly, I see how willing she is, how kind, how much she wants to flow with me and I can see when she needs to express things in herself and follow through on her own. I can see her needs and we can work together to get them met. But when I am stressed, distressed, the little girl bits of me struggle through, that early person who is still angry about being ignored, shamed and who still has unmet needs, elbows her way past loving mother me, and to this part of myself my daughter is just someone else who is standing in the way of getting her needs met. I mirror, at these times, the parenting I had.

The trick here is simple awareness.

When my daughter mirrors back to me my anger, my anxieties, my inability to hold onto my patience in all the small ways she needs me to, it’s easy to make excuses. “Oh, I’m cranky because I’m tired, because I’m pregnant, because the hormones made me do it!” It’s a bit too easy. Because one very simple fact remains amongst all this flurry of efforts to make myself feel better about behaviors I don’t like in myself. My daughter and her mirror. The simple fact is that regardless of the reason, regardless of the fact that I had certain deficiencies in my own upbringing,or of my hormones or tiredness or stresses, it affects my daughter negatively. The depth of my love for my child has taught me this, that I am the adult, I am the one who can change things, make better choices, who can give her the very best of me so that she can naturally give the world, and her children, these things easily.

And, perhaps best of all, she gives these better things back to me. Absolutely invariably, when I make the effort to regain my patience, when I step back and soothe my own anger, clear it from my vision, and see what she really needs and offer her gentle loving guidance and the room to learn from her own (harmless) mistakes, she repays my efforts with heartbreaking gestures of love and sharing. The countless hours, days, months of wearing her close to me, breastfeeding as she needed it, soothing her fears at night, listening to her, being interested in her and pouring in often more patience and understanding than I felt I had, all swamp back to me when the tiny lips kiss me, when her little warm body presses close to me in absolute trust that I will keep her safe, when she trusts me with the safekeeping of some treasure or shares a precious food with me.

I am passionate about gentle pregnancy, birth and parenting for these reasons, and because every time I hear someone talking about leaving a baby to ‘cry it out’ (cry what out?), or notice a child being berated or shamed, or see the person who a child should be able to trust completely to keep him safe instead smack him, I feel that we’ve lost something. And it makes me profoundly sad.

 There really is no need for the next generation, and the next to go on and on mirroring the disinterested uncompassionate parenting that they had. But it takes effort, the effort to be aware and to take responsibility, to show a child more empathy, understanding, warmth and aware guidance than you may feel you have, to reap that reward of having all of that mirrored right back to you.

It’s easier, though, if we remember to treat our children like they are someone we love.

REFERENCE

‘What Your Pediatrician Doesn’t Know Can Hurt Your Child’, Susan Markel MD, 2010, Benbella Books, inc,