What we can tell you about the Slacker Mum Movement after two glasses of wine

This month my feminist mothers’ group discussed the Slacker Mum Movement or Mothers Who Drink. You know, like this article from The New York Times about mothers’ cocktail hour, and these books currently making a big splash in the pond of parenting (normally so dominated by Alpha Mother reading material)? Sippy Cups Are Not For Chardonnay, Naptime is the New Happy Hour, Daddy Needs a Drink, I Was a Really Good Mom Before I Had Kids, The Three-Martini Playdate, and the most recent, Dirty Little Secrets From Otherwise Perfect Moms.

Our mothers’ group always meets of an evening, over a glass of wine and sans children, so we’re totally qualified to review this movement and the real question is why it has taken us so long to get to this particular topic. It is no surprise then that we found many aspects of the Slacker Mum Movement extremely freeing, after all, a number of us are pretty much card-carrying Slacker Mums (unfortunately I’m still a little nerdy but I’ve got some runs on the board). However, we noted two less favourable features of the movement during our discussion - its willingness to embrace liberation without even mentioning feminism, and its classism. Almost certainly, a mother from a low socio-economic group wouldn’t get away with a book of this kind of humour, she’d risk being seen as neglectful rather than endearingly chaotic - imagine if the mothers in that New York Times article were drinking bourbon and cokes instead of Cavit pinot grigio, would this be seen as the emergence of a trend in sophisticated motherhood?

Our group then moved along and talked about the gift of the Slacker Mum trend - the way it reduces our expectations of motherhood, and the breathing room it gives us all to be less than perfect. As we sipped our wine we wondered if mothers really were judging one another so much or if it just felt that way in our weakest moments. Well. I can say, following our own confessions of judgementalness that yes, we are judging one another, quite a bit. The snottiness of your children’s noses, the groceries in your shopping trolley, and the way you’ve taught your children sex education are all being noticed. 

And then we moved on to our dirtiest little secrets of motherhood.

Our group’s confessions took a decidedly darker turn than those generally expressed in books like Dirty Little Secrets From Otherwise Perfect Moms - this again was another beef we had with the Slacker Mums Movement. The false slackness, the confession that actually makes you, the confessor look good, the confession that through its lightness makes everyone else feel bad. In our group we were having none of that. I’m not going to repeat the melt-down type confessions because they seem too personal to discuss outside the group but what follows are a couple of the more endearing moments of slackness. Among us was the mother who turns the music up in her car to uncomfortably high volumes when her children are fighting to drown them out, but mostly to antagonise them (the speakers are in the back seat of the car and they hate her music). The mother who felt so insecure about the wealth of the other mothers at a children’s birthday party that she got drunk on the expensive champagne in front of the other parents and had to take her child and herself home in a taxi.  And the mother who gave a rather furious time-out to her screaming toddler before realising that she’d completely forgotten to feed her all morning. When we say slack, we mean it.

Bask in your relative glory or lighten the load and ’fess up here (don’t forget to make your comment anonymous). If you’re too shy here then you can try this one instead.     

Let’s get something straight about maternity leave

A person called Ellie left a comment this week on a previous post of mine calling for universal paid maternity leave in Australia. Ellie has raised some questions, and she’s done so politely, so it’s nothing personal against her but one of her points is a particular irritant of mine and I’ve seen this stuff come up elsewhere on the net so I’ve decided to tackle this as a post.

Here is Ellie’s comment:

I think the national maternity scheme for Australia is a great idea, but it needs to be worked out differently. It does seem unfair to make all workers pay for this as many may not be able to have children and some also decide (for whatever reasons) NOT to have children. This type of scheme would be ignoring this minority, taking money that they will not benefit from later. Maybe one idea to improve this is to offer people that aren’t having children a few months of general paid leave (sort of like long service leave). Then if people who have taken this leave ever change their minds and have children, they will not get the offer of this maternity scheme and need to do it on their own. Does this suggestion make it a fairer scheme for everyone? What are your thoughts?

Thanks for your comment Ellie. Here are my thoughts.

