Fear

Something happened to me today.

I was walking home with Ariel from town. Ariel was being a bit of a pain and in a contrary mood: insisting on walking rather than sitting in the pushchair but then being really unco-operative – running off, refusing to hold my hand, trying to pull the pushchair over, sitting or kneeling on the floor and refusing to budge, all that sort of thing – constant low-level misbehaviour. So anyway, after telling her that she had had enough warnings and that the next time I had to ask her to walk nicely she would be going in the pushchair, we were crossing the road and she decided to sit down about 2 feet short of the kerb and absolutely refused to move, pulling away from me and struggling when I tried to get her to stand up. I ended up having to drag her off the road and, as promised, put her straight in the pushchair while telling her in no uncertain terms (although not in fact shouting, just with a raised voice) that she should NEVER sit down in the road because it is extremely DANGEROUS.

None of this was exactly pleasant, but what else do you do?

Anyway, the next thing I know, some passerby has decided to involve himself and I’m being detained by the police on suspicion of assaulting my child. I was absolutely spitting, as you can imagine, and very reluctant to co-operate which no doubt made me look suspicious, however I did not know what they were entitled to do or not do (and the investigating constable insisted he could do whatever he wanted, and kept saying things like “I am a police officer” and “I can use reasonable force to detain you”) so I didn’t feel as though I had much choice but to do as I was asked, which included allowing him to take Ariel and I into the police station and removing her clothes so that he could examine her for evidence of assault.

It was the most upsetting thing that has happened to me in a long time. The most surprising feeling was of FEAR. I had done nothing wrong, why was I AFRAID? OK, maybe not so surprising. I very much felt that I was guilty until proven innocent, and at the back of my mind is the perennial mother’s fear – what if? What if they take her away from me? Maybe not today, but what if some other incident like this ever happens and now there is a *history* of abuse allegations and what if they take her away from me? What if I really was abusing and assaulting her? Did I go over the top when I was telling her off? If they did take her away from me, would I deserve this? What if they take her away?

Sisters, I’m here to tell you. They rule us with fear.

The fear is irrational, we all know that. But the fear is there.

There were a lot of things about the whole incident that made me really upset and really angry, but there is one more that stands out – which is the constable’s total failure to understand my concerns about his “examining” Ariel.

I was asking, for example, who would do the examination – would it be a doctor – isn’t she entitled to be examined by a medical professional? When he said he was merely going to inspect her for evidence of a crime I asked whether he was going to touch her. I said if he had to examine her, and he thought he was entitled to do so, then I would allow it but that I did not want him to touch her. His reaction to this was (as he admitted to me) that he thought this was a “weird” request.

Weird?

I mean, this is trained police officer who is investigating an allegation of an assault against a child. And he doesn’t get why it might not be appropriate for him to touch that child – the putative victim who he is apparently trying to protect – without first obtaining her consent?

And he thinks the child’s mother is weird for asking him not to touch the child, EVEN AFTER the mother has explained that the child does not like to be touched by people she doesn’t know? (My belief is that he only thought it was weird that I should request this, because he had already decided in his mind that I had assaulted her, in which case why on earth would I be concerned about someone else assaulting her?)

So how am I supposed to teach my daughter that it is not acceptable for other people to touch her against her will, if a POLICE OFFICER thinks it is acceptable for him to touch her against her will? – And, at that, a police officer investigating allegations of child assault.

The mind boggles.

 

Pledge

I pledge to you, dear heart:
Openness and honesty.
Truth and light.

My heart, I pledge that I will teach you to know yourself not through the images of men and the expectations of men and the eyes of men, but through your own eyes and the eyes of truthful women.

My one, I will not blush to speak of these things.
I will not perpetuate what was given to me.
I will not keep secrets.
I will be frank.
I will be clear.
I will not make things shameful or embarassing.
I will give you your answers, when you want them.

We will laugh together.

My beloved, I will give you an alternative to this pervasive idea that cruel, remorseless femininity is normal – that femininity is all there is. I will give you eyes to see with and a heart to love with.

I will give you freedom. If I can.

 

Real nappy week!

It’s real nappy week 2007. The Women’s Environmental Network are running a week long awareness campaign to promote real nappies.

