RANT - Motherhood and sacrifice
Apropos of nothing aside from a great many articles on motherhood recently and women cooking for their children (deathfat!), or not being at home (unnatural!), or being at home (lazy!), or disciplining, or 'being kind' and all the rest...
There seems to be an eternal reservoir of extremely public rage ready to be directed at any mother who happens to also be a person at the same time. Someone who gets tired, or really must put the child in another room for a moment, who gets exhausted, who might be weepy, who finds the too-young-to-speak toddler that does NOT bite more pleasant to be around and so forth. Because apparently when women become mothers, they are required to be massive reservoirs of eternal selflessness that never need time out, as if that were anything close to healthy. As if that personality shift were anything other than what we might consider to be akin to sudden illness in a normal human being.
I am reminded of something that occurred a while back, where a friend of mine who had a bad birth experience was mocked at a party that I was at - mostly by men, I am going to add. What was relevant was that these men would never, ever experience having to give birth under poor circumstances. They would never know what it was like to know they could die in childbirth without intervention. This friend was proactive in asserting her rights. And these people thought that the emergency was hilarious, that it would have 'taught her a lesson'. How tiresome after all it was to listen to women discussing birth plans.
They were laughing about it, and they thought I would laugh too.
Ha ha, emergency medical intervention in a stressful and painful situation of great disappointment! How hilarious! Major abdominal operations are just like an ironic twist in a hipster comedy!
The level of rage I still feel, over a year later, about that incident has really not faded. I wanted, literally, to spit on them. I did snap at them, and I have no idea what was said by now, but when the inevitable 'just a joke, we didn't mean it' came up, I kept going.
Yeah, that was uncomfortable, did I ruin your fun...well GOOD.
How outright spiteful do you have to be? Why is someone expected to suffer everything without comment, like some beautiful maternal martyr who would 'do anything' as long as the baby was fine? Why aren't you allowed to feel bitter, or frightened, or even angry? Why are you supposed to be uninvolved in the process, apolitical about it, when there's so much that needs serious political work in Australian obstetrics? Why, when every single person here has been born, somehow, is birth supposed to be a niche issue? Why is it hard to understand that someone who has not given permission for a medical procedure might feel shocked and frightened when it is forcibly done by surprise while they are held down(*)?
I can understand sacrificing things for children, especially any I had (yeah, I'm selfish that way!), but I'm not particularly on board with sacrificing my feelings or intellect because the role says I have to behave in certain ways that just reek of all manner of disturbing weirdness (classism and working while parenting - parenting has always had different shapes with nannies or working parents etc, body-policing, sexism, ablism and assumptions and all the rest). I am going to have bad days! Sometimes you need to act out in order not to stick things in a blender!
But! One thing that I found amusing. The Age recently ran an article on 'working women's children aren't poorly fed because they still cook' or something to that effect. And most of the commenters were saying '...yes, it is possible men also know how to cook, you know, maybe he's cooking! Maybe they take turns! ASTONISHING, maybe they are PARTNERS!'
For what it's worth, my (male) partner recently took on a lot of the sort of advocacy work that is useful during my emergency hospital trip. And I am deeply glad that he insisted on telling the nurses that I underreport pain, because I do. I am embarrassed, still, to make a fuss. When it came to it, when I was sheet-white, I was still embarrassed that people would think badly of me, because I had the urge to moan.
And I really did need those drugs. Stuff hurt! I was not happy! And everyone was still very nice to me - if someone had been feeding me a line about 'Oh, you just have to accept this, Good Women(tm) do' I would have popped them one in the nose.
Fffffuuuuuuuuu as they say.
(*) This did not happen to my friend (as far as I know), but I know people it has happened to - who were not in any danger, who were having a perfectly normal birth. They just simply were not asked about inspections - things were done to them that they may well have consented to, if someone had only asked. The fact that complaining about this is seen as 'whining' can only contribute to the lack of recognition of birth-related post traumatic stress disorder in Australia.
There seems to be an eternal reservoir of extremely public rage ready to be directed at any mother who happens to also be a person at the same time. Someone who gets tired, or really must put the child in another room for a moment, who gets exhausted, who might be weepy, who finds the too-young-to-speak toddler that does NOT bite more pleasant to be around and so forth. Because apparently when women become mothers, they are required to be massive reservoirs of eternal selflessness that never need time out, as if that were anything close to healthy. As if that personality shift were anything other than what we might consider to be akin to sudden illness in a normal human being.
I am reminded of something that occurred a while back, where a friend of mine who had a bad birth experience was mocked at a party that I was at - mostly by men, I am going to add. What was relevant was that these men would never, ever experience having to give birth under poor circumstances. They would never know what it was like to know they could die in childbirth without intervention. This friend was proactive in asserting her rights. And these people thought that the emergency was hilarious, that it would have 'taught her a lesson'. How tiresome after all it was to listen to women discussing birth plans.
They were laughing about it, and they thought I would laugh too.
Ha ha, emergency medical intervention in a stressful and painful situation of great disappointment! How hilarious! Major abdominal operations are just like an ironic twist in a hipster comedy!
The level of rage I still feel, over a year later, about that incident has really not faded. I wanted, literally, to spit on them. I did snap at them, and I have no idea what was said by now, but when the inevitable 'just a joke, we didn't mean it' came up, I kept going.
Yeah, that was uncomfortable, did I ruin your fun...well GOOD.
How outright spiteful do you have to be? Why is someone expected to suffer everything without comment, like some beautiful maternal martyr who would 'do anything' as long as the baby was fine? Why aren't you allowed to feel bitter, or frightened, or even angry? Why are you supposed to be uninvolved in the process, apolitical about it, when there's so much that needs serious political work in Australian obstetrics? Why, when every single person here has been born, somehow, is birth supposed to be a niche issue? Why is it hard to understand that someone who has not given permission for a medical procedure might feel shocked and frightened when it is forcibly done by surprise while they are held down(*)?
I can understand sacrificing things for children, especially any I had (yeah, I'm selfish that way!), but I'm not particularly on board with sacrificing my feelings or intellect because the role says I have to behave in certain ways that just reek of all manner of disturbing weirdness (classism and working while parenting - parenting has always had different shapes with nannies or working parents etc, body-policing, sexism, ablism and assumptions and all the rest). I am going to have bad days! Sometimes you need to act out in order not to stick things in a blender!
But! One thing that I found amusing. The Age recently ran an article on 'working women's children aren't poorly fed because they still cook' or something to that effect. And most of the commenters were saying '...yes, it is possible men also know how to cook, you know, maybe he's cooking! Maybe they take turns! ASTONISHING, maybe they are PARTNERS!'
For what it's worth, my (male) partner recently took on a lot of the sort of advocacy work that is useful during my emergency hospital trip. And I am deeply glad that he insisted on telling the nurses that I underreport pain, because I do. I am embarrassed, still, to make a fuss. When it came to it, when I was sheet-white, I was still embarrassed that people would think badly of me, because I had the urge to moan.
And I really did need those drugs. Stuff hurt! I was not happy! And everyone was still very nice to me - if someone had been feeding me a line about 'Oh, you just have to accept this, Good Women(tm) do' I would have popped them one in the nose.
Fffffuuuuuuuuu as they say.
(*) This did not happen to my friend (as far as I know), but I know people it has happened to - who were not in any danger, who were having a perfectly normal birth. They just simply were not asked about inspections - things were done to them that they may well have consented to, if someone had only asked. The fact that complaining about this is seen as 'whining' can only contribute to the lack of recognition of birth-related post traumatic stress disorder in Australia.