Maternity leave is not a holiday - it is paid leave to physically and mentally recover from an extremely taxing biological experience - childbirth, as well as time to establish a bond with the baby. Don’t underestimate the second of these. The baby’s very life depends on its bond with the primary care giver (in most cases a mother). It is essential for the physical and psychological health of the baby (and indeed the adult it will become one day) that it has a secure bond with its mother (primary care giver). We all have a vested interest in this outcome because we have to share our planet, if not our neighborhood with them. As I’ve said previously, it is women and only women (or men like Thomas Beatie) who can give birth and (generally speaking) provide the baby’s first nurturing. It is women, almost exclusively who suffer the loss of income and workplace entitlements associated with our species’ reproduction.    

It is long past time that Australia (and the United States of America) joined the rest of the world (or at least the OECD countries) and finally established a universal paid maternity leave scheme. It won’t send our economy broke, at least it hasn’t sent Great Britain or Iran broke yet. Paid maternity leave is already paid to some mothers, I was one of them. But it is the better paid and higher qualified mothers who are currently more likely to have a job with paid maternity leave entitlements. Poorer working women are usually left out. This is not fair. All women deserve the opportunity to take at least a couple of weeks from work to recover from childbirth and establish themselves with their baby. It is grossly exploitative of women to do anything else.

Paid maternity leave is about time to recover from a birth and establish care with an infant. In spite of popular mythology, birth is not generally an easy task and there are few paid jobs in this country which could be performed safely by a woman who, for instance, has just had a cesarean (for starters they’re usually on some serious pain medication, and they can’t drive a car or lift anything either), or who is coping with an infection following her episiotomy (she will consequently have difficult sitting or walking on top of feeling very ill). Sick leave is not holiday pay and neither is maternity leave. The failure to provide maternity leave stems from two wrongs. First, we have an out-dated and sexist view of women as financially provided for by a bread-winning male partner. And yet the economy is dependent on its female labour force, and we, the workforce face living costs which increasingly necessitate two income households. Second, women’s work is not valued in our patriarchal culture and we’re not used to compensating it. Women’s lives are ‘the other’, they are not the dominant life cycle around which our economy is structured. If they were we wouldn’t have long service leave which rewards a male life cycle of uninterrupted working years. Because women’s lives are an exception to the rule, an after thought, a common-place, natural occurrence like childbirth is either over-looked or treated as an extravagance in the workplace.      

Women who aren’t in the workforce don’t get maternity leave and yet they still face costs associated with raising a new child. This is NOT an argument against paid maternity leave. Means tested assistance should be provided to all families who really need financial support. Sick leave entitlements aren’t paid to people who aren’t in the workforce either, but this doesn’t make sick leave entitlements any less legitimate. 

Now to the heart of Ellie’s comments. Some of us may never have a baby and therefore never directly benefit from that tiny portion of our taxes that has gone towards a maternity leave scheme. Some of us may never be seriously injured at work and use the workers compensation scheme either, and some of us rarely even use sick leave. Is this fair? Getting closer to home, what about carersleave? Some of us won’t ever use carers leave, but you know, those of us who never have to be responsible for taking our father to his Alzheimer’s appointments, and who never have to sit at home tending to twin seven year olds exploding from either end with gastroenteritis could maybe think of ourselves as lucky rather than missing out on some entitlement. Because this leave, like maternity leave, is NOT a holiday.

We live in a society where we contribute a certain amount of our incomes towards a pool of money which can be used to provide big expensive services and infrastructure that we could not possibly provide for ourselves as individuals. Because we live in a society made up of lots of different people and not just clones of ourselves needs vary, and some of the stuff our taxes contribute to won’t be used directly by us. That’s ok, because this risk is shared by everyone in society. And while we’re worrying about the accounting, keep in mind that you will need to work a great many years to pay back your own use of the system - your health care, schooling, policing, road use, enjoyment of parks etc etc.

Babies are not lifestyle choices, even though the marketing of baby products sometimes indicates this. Babies are not even real choices (see here and here for a good discussion of what I mean). A lot of pressure is put on women to back away from pursuing paid maternity leave. You’ll be told that the economy will suffer, that businesses will go broke, and that it will undermine the goodwill towards women in the workforce. You may also be told that you’re selfish and greedy for wanting paid maternity leave. Rubbish, these are the same arguments that were used against the women before us who fought for equal pay for equal work. Paid maternity leave is not only increasingly necessary, it is just plain fair. Mother love alone won’t buy the food and pay the electricity bill. We need to keep the support up for the Sex Discrimination Commissioner, Elizabeth Broderick in her campaign for, as a minimum, a government-funded 14 week paid maternity leave scheme paid with two weeks paid paternity leave, at the level of the federal minimum wage.