Doing my bit, here are my own personal top five reasons for using real nappies:

• They don’t create anything like as much waste. A family with one baby in paper nappies produces about twice as much rubbish as a family using cloth.
• They are cheaper. You can save about £500 by using cloth nappies rather than paper ones. You can save even more by re-using nappies on a second or third baby.
• They don’t have nasty super-absorber chemicals in them. Just clean cloth.
• They are very, very cute. On teeny babies, the huge weeble bum is adorable, and as your child starts to toddle she will love picking out which nappy to wear, which cute little wrap, what bright colour Fuzzi. Lovely.
• The smell. Paper nappies stink! Especially the chemical ones (the eco-paper-nappies don’t seem so bad) – Pampers in particular smell vile. Ugh.

There is another reason, not in my top five because it is rather more woolly and odd.

It seems to me that real nappies help you feel more in touch with your baby’s body and, ultimately, your own. This seems like a weird one, I know, but there’s something about dealing with cloth nappies which creates an intimacy wholly missing from paper nappy disposal. Perhaps a recognition that poo and wee are not so unutterably disgusting, that bodily waste is just so much organic matter – perhaps this helps to create a bodily oneness for which “hygienic” paper nappies do not allow. It makes it easier to pay attention to poo and wee as an indicator of health. It makes it much easier to deal with and contemplate other bodily secretions too.

It is sad to note that after this year, WEN has no further government funding for real nappy week – especially given the current focus on climate change and the increasingly urgent need for us all to find ways to reduce waste. If you feel that you can support the network in some way (join!), I know they would very much appreciate it. Click here for details of how.

 

Depressing reading

(Pictured: Top = chart showing children’s subjective sense of well-being in OECD countries; Bottom = chart showing the relative quality of “family relationships” in OECD countries. The United Kingdom comes last by a mile in each chart.)

Here is the recent UNICEF report into the well-being of children in developed nations.

The report assesses 21 developed nations – all members of OECD for which sufficient data exists – against six categories: Material well-being; health and safety; educational well-being; family relationships; behaviours and risks; and subjective well-being.

The United Kingdom comes last, with an average ranking of 18 (out of 21). The United States comes in second-to-last, with an average ranking of 18.2. Our nearest “rivals” are Hungary, which had an average ranking of 14.5.

The only category in which the United Kingdon is not in the bottom third is “health and safety” (we are 12th). Otherwise, in no category do we rise above 17th. The position for the United States is just about identical – best result 12th (in “educational well-being”) and otherwise no better than 17th in any category.

Our children are poorer, iller, less well-educated, have worse family relationships, adopt more risky behaviour and feel worse than in any other developed nation that keeps relevant statistics. It is grim. It is sad. It is not surprising.

I mean, how often have you noticed British people being horrible to or about children? How often have you noticed that children in other European countries are made more welcome in, say, restaurants or bars, than they are here or in the United States? How many Spaniards do you know who think babies are icky? How many Swedes do you know who think breasts are for daddies only? How many children in other countries are treated with the same total disrespect that children here are expected to just put up with, as a normal fact of life?

We Anglo-Saxons are amazingly uncool about children. Is it any wonder that they are unhappy when we have marginalised them, oppressed them and ignored their needs and the needs of their families for such a very long time?

***************************

A few points are worth stating, although they in no way detract from the points made above:

• The statistics on “health and safety” are based on a few easy-to-measure criteria: low birthweight, infant mortality, percentage of children receiving immunisations, and number of people under 18 who die accidentally. Obviously this is likely to miss a great deal of hugely important information. It does not measure mental or emotional health. It does not measure either non-fatal accidents or non-accidental deaths. It does not measure child abuse. Nor does it measure any other key health indicators such as breastfeeding rates, or the incidence of disease. In short, it is a very limited measure.
• The statistics on “family relationships” (pictured above) do measure important things like how often parents spend time just talking to their children, and whether children find their peers (other children) to be “kind and helpful”. But they also measure how many children live in single parent families or step families. Personally I find it deeply offensive that my family is deemed to be less satisfactory from the point of view of my daughter’s family relationships than if her biological father happened to live with us. Frankly, I think we’re both better off without him: yet his absence is assumed to be a strike against us. I have hinted before at my views about this assumption, and have promised a detailed explanation. This will be forthcoming at some point, but for now, I simply wish to register my dissatisfaction. This measure is at best a blunt instrument. It is like trying to measure the number of children who are failed by the school system by seeing how many are educated at home. It is like trying to measure the incidence of mumps by counting the number of days children are absent from school. It is like trying to measure a person’s happiness by looking at their sexual orientation. It is wrong and silly and offensive.

