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Tag: Family

Meet Your Local Extreme Breastfeeder

The other day one of my seven year old daughter’s guinea pigs died and it is the first death my two kids have dealt with up close and they love their guinea pigs, and I do, too, and so it was really very sad. Their father was away trekking for two weeks – because I am a saint and I gave him the gift of solitude for his birthday – and so, I found myself alone in a way too, with all of this. (Huge eye-roll in sympathy to the real single parents who do this solo parenting gig all year around and who get crapped on by so many people for their, frankly, friggin’ heroic efforts). The guinea pig death happened on this very chaotic morning. Actually, all the days where I am working in the city are chaotic because ‘school + kindy + workplace’ and back again in the evening equals a whole lot of trips in opposing directions and a very long day for all. The three year old was being a really obnoxious griever, entirely missing the point of why his big sister and I were so upset, and just wanting to endlessly explore the nature of death in gruesome detail. All he knows about death is that it is something that can happen when people fight with guns and it is why his mother is a bit sensitive about gun-play for little kids and why he gets frowned at when he pretends to shoot anyone. So, every second phrase out of his mouth was “who killed her, but who killed our guinea pig?”. Didn’t matter how many times I explained that death just happens sometimes, all he wanted to do was be a frickin’ detective. Meanwhile, his poor sister was getting more and more distressed by her brother’s death carnival. It was awful. And I did think quite a lot – why me, why am I having to deal with this alone while their father is out in the wilderness enjoying himself?

But by that night, when we three got home from ‘work + school + kindy + after-school care arrangements’ and I showed them where the little pig was buried, the three year old finally appreciated the finality of death and he was suddenly on the same page as the rest of us. We were all in my bed together (see the title of this post above), and I was breastfeeding him because that’s what he likes to do when he goes to sleep and also because I thought that breastfeeding might be a better comfort than story books. But he immediately came off the breast because he was sobbing too much to feed and it seemed he wanted to talk to my breasts about the guinea pig’s death. So, if your rule is ‘kids should stop breastfeeding when they are old enough to ask for it’ how do you feel about kids who are old enough to emote their grief to it? I don’t even know how I feel about that.

Sometime in their first year babies go through a developmental stage where they finally understand that the hand you wave in front of them or the nipple you pop into their mouth whenever you appear, is actually part of you and not some random toy you happen to pick up. Considering babies arrive in the world knowing almost nothing, you can see why this would be a concept that would require some thinking about for them, but apparently, that developmental stage can be incomplete. Three year olds exist in this really trippy stage of life where they know puppets aren’t real, and that’s why they’ve stopped screaming when one approaches them, but they are still capable of getting completely lost in ‘pretend’ and they really do imagine that inanimate objects can be kind of real and have personalities. So, when he started talking to my breasts (“breastfeedings” he calls them, in case you were wondering), and he was being so sincere and sad I did not know quite what to do. Should my breasts be answering him, it seems rude to remain completely indifferent to someone who is sharing the most tragic moment of their life with you? I mean, my breasts aren’t cold-hearted. And if my breasts answered him should they have my voice, which, would kind of take you out of the moment, or should they have a unique voice of their own, and in which case, what does a breast’s voice sound like?

So, this is breastfeeding beyond babyhood. It’s both strange and normal.

I hear you have a reality TV show coming to your screens in the US about ‘extreme breastfeeders’ and I thought you might like to know one of those weirdos for yourself. Here I am. Before I had children I thought breastfeeding for twelve months was pushing it. Six months is fine, but if they can eat solids then why breastfeed any further? With the first child I really surprised myself and I breastfed her for just under two years. Now I am breastfeeding a three and a half year old who is tall enough to look like a five year old. We could definitely do an impression of that notorious TIME magazine cover. He’s partial to a bit of standing-up breastfeeding, too. ‘This me’ would totally have horrified ‘old me’. Public breastfeeding? Wasn’t keen on that. Breastfeeding toddlers? Really wasn’t keen on that.

The thing I didn’t realise back then when I was repulsed by the idea of breastfeeding a child ‘old enough to ask for it’ is that babies ‘ask for it’ right from birth and they never stop asking for it, their methods just get increasingly sophisticated. And that sophistication, like all other milestones your baby achieves, makes a parent beam with pleasure. If you found yourself compelled to respond to their earlier requests you will quite likely feel compelled by their later requests.