P.S. I lost my first shot at this post (thanks WordPress) and I have forgotten some of my points. I may revisit this post over the next day or so and add to it as I remember things.   

 

The only time changing your surname after marriage gets complicated

I collect stories on the approaches taken by feminists to their surnames when they get married and/or have children, so here’s another interesting one. Feminist or is Bijon just a way cooler name than Buday?

 

A music snob reviews a children’s music CD/DVD

That Baby DVD and That Baby CD are music products from OyBaby aimed at 0-5 year olds and they are  available from their website. This is a review written by blue milk for MotherTalk.

Sweetness and flight

Photo: Crashed out asleep, still wearing her bumble bee wings.

I couldn’t wait for Lauca to talk, to be able to express herself. One of the things I was waiting for was the “I love you’s”. I knew they’d be sweet, but I had no idea just how sweet. Achingly sweet. Impossibly sweet. Like an extraordinarily swift and intense opiate high. Straight to the heart.  

Mum, you are a beautiful, beautiful, beautiful Mummy. You are so lovely Mummy. You are the best Mummy in the whole world. I love you so, so, so much. I love you eleven years old. Mummy, how much do you love me, eleven years old?

I am addicted to this sweetness. My teeth may rot and fall out. And I love that eleven years seems like eternity to a three year old.

 

White feminists have lunch

This year I was a guest at an International Women’s Day lunch. A government Minister with portfolio responsibilities for women’s policy hosted the event. There was something amiss at the lunch. I gave some thought to writing about it at the time but being an invited guest I felt uncomfortable with biting the hand that fed me. Lately I’ve wondered if something else was holding me back. International Women’s Day events are heart-warming, joyful occasions in the feminist calendar. Was I feeling bound by some kind of loyalty, a duty to fellow white feminists not to criticise the event? 

I’ve asked myself this question after reading my way through the chasm of anger and sadness that is currently splitting on-line feminism. A divide triggered by racism. Thinking about this split has led me to consider what my feminism has done for a black woman lately? Not an awful lot. Even though there is much to say, I write about Indigenous Australian issues on my feminist blog occasionally, at best. The reasons are varied but among them must be some apathy. So, I am writing this post for The Angry Black Woman’s Carnival of Allies. 

Where self-identified allies write to other people like themselves about why this oppression and prejudice is wrong. Why they are allies. Why the usual excuses are not good enough. I figure allies probably know full well all the many and various arguments people throw up to make prejudice and oppression okay. Things that someone on the other side of the fence may not hear. Address those things and more besides.

I’ve decided to hold that lunch up to the same scrutiny I give to the other issues I discuss on this blog. I’m questioning my own and other feminists’ silence in the room that day. The lunch…   

As is the custom, the lunch was accompanied by a speech from our host, the Minister. Having written a Ministerial speech or two myself in a previous life, I can usually detect the key points and the filler pretty quickly. The Minister wanted us to celebrate our achievements as women on this special day but she also wanted us to acknowledge her government’s work in this area. So she told us we’d made it, that in this generation gender inequality was finally over. The women in this room now have a wealth of opportunities and the freedom to pursue them. For example, she pointed to the growing number of women elected to Australian parliaments. I hate this kind of sentiment. If we’re so equal then why are we celebrating anything less than 50 per cent female representation in parliament? Why do we still have record levels of domestic violence in our homes and sexual harassment in our workplaces? Why eating disorders, the sexualisation of little girls, the absence of carer rights, rape-blaming, the low number of female protagonists in films and books, female slut shaming, the rampant pinkification of products, the terrorising of prostitutes, the failure to introduce universal paid maternity leave in Australia (and the United States), the persistence of gender pay differences, single mother hating, teen mother hating, the criminalising of abortion etc etc? 

