Mothers For Women’s Lib

I was really excited when, upon emailing Debs about writing for this blog, she said she’d had me in mind when she set it up. Those of us who are feminists and mothers are in a unique position, especially those of us raising boys. My son Orion is two years and nine months old. He is the most important person in my life, as well he should be – but how does one reconcile a feminist lifestyle with raising a boychild in a patriarchal society?

Shirley Chisholm said that the emotional, sexual, and psychological stereotyping of females begins when the doctor says, “It’s a girl.” This is true also for the emotional, sexual and psychological stereotyping of boys, and it can be just as harmful if not more, to the women’s movement and the fight for women’s liberation. On the day my son was born I was in denial that I was in labour; I entered the maternity centre with no clothing or nappies for my impending child. He was a big baby, at 9lb 10oz there was very little in the centre’s emergency wardrobe that would fit him. I didn’t want to cover his skin, to a new mother, newborn skin is heaven. But they told me he would become cold, and finally found something which would fit him. It was a Disney sleepsuit, featuring a motif of that famous bear Winnie-the-Pooh, along with pink collar and cuffs and a selection of pink and lilac flowers and butterflies. I thought he looked adorable. Everybody else laughed, and various family members swung into action to get some ‘proper boy clothes’ for him.

At the time of course I was exhausted and I didn’t think much of it. Now though I wonder why they laughed. I wonder why it was so important to clothe my newborn son in something, anything, other than pink. At only a few hours old he couldn’t care less what he was wearing, or about anything else at all other than that my breast stayed within reach of his face. Newborns are the only human beings in this society who not only don’t know about the gender dichotomy, but they don’t care either. It is not until later that it dawns on us that what we have between our legs is supposed to dictate the way we appear, speak and behave. I looked down at my son, half a day old, milk-drunk and sleeping peacefully in his clear plastic cot and I have to admit that neither of us could have imagined just how much his penis would affect both the way he was expected to behave and the way I was expected to treat him.

Now he is nearly three. He is gaining control of his language and his bodily functions with alarming rapidity, and every day he surprises me with something new he has learned. He had a major accident when he was a few months old which delays his development slightly, but even with that he is basically doing everything a normal toddler is supposed to do. Why then, does it seem that every action of a child seems to have a gender? My son loves cars and trains. Not a day goes by where I don’t nearly break my neck in an unintentional attempt to rollerskate across the room with Thomas the Tank Engine stuck under my foot. We have more cars on our living room floor than appear at the local Honda showroom. Orion could stand at the bus stop watching cars and buses and lorries go by for hours and not get bored. The kid likes movement, he likes things which go ‘brum’ and ‘zoom’ and ‘beep beep’. Things like that are cool when you’re nearly three. Of course, when people see him playing with his cars, telling me about vehicle sounds or getting excited about seeing the train pull in at our local station, they invariable comment on what a ‘proper little boy’ he is. Likewise when they see him bouncing around the playground like a boy possessed, kicking a football around the basketball court or when I tell them about his crazy, dynamic, unstoppable little personality. These things are never put down to healthful energy, or his age, or my parenting styles. They are all universally shoved into this little box of ‘boyness’.

On the flipside of the coin, my son has approximately four million stuffed toys, dolls and other approximations of people and animals. He has a child-sized pushchair, plastic bowls and spoons and demands I create chairs and tables out of Sticklebricks for him so he can sit them down and feed them dinner. He likes to cuddle ‘Baby’, a little doll I bought him after seeing how he fell in love with a baby doll at one of his occupational therapy sessions, and pesters me for baby wipes so he can clean its face after ‘breakfast’. He likes to shove as many cuddly toys as possible into the pushchair, then bimble down the road beside me as we walk to the supermarket, waxing lyrical the for the whole journey about where we are going, telling his stuffed friends about what he can see, and stopping every few minutes to lean down and plant a squishy kiss upon an inanimate furry nose or cheek. I had some workers in my house a few months ago, measuring my fireplaces so they could be covered. Orion was pootling around the house playing ‘shops’; he had one of my cotton carrier bags over his shoulder and was pushing ‘Kangaroo’ (can you see how original we are with cuddly toy names around here?) around in the pushchair. He pushed it into the lounge, and the workman looked up at me and asked if Orion was a boy or a girl. I figured well, he has massive dark eyes and rosebud lips, easy mistake to make, and told him Orion was a boy. He immediately turned to my son and said “Well then you don’t want to be playing with that, that’s a girl’s toy!”

I was a bit dumbstruck to be honest. This total stranger walked into my house and basically dictated to my son what was acceptable and unacceptable for him to play with, based solely on his genitalia. I rallied a bit and said “Nah, you love looking after your babies and friends don’t you Orion?” and he looked at me, a little confused, and said “Yes…” and then looked at the workman, almost asking for his approval. My son, my beautiful son, who is so little and innocent, is at an age where he is eager to please everybody, especially adults. He yearns for approval and validation. Nobody should ever feel invalidated, and my little boy was made to feel wrong by a man he had never met before. That man could have kept his mouth shut, but for some reason the world and his dog think they have a right to comment on women’s parenting and to give uneducated, unsolicited advice.

