Touch of a tiny hand reminds us what's missing from the motherhood debate

The Sydney Morning Herald ^ | May 13 2003 | Anne Manne

[presidio9]

A friend weighed motherhood up carefully in a cost-benefit analysis, assessing the pros and cons. There were a lot of cons: halting the smooth progress in her career, the decent income, the freedom to live as she pleased. She decided motherhood was irrational.

That night, confident her decision was right, she waited in a supermarket queue. A toddler, somehow detached from her mother, got all those women's legs mixed up. With that trusting unconsciousness of a child, she slipped her little hand around my friend's leg, and nestled into her. Suddenly, the matter was not quite so clear. She decided she would have a baby.

Recently Naomi Wolf informed us of the horrors of childbirth and motherhood. Wolf says my friend's decision is likely to be the start of a nightmare from which she may never awake, or at least until we pull the right policy levers to soften the clash between work and family. Yet for all the importance of the work-family issue (I have spent a lot of my working life thinking about that) as a sole filter through which we now view motherhood, there is something here both false and slightly tedious.

In its cool language - "care" rather than love, "work/family balance", "quality child care" - meaning is flattened and bleached out. Such language reminds me of those old, well-meaning sex manuals which surmounted our Puritan heritage by depicting sex as a bodily function, all jolly and healthy, even medicinal, like a glass of water or a vigorous hike in the woods.

What was missing in such texts was the seething heat and pleasure and murk of it all, the sheer power of sexual desire to intoxicate us, or even blast our lives completely off course.

And what is missing in the new discussion about balancing work and family is honest acknowledgement of how a life might be changed by a quite different kind of passion - like the capsizing of my friend's reasoned cost-benefit analysis by one small, warm hand.

Yet even the term "working motherhood" can sound strained, as if, as Paul Keating once said of "practical reconciliation," the adjective is intended as an anti-matter particle intended to cancel out the power of the noun.

Yet mother love, as Helen Garner once wrote of Eros, "mocks our fantasy that we can nail life down and control it" and is "as far beyond our attempts to regulate it as sunshine is, or a cyclone".

That is why at a recent dinner, the high-achieving women present all admitted regret over not having more children, why one academic friend spent more of her sabbatical snuggled up in bed reading to her five-year-old than in the library, and why Garner herself described her relationship with her adult daughter as "just the most precious thing".

Children teach a different kind of consciousness to the one most celebrated in our society - the free, untrammelled, achieving self.

Children call out the best in us, requiring us to put our energies on behalf of others, and forcing us to think most deeply about what we value. And from "the ramshackle life of a mother", as Joanna Murray Smith once expressed it, a strong sense of self may emerge.

Andrew Denton asked Wolf if the reason we might dissemble on the horrors of childbirth might be to protect our loved ones. Such reticence may partly be to protect children from the knowledge that they had come into being alongside so much pain. Not because we take delight in duping women, but rather, to dwell too much upon the grisliness of birth would obscure the deeper truth of our gratitude for their existence.

[Bigg Red]

Proud to be a mother bump

[mvpel]

Index ping.

[Mr. K]

Does Naomi Wolf have any kids? She could not write such stuff if she did.

[ChemistCat]

Everything she says against motherhood is true. You can't have a bright half without a dark half, can you?

On the whole, on the balance, life without children would be empty and bleak for me. Sometimes I need industrial grade headache relief, though. Anyone who can see only one side of it probably shouldn't have any children at all. Sometimes they are really hard to tolerate, unless you have a neural network as numb as an oyster's.

They come into the world squawling, uncooperative--and spend the next several years thinking of inventive new ways to try to kill themselves while pinning it on you. Motherhood is sometimes very much like combat. There are thousands of ways to raise a child, and your neighbors will be using all the worst ones, while watching you like a hawk for signs that you SPANK or DISCIPLINE yours. The state will try to force you to do things with your children you probably wouldn't approve if it wasn't mandatory. (Public schools come to mind. Vaccination schedules. The list goes on and on.)

And the little beasts have this stubborn ability to develop their own personalities early, and sometimes despite the best parenting possible, will go astray and bring you incredible pain, or, through no fault of anyone's, something awful will happen to all their bright promise, breaking your heart more painfully than anything else in the world. Look at a children's cancer ward. If you don't trust God enough to risk that....

If you aren't up for all that, stay childless, because that warm snuggly trusting bundle is the throw of the dice from colick, breaking your window, throwing your wallet in the toilet, eating the contents of its diaper...flunking ninth grade, driving and wrecking your car...graduating with honors....getting happily married and giving you grandchildren!