I thought the Minister had redeemed herself when she explained that while we in this room had achieved equality, some women in this country had not. Some women had been left behind - the women in remote Aboriginal communities she explained, were not enjoying the same opportunities. A few missteps on the speech-writers part I thought, but now I see where you’re trying to go. Aboriginal women were suffering horribly, the Minister told us, because of the terrible violence they and their children are enduring at the hands of Aboriginal men. Don’t let that ruin the lunch though, there is room for optimism. The government is providing women’s shelters and female mentoring programs, she explained. Yadda yadda, speech finished, enjoy the lunch.

Yes, it is a truly mortifying level of violence, but no mention of the other factors that lead to the suffering and vulnerability of Aboriginal women (and men)? Problems governments and white communities could take some responsibility for too - life expectancy gaps, inadequate health care and education, widespread displacement, homelessness, long histories of extreme family trauma, unemployment, unpaid wages, alcoholism and addiction, grossly disproportionate incarceration rates, judicial discrimination, and deep levels of community racism and hostility towards Aboriginal people? Problems that contribute to violence, and prevent escape? No, this lunch was a time for feminists to come together. Speaking out against the violence of black men, that is something every feminist in the room could get behind, even the white men. Everyone that is except for the only table of Aboriginal women in the room. Utterly embarrassed I looked over to see their reaction. They looked pissed off, but in a resigned kind of way. They’d heard all this before.

My friend and I grimaced at each other. Where do we leave Aboriginal women when we simplify problems to the point of pinning them entirely on Aboriginal men, we wondered in whispers? How do Aboriginal women embrace a feminism that is so appalled by Aboriginal men - by their brothers, and fathers, and husbands? Quite simply, how do Aboriginal women even contemplate raising their sons to be feminist when we hate them?

I know we feminists do it tough, this is a long struggle and it is painful and depleting, and we owe ourselves a nice lunch. But if feminism is about equality with men for all women, then surely we have to start from a place that understands some women are not even equal to other women yet. And if we can’t do that at an International Women’s Day lunch (the irony almost too great)… then we have a long way to go. Until then I wish myself and all other white feminists a little indigestion after the lunch.     

 

          

                

 

Latest trends in flooring

Several years of putting a baby, and then a small child to sleep, and trying to sneak out of the bedroom - I am really coming to not like polished timber floors so much.

Home movies

Just me and her father showing Oprah our house. Thought you might be curious to see too.

Don’t you love how he and I hold hands all the damn time? And how many times do I say “I love you” to him before I drive into town for a quick errand? Over-kill? It is just that our love is so real.

 

Actually, the play room is not unlike our kid’s play room, totally filled with the shit of over-indulgement. Anyway, apologies for vacuous blogging, I have such a weakness for celebrity home tours, they’re just so genuine.

Just because you’re a toddler, doesn’t mean you actually want to ‘toddle’

Then.

Now.

Me: Should we go on the Labour Day March this year?

Him: I don’t know, a Labour Day Carry? She’s almost 20 kilograms now.

Feeding children eating disorders

I pretty much don’t trust a single word that comes out of my mouth when it comes to food. I’ve never had an eating disorder, but unhealthy attitudes towards food? That, I’ve experienced, because hey, I grew up female in this culture, so I readily think of foods as good and bad, sin and reward. I have been undoing the cultural indoctrination over the last 15 years and I feel healthier and happier for it but I still have to stop and think about what I say about food in front of my child, particularly as I will probably be the only person around her to counteract the rubbish she is going to hear about food.  This post I found at Hoyden About Town by Lauredhel was a wonderful discussion on that, and a good reminder, I was slipping on some things.

I try to describe food options in terms of freshness and colour and origin and diversity and nutrients, not in terms of good and bad, allowed and forbidden, sinful and virtuous.

While we’re talking early eating habits, there’s also this from Lauredhel. (OK, that’s a bit of a stretch for relating these two posts, but it’s all I’ve got). Breasts really are fascinating - see why do breasts shrink after breastfeeding.

Did you know that the storage capacity of any individual breast may be between 80 and 600 ml, but that storage capacity has no effect on the ability of a mother to feed a baby? As soon as the breast empties, the polypeptide dubbed “Feedback Inhibitor of Lactation” (FIL) levels drop, and the breast ramps up its production speed dramatically. Cue-fed babies will adjust their feeding frequency according to their mothers’ breasts’ storage capacity. In addition, the emptier the breast, the higher the fat content of the milk.