 

I take it all back!

My previous ramblings (re dead man’s sperm etc) were the product of a dazed brain. Newly invigorated by yesterday’s tidyup, I have some additional analysis to make.

I had reasoned more or less thusly:

(1) I have never been in a situation where I really, really wanted to give birth to a child and yet was unable to conceive and/or carry one. I cannot understand that state of mind, because I have never been there, never even been near.

(2) I do take the approach generally that I should not go about judging other people’s hopes, wishes, fears, ideas, attitudes and choices, even if I do understand where they are coming from, but certainly not if I have no idea what they are going through.

(3) Therefore I pass no judgement on assorted fertility treatments and similar medical interventions which are designed to produce a child who would not otherwise have been born.

(4) Accordingly, since the situation in this Israeli case is no more than an extension of fertility treatments already deemed acceptable, I can see no reason to pass judgement there, either. Therefore, it is OK, and my gut reaction to the contrary is purely an ick-factor thing. My bad.

Where I went wrong, as any half-witted feminist could have told me (but you were all either too polite, or reading something else at the time) is at stage number 3.

Since when did I give up my right to analyse the meaning and consequences of medical procedures just because I’ve never happened to want one myself?

The fact that I would never choose to give a baby of mine formula milk instead of breastfeeding does not mean that I cannot analyse the politics of the breast v bottle debate. The fact that I would never choose to undergo cosmetic surgery does not stop me from shouting from the rooftops how totally bad and wrong it is. The fact that I would never choose to undergo FGM does not stop me from screaming in my head and on my blog.

The fact that I have never been in the position where breastfeeding has become so painful and seems so difficult and there is no help or support and no light at the end of the tunnel, and there is a free sample of formula in the cupboard… so that I end up just saying to hell with it and bring on the powder… that fact does not stop me from having very deep feelings and strong opinions on the subject of our bottle-feeding culture.

The fact that I cannot imagine being so filled with hatred of and discomfort with my body that I would go through surgery to “correct” it, does not prevent me from subjecting cosmetic surgery to rigorous analysis.

The fact that I cannot imagine being so disposed that voluntary FGM seems like an attractive alternative to ostracism and daily acts of hatred – again, does not stop me from subjecting the procedure, and the process that lead to people undergoing it either willingly or at the hands of their supposedly loving parents, to feminist critique.

So let’s look at fertility “treatments”.

I know little of them. Perhaps I will take the time soon to learn more. What I do know is that they often involve drugs, invasive procedures, sometimes surgery. They involve a lot of mucking about with the putative mother’s body.

And for what, exactly?

For motherhood. Now, I am the last person to slag off motherhood. I love being a mum. I find it deeply fulfilling and satisfying. BUT. I know a lot of women who are not mothers, and they also appear to find their lives deeply fulfilling and satisfying. Motherhood is not, despite the way I do kind of feel about my own mothering, the be-all and end-all of life. In reality, it is not.

And not just for motherhood in general: for biological motherhood. The purpose of fertility treatment is not purely to “get” a child, because you can get a child in other ways – for example, by adopting one of the many, many, many children who are orphaned or otherwise in need of adoptive parents. The point is to have a child “of your own”, meaning one that is biologically related to at least one and preferably both of the putative parents. This is not essential. Mothering/parenting a child is fulfilling regardless of biology. Biology is decidedly not the be-all and end-all of being a parent.

But many, many women and their partners feel that having a child is essential. Why?
Many, many couples feel that having a child who is biologically related to them is essential. Why?

I don’t have all the answers right now, but I think this is so clearly a subject worthy of feminist analysis that I find it hard to believe I managed to not even notice this as a real issue.

Here are some thoughts.

Our society still has a very strong virign-mother-whore approach to assessing women. If you don’t want to be a virgin or a whore, yes, motherhood looks like the right place for you.