Here is how a baby ‘asks for it’: they cry shrilly, they nuzzle you, they suck on your finger, and they turn their face towards you if you lightly brush their cheek. Then one day, while balanced in your lap, they throw themselves backwards to be laying down near your chest. You think, holy hell, your little neck is going to break, because they do this when they’re still in their floppy stage and haven’t developed proper neck muscles. Sometimes, they clamp on to the fleshiness of your arms and they suck you a hickey. If you teach your baby to sign, like I did, of course I did – see the title of this post, then they might even begin signing ‘breastfeed’ to you at five months old. When someone else holding them passes the baby into your arms they will tilt their head sideways with their mouth gaping in anticipation. They can burst into impatient tears at the sight of you undoing your bra. Sometimes they will reach their arms down your dress or lift up your t-shirt. They usually do all of this before they finally ‘ask for it’ with a spoken word and even then their word may be nothing more offensive than the adoption of a particular pitch when they plead “Mama” at you. At what point are ‘they old enough to ask for it’, and at what point is it too much? Depends on you, their mother, but don’t be surprised if you start to find the notion of ‘old enough to ask for it’ absurd.

Maybe you want to ask me, your local extreme breastfeeder, some questions.

Am I an earth mama?

No, I’m an economist, remember? I do not fit the stereotype you probably have of extreme breastfeeders and I would be surprised if you find all that many mothers do. I vaccinate my children, I wear pencil skirts and high heels, I ride a motorbike, I can’t sew, I like sex and violence in my TV shows (hello True Blood!), I used disposable nappies (diapers) on my babies, I am an atheist, I have never learnt yoga or meditation, and I am argumentative (so, I really should have taken the time at some point to learn yoga and meditation). I love earth mama types, they’re some of the most generous mothers I know, but I am not one of them.

Do I feel like breastfeeding for so long has taken over my body?

I think this is the number one concern I hear coming out in discussions where certain feminists are sounding a little anti-breastfeeding, and this notion that breastfeeding undermines your bodily integrity is definately what I sense in some of French feminist, Elisabeth Badinter’s work. I can see that breastfeeding may feel that way for some women but for me so much of mothering ‘takes over my body/life’ that it would be difficult to identify exactly which aspects I can attribute to breastfeeding. I hope women aren’t stuck resentfully breastfeeding for months and months because of the pressure to breastfeed, but the truth is, plenty about mothering is done with a little bit of resentment on the side. Breastfeeding can be terribly annoying when you urgently want to get up off this damn bed and get on with something else for the night, but for the most part, breastfeeding is a lazy parent’s best friend.

Motherhood is a very challenging identity for many of us. There’s a huge fear of losing yourself, and your boundaries, and your sex appeal, and your focus and direction, and control over your body when you transform into a mother. Breastfeeding can push all of those buttons. We live in a very misogynist culture. The worst trolling on my blog has always been about calling me a cow and trying to humiliate me about breastfeeding. Clearly, the concept that we can be lactating animals scares the shit out of some of us.

Do I feel forced into breastfeeding for so long by society’s expectation of what the perfect mother should be?

No. I have really, really enjoyed breastfeeding, it’s as simple as that. I understand that not everyone finds breastfeeding to be so nice but for me it has been a very lovely, intimate, relaxing experience. Breastfeeding fills me with love and that’s a nice thing to feel with your children. And for someone like me, who has had a love-hate relationship with their breasts, I have to acknowledge that breastfeeding has been a rather healing experience for my psyche.

Do I feel smug about breastfeeding for so long?

To be honest, I feel kind of embarrassed about breastfeeding for so long. It’s a terrible thing for a feminist mother who advocates for breastfeeding to admit but the stigma attached to breastfeeding kindergarteners (and beyond) is really strong and I have not really outed myself in my writing before as an ‘extreme breastfeeder’. I think that says quite a lot, that a ranty feminist like myself can feel so intimidated by the prejudices against long-term breastfeeding in our culture.

Do I find breastfeeding for so long to be sexual?

Very much not. Three cheers for women who manage to have a discreet orgasm while breastfeeding because they like the sensation so much. There are not enough orgasms in motherhood. But for me, breastfeeding is not a sexual experience. And let me clarify, no mother finds the concept of their child breastfeeding to be a sexual experience; really, they don’t. You might just as well try to convince us that wiping toddler’s bottoms is sexual. So Much No.