I have a whole lot more to say on this particular subject but if I carry on here I’ll end up with nothing to write in further entries. With a son Orion’s age I see sexism every day, not just perpetrated against me as a woman and a mother, but also against my son who is gradually becoming the person he is destined to be and is fighting against ‘well-meaning’ idiots left, right and centre who want him to restrict certain parts of his unique personality because they are too ‘female’ while also praising other parts because they are ‘male enough’. To a toddler this is all very confusing, and it pains me to see it happening every single day. Being a feminist and a mother is a hard job, and sometimes it feels like I’m just fighting one battle after another. I am thankful that now I have a forum to share those battles and to get feedback and discuss them with others in similar positions. Thanks for your time.

This post was originally written by Debi.

I am going to try and write about something which is very difficult for me to do, as I am still in the midst of it and am not fully recovered yet. I feel it is very important to write about it as it is a subject that I think is not talked about nearly enough, and one which also brings much undeserved shame on the women who sufferer it. I’m sorry if the subject does not seem all that relevant to feminism, but I can assure you, as a feminist and a mother, that it is! This will probably be broken up over several posts, as it is hard for me to do and I can only see me being able to tackle it a bit at a time. The subject is post-natal depression.

There are many factors which I believe contributed to my suffering post-natal depression. We wanted children for a long time (a subject for another post sometime – is it somehow wrong for feminists to have such a strong maternal instinct?) – but had trouble conceiving. I had to have several procedures to see what was wrong, and eventually had a myomectomy, which is major surgery where fibroids are removed from the uterus. The seriousness of the operation, and the recovery time etc are roughly the same as for a hysterectomy. They removed several large fibroids (the biggest was 17 cm across!), leaving behind several more which are still there and will continue to grow whilst I am of reproductive age (for those who don’t know, a fibroid is a benign tumour that grows in or attached to the wall of the uterus). At this time we had been actively “trying for a baby” (I hate that phrase!) for 5 years. After the operation my consultant said the next stage would be to refer us to another department of the hospital for IVF treatment. (Again, another subject for another post – the maze that is IVF and reproductive technologies from a feminist perspective). It was 3 months after the operation, and 2 weeks before our appointment with the IVF clinic when I found out I was pregnant. I had the wonderful task of ringing the hospital and telling them we no longer needed the appointment; our consultant was delighted.

All my life I have wanted children, and all my life I have wanted the experience of having those children to be as natural as possible. I wanted a home birth, no drugs, the whole shebang. Because of my peculiar anatomy, and my previous surgery, the pregnancy counted as “high risk” and that was not to be. However, right up until the 38th week I was holding out for a home birth, as no-one could seem to make up their minds whether I could have one or not. Throughout the pregnancy I had appointments at the hospital at least once a month, and they seemed to be telling me something different every time. At 38 weeks, the (female) doctor did a rushed and painful internal exam and proclaimed abruptly, “I’m booking you in for a Cesarean next week.” I asked her why, and she seemed shocked at the question, and gave the impression she was far too busy and important to bother answering it. So, the Cesarean was booked, and I was devastated.

I think that this, coupled with the fact we had had to move house when I was 7 months pregnant, and we could not afford a removal van, so I (being the only driver in the relationship) had to drive the van back and forth for a week with all our worldly goods, resulting in exhaustion and stress, contributed to my actually being depressed before our son was even born. I don’t think I realised I was depressed at the time, though.

So, not only was I not to have a home birth, but I was not even going to experience going into labour, and, because they had spaces on the Wednesday and the Thursday of my 39th week, we were given the strange task of deciding when our son’s birthday would be, as they said it was up to us whether we went for the Wednesday or the Thursday! We went for the Thursday because, as it happens, every member of my immediate family has been born on a Thursday, so it seemed a shame to break the tradition.

I have read in various places that a common cause of post-natal depression is when the mother has unrealistic expectations of what motherhood will be like. I think I fall into that category, although at the time I was convinced I was being very realistic about what it would be like. I was bitterly disappointed (and still am) by the hospitalised/medicalised nature of the entire pregnancy and birth, and equally disappointed by the pregnancy itself. I did not enjoy being pregnant one bit, and feel I was sold a false idea of what pregnancy is like by the magazines and books I was reading. I hated it. Pregnancy for me was not the blissful mother earth awakening I had always dreamed it would be; it was painful and uncomfortable, I felt sick half the time, the other half I felt faint, I constantly needed to pee, I was always too hot, I couldn’t sleep, I couldn’t move properly and, far from being the natural non-medical experience I yearned for, I was summoned to the hospital virtually every other week, and ended up ‘giving birth’ there, flat on my back, and with no sensation at all from my shoulders down. I know it was a good thing I had a Cesarean, because my son would never had got out the normal way (his way was blocked by fibroids) and the procedure most certainly saved his life. Even having a Cesarean wasn’t straight-forward – what should have been a 40 to 45 minute procedure took 2 hours and 2 blood transfusions. But even knowing this, somehow psychologically I feel damaged by that operation. It’s hard to explain. My idea of giving birth had swung so far from the active home birth I had always envisioned, to being the exact opposite, I think actually I might have been in shock from it all.

