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.