Our society still assesses women based on their ability to reproduce. Proof of fertility, in the form of a child, is proof of womanliness. Problems with fertility are an insult to our womanliness, and to our personhood, that seem impossible to bear. This assessment of womanliness based on capacity to reproduce is part of the reason why, in a workshop at the Big Green last year, someone asked whether we thought that she, as a person who had undergone a hysterectomy, was “a woman”. It is part of the reason why women disappear as they age, their biological clock ticking down to Domesday, with post-menopausal women all but invisible. Yes, a want of fertility is a defect in such a world; yes “treatment” is appropriate in such a world. Right?

In a patriarchal culture which is predicated on building up wealth over generations, on passing wealth through the paternal line – kinship is vital, and proof that someone is biologically related to you is extremely valuable. Especially for men. The whole bloody point of female oppression over the millennia has often been to ensure that the offspring a woman produces are actually fathered by the man who owns her. With biological lineage that deeply entrenched, yes, we are going to feel that bloodlines count.

And why is the medical establishment – ethicists and all – willing to go along with all this?

Patriarchy. Money. Power.

Because the person that is harmed is the woman. It is she who takes the drugs, she who undergoes the invasive procedures and/or surgery. It is she who, ultimately, will end up going through pregnancy and childbirth. It is her body that is taking all the risks; when the child is born, it is she who will do all the work. And because there is nothing that the patriarchy loves more than a nuclear family; and you can’t have a nuclear family without nuclear kids.

Because fertility treatments cost money. People pay a lot of money. People are willing to have several goes at this, if they do not succeed the first time around. Most fertility treatments are funded privately. Even poor people will scrimp and save and budget so that they can give some rich white guy a wad of cash in exchange for – what?

Because doctors are very good at doing what people want. Doing what people want makes the doctor powerful. Counselling people that what they want is not possible, not practical, that it may be harmful or risky or downright dangerous; counselling people to think carefully about what they really want, giving people the support they need to come to terms with the grief they feel at being unable to have their own children… these are not the powerful things that doctors like. The fast, dazzling magic of fertility treatment is sexy and powerful. The slow, careful magic of emotional support is difficult, draining and it gives the power to the patient/client.

Patriarchy. Money. Power.

From that point of view, what’s not to like about fertility treatment?

But from the point of view of bodily independence, there are clearly some serious problems here. Women are not baby machines. Their bodies are as they are; they do not need “correction” or “treatment” to make them into the incubators that they “ought” to be. They are not ill. The “treatment” is not medically necessary. It is not about health. It is, like cosmetic surgery and FGM, about compliance and about “choice”.

What if, instead of treating women and men with “fertility problems” as somehow defective, we just shrugged our shoulders and let them come up with another plan for their lives?

What if, after the revolution, it did not matter who you were related to: you could be yourself, a child with many loving adults to care for you – sisters, neighbours, uncles, friends.

A person who loved children but had none of her own could, like my great-Aunt, give tea-parties now and again for all the children on the street. Or form a close attachment with a child in a local single parent family where some extra support is desperately needed? Or find some other creative way to express a love of little ones and desire to spend time with them? What if men who loved children were not demonised for taking on childcare jobs? What if ANYONE could take an interest in children not biologically produced by them, without worrying about being labelled a paedophile?

Where then would be the expensive fertility doctors and their Frankenstein treatments?

 

Homo-eroticism and female hostility

Below is a passage from The Beauty Myth which made me furrow my brow with perplexity no matter how many times I read, re-read and re-analysed it.

In it, Wolf suggests that women are made more susceptible to an “outside-in” version of sexuality (in which what one looks like is more important than how one feels) because of, among other things, the “unnatural pressure” on female sexuality that “little girls are not usually intimately cared for by their fathers”. (The general point she is making is that these unnatural pressures make it harder for us to form a sexuality of our own, and easier for a false version of sexuality to be imposed upon us from without.)

