Motherhood - more than baby buggies and rattles
Smug musings of privileged women don't help mothers struggling with family life.
I learned something last weekend. I learned that motherhood is a ''breeze'', a ''cinch''. That achieving work-life balance is ''a piece of cake''. Thank you, Jacinta Tynan. The Sky News presenter and columnist, who has ''an easy baby'', berated all of us ''whingeing'' mums in last week's Sunday Life. She is also ''blessed'' with ''a stimulating part-time job and good childcare'' - and she had paid maternity leave.
''Most mothers want to be mothers, longing for the day when we will hold our own baby in our arms,'' she writes. She spent a long time feathering the perfect nest and finding the perfect man (as she chronicles in her book, Good Man Hunting). Then, aged 39, she visited a fertility doctor, where she discovered she was already pregnant. No wonder she believes that ''soothing a crying baby who won't sleep for love nor money is a privilege, not a hardship''.
But her smug generalisations don't reflect everyone's experience of motherhood.
I was 22 when I found out I was pregnant, the week before I was due to leave my live-in partner and return to live interstate. We spent my pregnancy debating whether to give it another try. (We did; it failed.)
From the moment I was handed my baby boy, I was overwhelmed with an intoxicating blend of intense love and helpless terror, a combination that persisted as I struggled to adjust to my new life. A life that included my body becoming a functional object, lack of sleep, responsibility for another being's happiness and wellbeing, and a frightening lack of control.
For the first time since I was a teenager, I had no independent access to money outside a weekly housekeeping and pocket money allowance. Previously in love with my career, a typical day now meant breastfeeding on the couch eating Freddo frogs and watching television.
When a friend gave me Susan Maushart's The Mask of Motherhood, a whip-smart book that systematically exploded the many myths of happy mothering, I felt rescued. Maushart explained motherhood can be painful and crazy-making, but that doesn't mean you don't love your child. This permission to mourn my loss of self was also my gateway to slowly regaining it.
My sister found out she was pregnant weeks after she got engaged - just as she was embarking on a year of saving money to buy a house. She had started a new job and was conveniently fired during the three-month trial period. Her fiance's idea of helping was sitting his daughter on his lap while he watched Foxtel and my sister made dinner.
My sister-in-law fell pregnant on demand. She and my brother work at a bank with generous salaries and on-site childcare. She was devastated when her natural childbirth became a caesarean. The surgery left her in such pain that she had to sleep upright in the lounge room for weeks. And her high-maintenance daughter needed to be constantly held.
The women in my family widely differed (as women do) in our degrees of readiness for a baby and the difficulties we faced as new parents. None of us declared it ''easy'', yet we all madly love our children.
Tynan uses the stick of previous - apparently robotically happy - generations to beat us about the head. Apparently, we ''never heard a peep'' out of our mothers and grandmothers ''about mucking in to double the kids and double the workload''. Which makes me laugh. My mother worked full-time and had five children, frantically ''doing it all'' with little help from my father. And she complained all the time - rightly so.
For the record, my grandmother (who had six kids and worked) tells my generation that we shouldn't accept anything less than an equal partnership with our children's fathers. And even when that's what everyone honestly desires, it takes hard work and constant negotiation.
What's so good about ''easy'' anyway? Tynan says previous generations ''mostly didn't work'' and ''appreciated that being a mum was one of the better things in life''. These would be the women Betty Friedan described in The Feminine Mystique (1963) as suffering ''the problem that had no name'' - a creeping dissatisfaction with motherhood and domesticity as their primary identity. Naming that unnameable problem was the first step to the long (ongoing) process of finding a solution.
Legitimate ''whingeing'' can have positive effects. It can lead to change. The whingeing of second-wave feminists such as Friedan meant women no longer felt pressured to accept motherhood as their natural primary role. They could fight to make it fit with other roles, like careers. We're still working out exactly what that means, and working to make sure more women have access to the privileges that Jacinta Tynan (ironically) takes for granted: stimulating part-time work, good childcare, paid maternity leave, relationships that work. Until we do, we should keep on whingeing.
Jo Case is a mother of one and associate editor of Kill Your Darlings.
Source: The Age