You don't have a baby. You have a billion irritating probabilities and a handful of bright, fragile promises.

[hunyb]

"eating the contents of its diaper"

O Please NO!!!
i am 7 weeks along, i think i could handle all of the other things you wrote about, except this one! i could hardly stomach my dog doing this, but a child??? dear me....

[MHGinTN]

It is good advice to 'stay childless', depending on the means to achieve that. Abortion is not an acceptable means to remain childless, but too many women have been sold the lie that 'it isn't a full human being yet, not as long as it is still in your body'.

[valkyrieanne]

Good post. One reason women wind up naggy, discontented feminists is because they believed the marketing and advertising themselves, that in order to be happy they had to have "the perfect baby," the perfect child, the perfect marriage, etc.

It doesn't have to be perfect. The point is that you *trust.* But you're not guaranteed perfection. As long as a woman understands it, she can handle what comes along. Mostly.

[katnip]

Believe it or not, there are many things you will stomach quite well after you become a Mommy.

Don't worry, your baby will be beautiful and perfect in every way.

[hunyb]

you're sweet to say!!!
Thank you! :)

[netmilsmom]

ping!

[ChemistCat]

You are going to prove to yourself that you're far tougher than you think you are. :-) Congratulations!

Actually none of my children actually ate the contents, but one of them did do a major art project of sorts. Following in my footsteps--I'm said to have done the same thing. Then there was the time my youngest got into my very expensive prescription toothpaste. The time my oldest jumped into a near-frozen lake in January was lots scarier--I had no idea he could fit through a fence like that. The same kid got himself lost at a public swimming pool complex when he was 2 (a case of too many grownups in charge, and everyone thought he was with someone else.) My second one wandered off at a mall once when another blonde-haired tyke with the same coat took her place on the play equipment without my noticing the switch. It's really a wonder any of them survive. I'm told the teenage years are going to be just as crazy as the toddler years were!

But when they hand you that new little life and you get past the "You're kidding, it's really mine? Mine? I'm trusted with THIS?" feeling, you will feel more love for your baby than you've ever felt for anything or anybody, and you will be willing to go through all and forgive all. And you'll be able to clean up messes you never imagined any human being could cause...!

Final advice: don't even buy one of those bath seats or baby bath tubs. Two parents and a grownup bathtub is the way to go. Warm, safe, comforting. One out of the tub with a towel, one in the tub with baby soap. You don't need most of the high-priced junk they're going to be trying to sell you! You don't even need a single jar of Gerber to raise a healthy, happy baby. :-)

[Diva Betsy Ross]

congrats. I have two boys. One five, and one who is almost one. My second is the hard one. He has cried and fussed since he was born. He never sleeps, he has always been very restless. While pregnant I would double over in pain because of the rolling. I did child birth twice with no med except for being induced. Both of my guys have huge heads. They get it from their Mom.

I would do it all again over and over if I could, and I would not change a thing about it. You will never know such pain as when you have a child, and it will be bittersweet because you will never know such glorious love either. Having a child does not change your life, it gives you life. Having a child gives you happiness you could never understand until, like you, a person holds small ,restless, joyful, life in their womb, or in their hands.

These women who think it is a choice whether to have a career or have a baby are nuts. It is not a choice, it is a baby.

My best advice to you is to stay away from women at any and all gatherings. Women have a way of making childbirth sound so horrible and I ahve seen amny women who searh out the pregnant ones to tell their scary tqales to . It is painful, but you will think it all worth it when you look at that babe and know his/her life is forever interwoven with yours. It will take your breath away if you let. The nay sayers who think it is a choice will never get it anyway. Best of luck to you.

[hunyb]

Thank you Chemist! I am getting mighty excited!! :)

[hunyb]

Thank you! :)

[Tax-chick]

When I was expecting my oldest daughter, ONLY 13 years ago, a friend told me that an incredible chemical change occurs during delivery, so that nothing your own baby ever does will make you throw up!

13 years and 6 babies later, I have to say this is true, even when I'm pregnant :-). I get sick when the cat throws up, but not when the babies have all kinds of ... er, productions.

It's cool, you'll handle it. I lost a baby last month. That was harder than the whole rest of my life as a mother.

[dyed_in_the_wool]

Got home late tonight. Just as the wife was putting the little one (11.5 months) to bed.
Nuggled into mommy, heading to the crib, she spotted me, leaned over, and reached out to hug me.
I patted her and kissed her head and she nuggled right back into mommy.
Just blows you away.