The naked Iron Maiden* affects women powerfully because most are tended in infancy by women. The female body and the female breast begin as the focus of desire for the infant girl, with the male breast and body absent. As girls grow, the [beauty] myth keeps the sexual focus on the female body, but, unlike the attraction felt to it by straight men and lesbians, heterosexual women’s ungratified admiration often becomes contaminated with envy, regret for lost bliss, and hostility. This situation creates in women an addiction to men’s eyes, enforcing what the poet Adrienne Rich calls “compulsory heterosexuality,” which forbids women from seeing other women as sources of sexual pleasure at all. Under the myth, the beauty of other women’s bodies gives women pain, leading to what Kim Chernin calls our “cruel obsession with the female body”. This balked relationship – which gives straight women confused, anxious pleasure when looking at another female body – leaves women in a lifelong anguish of competition that is in fact only the poisonous residue of original love.

[*Wolf uses “the Iron Maiden”, a torture device consisting of an excruciating person-shaped prison with a beautiful woman painted onto the outside, as a metaphor for the techniques by which our culture imposes external beauty requirements on woman.]

I would venture to suggest that this is not by a long stretch the best put-together part of Wolf’s argument. (If anyone else understood it first time, let me know and I’ll send you a gold star in the post.) After much brainthinking, I have come to the conclusion that there are parts of this which ring true and other parts which do not, and that the conclusions are misplaced. So, for what it is worth, here is my take.

In infancy we get nutrition, nurture, pleasure, comfort, love and safety from our mothers – we get all that from our mother’s body and breasts (and a lot of it even if we weren’t breastfed). Consequently, the female body – and in particular the specific female body that is our mother’s – becomes the first object of desire in our tiny lives: the female body and the female breast begin as the focus of desire for any infant (girl or boy) thus nurtured by her or his mother. Now, mothers have nursed and nurtured their offspring forever, with the “male body and breast [mostly] absent” forever. If the consequnce is that we learn to love the female body before we learn to love the male body, then this must be, to my mind, a normal and expected incident of infancy. Indeed, my view is that it is a perfectly natural and healthy part of life that we should learn in infancy to view female bodies with pleasure and desire.

Given the huge importance of our mother’s body and breasts to our small minds and hearts, it would be remarkable if we did not internalise the pleasure we took in our mother’s female body to the point where it was a part of our identity, and thus perhaps a part of the sexual identity that will form as we grow and develop. However, I don’t think (unlike Wolf, from what I can make out) that our pleasure in admiring and enjoying the softness and lovingness of female bodies has to be a sexual pleasure in order for it to have the consequences we are talking about. It only has to appear capable of being or becoming a sexual pleasure for the arguments we are making here to hold good.

This is where Wolf’s reference to “compulsory heterosexuality” comes in. What she means by this is the way that patriarchy obsessively enforces heterosexuality, to the point where any pleasure that a person takes in the body of another person of the same sex becomes suspect.

We see this in the way that men engaged in contact sports (especially team sports) have to act extra-masculine in order to prove that the pleasure they take in other men’s bodies is not a homo-erotic pleasure but a normal, healthy one – because under patriarchy homo-eroticism is neither normal nor healthy.

We also see it in the way that women are trained to view other women’s bodies.

We are not permitted to take pleasure in other women’s bodies, but we cannot stop looking at them – so the beauty myth steps in to provide a solution. The beauty myth allows us to look at another woman’s body as long as we do so in order to assess and judge her beauty. We can take a sort of pleasure in putting her down because she is not beautiful enough. We can take a sort of confessional pleasure, a masochistic pleasure, in putting ourselves down because we are not as beautiful as she is.

• “She’s so ugly, it’s disgusting, doesn’t she even make an effort? I hate her.”
• “She’s so beautiful, I’m so jealous, it’s not fair, I hate her.”
• “She’s so beautiful, I want to be her, oh I hate myself.”
• “She pretends to be beautiful, but look at that! Really she’s spotty and fat. I hate her.”

But, ultimately, these “pleasures” are not the real thing. They are not what we really want in our souls, they are merely a sop that patriarchy allows us in order to keep us from realising the truth: that real female bodies are wonderful not because of what they look like but because of the love that they can give. This is of course a second threat to the social order – because if we realised that beauty is in the love and the light, and not in the looks, we might overthrow the beauty myth, proclaim our true, fabulous beauty and demand our freedom.