Does my child find breastfeeding sexual?

No. He doesn’t find sippy cups sexual either. He’s a little kid and he doesn’t know about anyone finding breasts sexy yet.

Does my partner resent me for breastfeeding for so long?

If I’m going to be really honest here (why not?) – I think he feels a little impatient with the fact that significant amounts of breast-play have been off my menu for a while but he doesn’t feel in any way competitive with his son for my body, and he doesn’t find breastfeeding repulsive, and he doesn’t think my decision to breastfeed is particularly any of his business. (He knows that my breasts belong to me – he successfully went through that developmental stage as a baby).

When will I stop breastfeeding?

Soon, I hope. I am getting a little sick of breastfeeding and the right time for weaning for me is coming soon. Get in now with your questions before I am no longer your local extreme breastfeeder.

(Post-script: my blog is bluemilk.wordpress.com and you can follow me on twitter @bluemilk).

Not Another Mummy Blogger

Hi. I’m the writer from blue milk and I’m thrilled to be writing at Feministe. I write about motherhood from a feminist perspective and I sometimes write for the Australian feminist group blog, Hoyden About Town and other times I write for a couple of mainstream commercial publications. I also work half the week as an economist but I don’t know anything about personal budgets, sorry, as evidenced by my own household budgeting, which is woeful; so, if the figure doesn’t involve at least $100 million then I’m clueless.

I write about juggling work and family, about art and pop culture, about sex and arguments with my partner, about a bunch of traditional feminist topics like rape, breastfeeding, abortion, and the sexualisation of little girls, and I also write about politics. By and large, my writing is pitched squarely within the framework of motherhood and technically, I think this probably makes me a ‘mummy blogger’. I’m not all that offended by the term. I can see that it’s meant to be somewhat insulting, even children get embarrassed calling you ‘Mummy’ once they get to school, it is just that I am too tired to care. And there is a part of me that feels if a label is stigmatised like that then maybe it’s worth defending. After all, the belittling of mummy blogging has a lot in common with the ways in which mothers are marginalised.

There’s a lot we could do to improve the public discussion of motherhood but here is where I would start. We would not be so judgemental towards mothers if we recognised that mothering is work. If you aren’t yet able to accept mothering as work then you have some reading to do – it will involve economics and history. Start with the emergence of industrialisation when family work first became invisible. And if you can’t see that breastfeeding a baby was every bit as important as collecting firewood for family survival, then keep reading back through feudalism. But once you knock that patriarchal lens of distortion from your eyes you will never see mothers and children quite the same way again. Everywhere you look you will see something a little bit horrifying – hours and hours and hours and hours of unpaid labour. It is work performed very often with love; it is work with possibilities of personal reward and great satisfaction, much like some other jobs, except it is unpaid.

We would have better public policy and better rights for women if we were able to acknowledge more honestly that capitalism is not a marketplace, it is rather, a system that involves the intersection of the market with government, families and communities. We are talking about the greatest heist in capitalist history, because it is estimated that unpaid work in the USA amounts to 50 per cent of all hours of work performed. Imagine any other resource vanishing from the national spreadsheet like that. Capitalism, in its present form, could not survive without that unpaid support. It is not mothers who are draining the system, it is mothers and carers who are propping up the system.

I don’t want to over-complicate what is supposed to just be an introductory post here, but it says something about living in a patriarchy that we would have women specialise in a very demanding area of work that is both vitally important to us and utterly worthless in terms of monetary compensation, doesn’t it?

And there’s lots of other stuff to consider – children are not ‘units of production’, they’re small people who deserve to be nurtured with love and dedication; and yes, mothers are driven by an intense maternal desire to be with their children in spite of the sacrifices; and yes, self-ownership through individual wages was an incredibly important step in feminism and who am I, a mother in the workforce, to deny it? All I am saying is that you do not need to believe in universal minimum incomes and legislated entitlements for at-home parents/carers (though it would be nice) to know that there is a problem here when we penalize mothers through regressive tax systems and workplace discrimination for providing essential care work.