And if I wasn’t in shock from that, I certainly was once I had a baby to look after! I did. not. know. what. the. hell. to. do. I worked it out, obviously, we all do, you have to, but nothing, and I mean nothing can prepare you for that first week. And I have also found it is impossible to adequately describe it to anyone who has not experienced it. We took to breastfeeding quite easily, but it soon deteriorated, I don’t know why, until day 8 when I finally gave up. I was devastated about that. I felt like the worst mother ever, like I had abandoned him to the wolves or something. He was more than happy with his bottle, but somehow that still didn’t make me feel any better. He frequently got a mouthful of blood instead of milk because my nipples were so cracked, so he probably much preferred the bottle! Sometimes when he was feeding it felt just as though someone was slicing into me with razor blades – and I would cry in pain all the way through every feed. That is why I gave it up. But then you have the guilt. Nobody tells you about the guilt of motherhood (or is it just the guilt of post-natal depression? I don’t know because I have yet to experience motherhood without the depression). Guilt about everything, every time he cries, every feed that’s 5 minutes late, every time people visit and you haven’t dusted, every damn thing turns into something to feel guilty about. And the books! Those bloody baby books. Do not read them, that’s my best advice. All mine had gone in the bin by the time my son was 6 months old, they were making me feel so inadequate, and, well, humiliated, because I wasn’t the Perfect Mother.

Another contributing factor: I had hoped my husband would be something like an ‘equal partner’ in this new child-raising job we both had, but no, it very quickly became apparent it was all down to me. My husband even had trouble giving our son a bottle, I’m not sure why, so he only ever did that twice because he said he found it too difficult (?) – so that left me everything on my own despite having a partner.

This post is getting a bit long now, so I’m going to break here, and come back with “Part 2″ a bit later, when I will attempt to wade straight into the post-natal depression part (as opposed to the “baby blues” whatever they are).

This post was originally written by Debi.

Hi everyone

Thanks for stopping by, I’m glad you found this site. It is a site dedicated to feminist mums, and I would love it if it could become an international site for feminist mums to discuss matters which are important to them.

Some of you may know me as Debs, I run the Burning Times blog among other things, and I am also the mother of a dear little nearly-two-year-old boy, who we plan to home educate. In the two years since having our son, it has become more and more obvious to me that being a feminist mum often means having quite a different viewpoint on things to other feminists. I am also painfully aware sometimes that the fact that I am a mother means my opinion is not taken seriously, or even that I have no right to an opinion at all, which of course is complete rubbish. On the other side of the coin, I have sometimes got the impression that, because I am a mother, I am supposed to suddenly be an expert on certain aspects of being female and/or a feminist, which again is total rubbish.

I have been a feminist for as long as I can remember, yet only became a mother at the age of 34. Becoming a mother did change me, I think it changes everyone, but I am still a feminist, and indeed I seem to feel more strongly and want to take more action about feminist matters than before I had my son. There is a sense of urgency that was not present before. This blog will hopefully become a place for feminist mothers to discuss, well, whatever they want to really! But naturally the conversation will lean more towards motherhood, how we raise our children as feminists, and how motherhood may or may not effect our feminism. Also, there are specific feminist issues, the use of reproductive technologies for example, which might be of particular interest to feminist mums, that we can talk about.

I have often wanted to discuss these matters before; how, as a radical feminist, do I raise a boy in this world? Why do I still want more children even though I know I can’t have them, and *apperently* having children is a very un-feminist thing to do? etc, but I have felt that I cannot bring these subjects up on my own blog, as the subject of motherhood is something that naturally only pertains to those who are mothers, and thus can be alienating to those who are not mothers.

I would also like to make it clear that this space is open to those women who are pregnant, and thus about to become mothers, aswell as those of us who are already there. Also, naturally, adoptive and foster feminist mothers are really welcome too!

I would hate for this blog to be just me talking and others commenting – so I would like to throw it wide open for other feminist mums to contribute as and when they would like to, and to that end all feminist mums are invited to become authors on this blog – I will add you on the author list so that you can post directly – so please if you want to contribute, comment on this post or email me, and I’ll see to the tech side, and you can get talking about feminist motherhood as soon as you like! My email is burningtimes1645@yahoo.co.uk

I’m really excited about this blog, and I hope you are too! Already I can think of several topics for discussion, so don’t forget to let me know if you want to contribute (of course you can always just contribute through the comments if you do not want to actually be an author) and we’ll get the ball rolling!

Looking forward to hearing from you all.

In sisterhood

Debi Crow xx

PS: the title of the blog is totally up for discussion, if you don’t like it let me know and don’t be shy about suggesting alternatives – it’s just the best I could come up with this morning!