Thus our innocent pleasure in the female body, posing a double threat (both to compulsory heterosexuality and to the beauty myth itself), is perverted into envy and hostility which are ultimately unsatisfying because, deep down, we know it is not what we want. Forced to repress this knowledge, forced to repress a key part of our (sexual) identity, it probably isn’t surprising that we develop a “cruel obsession with the female body”, desperate to find some acceptable outlet for the innocent need we have – the need just to be able to admire and take comfort or pleasure in thinking about or looking at a female body other than our own.

And if you were living in a place where being looked at by a woman meant either (1) that she was judging your beauty and condemning you because of it or (2) that she was objectifying you in a “disgusting” homo-erotic moment – wouldn’t you hate being looked at by women? Wouldn’t you instead develop an “addiction to men’s eyes”?

From all this, Wolf appears to suggest that it is the existence of a relationship between a grown-up non-lesbian girl-child and the bodies of other women (as representative or reminiscent of the original love of her mother’s body) that is the problem.

That may not be what she meant, but if it is then she is wrong. The problem lies in the way that this relationship is distorted by the “compulsory heterosexuality” mindset which prevents the grown-up girl child from taking her innocent pleasure in the bodies of other women. The problem lies in the way that, unable to satisfy this natural and healthy urge in a socially acceoptable way, women find an outlet in the competitive looking encouraged by the beauty myth – a competitive looking that is both harmful and unsatisfying. The problem lies in the way that, unsatisfied by the only kind of looking allowed under patriarchy, women end up developing their “cruel obsession with the female body”, and their “addiction to men’s eyes”.

Which all brings me to my central objection to what Wolf is saying here.

Her introductory words to this passage state twice that being cared for by a woman/mother instead of by a man/father is what gives rise to all this. Which is kind of true, but also kind of misleading. Because what is she suggesting? That women shouldn’t nurture their girl children? That we should accept the fact that we live in a compulsorily heterosexual society and ensure that boys are tended by women and girls by men, so that they can be properly adjusted at an early age to prevent this problematic homo-eroticism from arising in the first place?

When you put it like that, it becomes obvious that the “unnatural pressure” on female sexuality is not the fact that girl babies are rarely intimately cared for by men, but the fact that our culture is so paranoid about any suspicion of deviation from the heterosexual norm.

 

Kids on leads

I’m not sure quite where it came from but I have always had a sort of unreasoned horror about the idea of putting your kid on a leash, as if it (i.e. s/he) were a dog. I think it just struck me as horribly undignified and frankly rather lazy.

And then I saw a girl of at least six, pottering around the supermarket with her mother, wearing brightly coloured fun-reins as if it were the most normal thing in the world, and it made me think – yes, that’s why I hate those things. Because a harness is a thing, a control mechanism, an inanimate object used to restrict freedom, a set of cheerfully plastic chains.

In restricting freedom, the leash reduces the child’s choices and risks, and limits her or his opportunity for learning and exercising responsibility and judgement, for learning (inevitably the hard way, to some degree) how not to get in trouble, and for gaining self-confidence and independence. It also limits the parents’ opportunity for developing trust in their child’s ability to look after her- or himself.

So a child of six or so is still “on the lead” because her mother does not and cannot trust her to walk unfettered without running off or causing some other mayhem, or simply becoming frightened without the lead as a sort of crutch; and the child herself has had such limited opportunity for developing common sense that, in a way, the mother is right. These things are self-perpetuating, in the sense that the need for which the reins cater is a need arising from (overuse of) the reins themselves… a sort of vicious circle.

I’m not suggesting that occasional use of reins has any of these bad effects. Indeed, there have been a few times recently when I have questioned this prejudice myself. In airports, for example, when you have a million things to worry about and you really wish that keeping your excited toddler under constant active supervision did not have to be one of them… When children are too small to really be reasoned with, or to have any hope of understanding an explanation of WHY they absolutely must not wander off right now…

Nevertheless, I will not be using reins. I am prepared to put up with a bit of ARGH! now, because I know that in the long term it will make Ariel more sensible, and my life easier.

 

The Tale of a Bottom

Don’t let the lighthearted title of this post fool you – it is a tale of woe and sadness.