And while capitalism helped women mobilise collectively and seek ownership of resources you cannot pretend that capitalism and the patriarchy are not also mutually reinforcing, which is what you are doing when you tell mothers to just stop looking after kids and get a real job, already. Because whenever a mother enters the workplace a deal is being cut somewhere for childcare. Thinking care work vanishes when a woman’s time is suddenly accounted for in paid employment is patriarchal thinking. Either she is negotiating with a partner for him/her to stay home with the children (and obviously, this favours partnered parents over single parents and high-income couples over those in minimum wage jobs); or she is asking a female relative or friend to help out (more unpaid care on the balance sheet); or she is paying someone to look after the children (and fine, if she can afford to and is willing to pay a fair wage to someone for the task; but let’s not kid ourselves, childcare is female-dominated, poorly paid, and has a history of exploiting poor women for the task).

Ok, so this mother is now at work and by being there she sends important signals to her colleagues and employers about the role of women, she also sends a message to her partner (if she has one) and her children about her identity, she’s feeding her family, and hooray! she officially exists in the marketplace. Good for feminism, but as long as we don’t get ahead of ourselves and expect her to be the entire gateway for female liberation. In fact, it’s an uncomfortable notion but dual, high-income households have seen poor households slip even further behind since women joined the workforce. Turns out when rich women are working and marrying rich husbands, who are also working, that this only widens the gap between them and poor households. Go figure. Obviously, I’m not against women in the workforce but I’m saying this stuff is complicated. It will take a few bites of the apple before we get it sorted out.

If feminism, in approaching the unresolved question of mothers, does not recognise that motherhood is messy and emotional and diverse and political then it has missed the mark. It is important not to try to over-simplify mothers, not to stereotype them and not to ignore that their tasks are real work. Again and again in my writing I try to emphasize that last point, because I suspect much of the hostility towards mothers, including between mothers, would fade if we just understood that mothers are people trying to do a job and it’s consuming and tiring. It is difficult to imagine we would be bothered with The Mummy Wars if we were mobilising around the exploitation of unpaid care in our economy instead.

Because how ludicrous, how shameful, how utterly trivial our judgements of a teenage mother suddenly become with this one acknowledgement – that she is working, that it is hard work and it is for no pay and no recognition. Or our judgements of a mother with a disabled child having an outburst in public; or a mother breastfeeding her toddler; or a mother trying to help her teenage child with their drug addictions; or even, a mother blogging. (Oh, you want to tell me how I should do my unpaid work more to your liking? Fabulous, do tell). It sometimes helps to remember that even the most privileged mother is occasionally woken in the middle of the night by her sick toddler and sits bolt upright in bed, bleary-eyed and shivering in the dark, to catch vomit or shit in her bare hands. It may take some of the sting out of her, apparently, selfish lifestyle.

It is an uphill battle though, some of the fiercest defenders of mothering as a task too precious to be sullied with the term ‘work’ are mothers, themselves. There’s a lot invested in an identity when it is all you have. This does not mean that we can’t question the decisions mothers make or criticise the institution of motherhood. In fact, I would be lost as a mother without feminism and its difficult questions. But as feminists we must ask questions and listen to the answers, we must be prepared to change or expand our theories when we get it wrong, and I advise that we tread lightly in these discussions – that we tread as someone walking over the toil of unpaid workers.

Encouraging Delayed Sexual Activity Without Shaming

A few years back, the McGuinty Liberals in Ontario proposed a new sex ed curriculum for the province, one that would start in Grade One.

Naturally, people lost their shit, because Grade One students couldn’t possibly be taught about … (whisper it with me now).. sex.. in a nuanced and age-appropriate manner. Around me I saw parents react as though they were going to be showing Debbie Does Dallas to six-year-olds.

However, the curriculum outline was much more well thought out than that. The Grade One curriculum would introduce basic anatomy including body parts and their proper names. Grade Three would introduce homosexuality – as in, ‘Hey. This is a thing that exists.’ and ‘Some kids have two mommies or two daddies’. Grade Five would cover reproduction and introduce masturbation. Grade Seven and Eight classes might touch on Oral and Anal sex.

The original articles I cited when I wrote about this back in 2010 are gone, but I did find a link to the proposed curriculum.

Click Here (.pdf)

At the time I felt like this kind of curriculum made a lot of sense and was a nice step from the last curriculum update, which had been in 1997. It didn’t operate in a strictly heterosexist, heteronormative paradigm, introducing kids to concepts such as homosexuality and transgenderism on a level appropriate to kids. Granted, how well these concepts would have been communicated by teachers we’ll never know, as the curriculum was abandoned after less than three days under pressure from conservative groups that were concerned with pre-teens ‘getting lessons in anal sex’.