On and off for a very long time now – I couldn’t tell you how long, months and months – Baby M has been having Bottom Troubles. Some nappy rash, then a healing period, a skin infection, then some more nappy rash, then a healing period, then more nappy rash. And on and on. It always seems there is something new on the heels of something old, before the last lot has entirely gone away. Every time she sprouts a tooth or even if she doesn’t it seems to end up with little bottom sores on her sore little bottom, sometimes of one kind and sometimes of another. Poor baby.

So, anyway, quite naturally this is my fault. When you’re a mum, everything is. And, quite naturally, I’m trying everything within my power to make it go away – short of zapping it with anti-biotics or fungicide which I don’t believe would fix it anyway, that is. And, quite naturally, the fact that everything I try seems to fail – or at least, nothing seems to work – is my fault. And this means that I am a Bad Mother. Ask any mum, she’ll tell you I’m right on this.

What’s interesting is that when she is at home it doesn’t seem too bad, and although she does complain a bit now and again she does not seem to mind overmuch. On the other hand, the staff at nursery report a sobbing, suffering child so distressed that she screams the place down and/or won’t let them near her. They tell stories of bright red skin covering the whole nappy area. The way they tell it you would think her bottom was about to fall off. Yet I’ve never seen anything to back it up, only their descriptions when they call me on the phone. At home she is more or less fine. WTF? I believe they are honest and well-meaning but what they describe does not fit what I have seen.

So today I was called before the Head (sort of) to be lectured on things I should be doing to fix it, on how my child is suffering, on how Positive Action is needed to alleviate her pain. They don’t seem to get it when I say that it isn’t like that at home, that it seems to be something THEY are doing that makes things bad for her, because it isn’t so bad at home. No. They obviously think I’m a crap mother. Maybe they are right. Today it was mentioned that if they are concerned about the welfare of a child they may feel that they have to contact my health visitor themselves…

WTF?

Part of me rages – HOW DARE THEY!!!!

The other part says – OK, I give in, you win. You want me to give her antibiotics and switch to disposable nappies and generally do stuff that won’t work… so I’ll do it. Whatever you say.

Just don’t call social services and have my baby taken away from me.

I don’t really know what to do, except that I will take her to the doctors tomorrow, make sure that the doctor has seen that there is nothing really wrong with her, and see if there is any powerful-looking ointment I can give them to use on her. Beyond that, I can’t think.

 

On Expectation (Helplessness in the face of)

…The thing is, that people like to do what is expected of them. They think the expecter will be pleased if they, the expectees, fulfill the expectation. They are probably right, because most grown-ups get into habits of thought, expectations, and we feel uncomfortable if we are jolted out of those habits, by someone who defies our expectations…

So how do you know whether someone who wants to do what is expected of her is doing it because she wants to do it or because she wants to do what is expected of her?

If, for example, a teenaged girl wants to experiment with make-up and boys and such – is it because she herself genuinely enjoys the experiment for its own sake, or because she is going along with what everybody expects her to want to do, what with her being female and pubescent and hormonal and all. And how does one tell the difference?

It strikes me that the only way you could be sure you were doing something for its own sake rather than for the sake of meeting someone’s expectation is to remove the expectation. Or at least to remove any consciousness of that expectation. But how can you do that?

How can you take a little girl out of a world where she is expected to like pink and push toy babies around in toy prams? How can you take a little boy out of a world where he is expected to get into fights and to play with toy trucks?

How do we escape the expectations of countless unliberated minds? Unending streams of people, laying their own prejudices, their own preconceived ideas on my daughter. Clanking, gendered chains (glittering flowery ones for girls, blue with sailing boat design for boys) steering our children like trams along pre-ordained courses: steering my own girl from pink babyhood, through teddy-bear-girlhood and on to pornstar wannabe, inviting friends to a pole-dancing stripper-cise party for her sixteenth birthday.

Perhaps I am too pessimistic.

But I panic so, when I see little girls, no more than eight years old, with “Cheeky” written across their bums. I panic so, when I see pre-pubescent things in short-short skirts with glossy pink lips. I panic so, when I see young adult women simpering foolishly over stupid, stupid, stupid, glossy, celebrity claptrap.

How can I save my little girl from such a fate?

 

Something beautiful

This picture is of a baby less than 24 hours old, and the baby is smiling. Want to know more?