One of the phrases that jumped out at me in reading about this was, as opposed to abstinence as taught by many sex education curricula, the idea of ‘delayed sexual activity’. It seems to put across the idea that sex is going to happen, but let’s just try and put it off a bit, until you’re good and ready.

I have a confession to make. As a parent, the idea of my kids as sexual beings, scares the beejeebus out of me. It’s coming though, I know it. My oldest one, at eleven, has discovered ‘boys’ and while she enjoys the attention, she thankfully still makes faces at the thought of anything beyond hand-holding.

It’s coming though. I’d like to be able to put it off as long as possible.

I talk with my kids a lot, and I’m pretty candid with them. I’ve had numerous puberty talks and we’ve had numerous ‘Where babies come from?’ talks and a few ‘How do babies get there?’ talks and at least one ‘Dear God, how you NOT get babies there?’ talk. I’ve talked to them about consent and about how no one is allowed to touch them without their permission. I’ve talked about secrets and how if anyone tells them to keep a secret from me or their dad that they should tell us immediately, even if it does ruin a few surprise parties. I’ve talked to them about masturbation and how it’s totally cool and okay, just not in the living room in front of company.

I wish I could find a way to just say ‘Please, for your mother’s sake don’t do it.’ without making them feel like sex is dirty or shameful. Because I don’t fear them having sex so much as facing the issues that sometimes go with it. Coercion. I don’t necessarily expect them to buy into the idea ‘your first time should be special, and full of feeeeelings’.

But your first time, if at all possible, should be on your own terms. It should be safe. Without fear. Because you’re there and you’re ready and you really want this. I don’t want them to feel coerced, or unsafe, or unable to walk away.

I fear unplanned pregnancy. I can have all the birth control talks with them I want, but that doesn’t rule out the possibility that most, namely hormonal-based methods may not even be an option due to family history. I fear them having to face an unplanned pregnancy. None of the options are pleasant. Raising a child in your teens, abortion, adoption – none of these are wrong choices, but none of them seem like particularly pleasant choices.

I don’t want them to delay their sexual lives out of some kind of moral obligation or some arbitrary idea of purity. It’s a protectiveness thing I suppose. I just want their lives to stay… uncomplicated, or as uncomplicated as possible, until they are both fully ready to take that kind of responsibility on.

Is it possible to encourage kids to wait to have sex (whatever ‘sex’ may entail – not referring strictly to PIV) without being shame-y about it?

(I just want to mention that this probably comes across as fairly heteronormative in assuming that both kids will be in heterosexual relationships. I’m not taking it for granted, I’ve actually given great consideration to the possibility that my kids could fall anywhere on the spectrum and I’d be totally supportive.)

Dinner Talk

There’s a post up in the Times Style section this week about dinner table conversation, and how it varies from family to family. The author notes that at her childhood dinner table, the parents did the talking and the kids kept to themselves. In the Foer family, no one ever asked “What did you do today?”; instead, the Foer father, “a lawyer who served on the board of the American Civil Liberties Union, led his children in debates about economic policy and civil rights issues, but with an open ear: a conversation about Reagan’s Star Wars policies might lead to a discussion about “why we couldn’t build a giant shield over the United States out of Legos.”

Motherhood is THE MOST IMPORTANT JOB IN THE WORLD (unless you are poor)

A brief addition to yesterday’s post, where I speculated that for all their blustering about how Ann Romney made a choice to stay home and raise her five boys and that’s a wonderful choice because motherhood is THE MOST IMPORTANT JOB IN THE WORLD and Democrats hate stay-at-home moms, Mitt Romney (and Republicans generally) only think you’re a stay-at-home mom if you’re white and wealthy and heterosexual: Well look at that.

The Power of Female Friendship

A truly excellent piece over at The Rumpus about female friends:

I was reminded of the Wrinklies, of my friends, of the ways in which they carry me, when I read A Train in Winter by Caroline Morehead, a remarkable book that tells the story of women French resistance fighters who were sent to Auschwitz and who survived by doing what women do: supporting, finding a way to love and nurture in situations marked by the absence of love, tenderness, sense, sanity, or even humanity. In a concentration camp they managed to make Christmas gifts out of string and sticks; they put on plays in their barracks; they supported the weaker women, often hiding them for roll call. They were “a team.”