I’m just about to post a review of sorts for Jessica Valenti’s new book, Why Have Kids? and then I heard about this.
When pitching articles about her book Valenti was asked by a major news organisation to, instead, write about how she lost her ‘baby weight’. She declined. The video from Valenti about this experience is worth watching because she starts off as kind of amused and aghast but then you see her tone change when she talks about how she actually lost her baby weight, which is intimately connected to the fact that her daughter was born premature. And this moment puts the whole ‘yummy mummy’ conversation into perspective. In becoming a mother, Valenti, like some other mothers faced a life-threatening situation for herself and her daughter – it will take years to recover from that kind of trauma. Motherhood is not a trivial topic for women, why do we keep trivialising it? Valenti has also gone on to write a very thought-provoking book about the ambivalence that characterises motherhood for contemporary American women.. and this, this is what we want to talk about – how women ‘lose their baby weight’. And there’s a reason why readers are so interested in the topic of ‘baby weight’ and that is because we have made women’s looks the measure of a woman’s value. But Valenti is right – trying to change the conversation and being dragged back to this all the time is exhausting. It’s also disturbing and hurtful.
I lost all my baby weight in a week after giving birth. I had a wonderful natural birth with a really nasty, excruciating complication that required emergency surgery, being separated from my baby for the 12 hours following his birth, and a week-long hospital stay. I lost 1/3 of my blood and was totally psychologically knocked for six – and then inevitable breastfeeding problems, followed by months of insomnia, anxiety and further medical complications. Yeah, so when people say how lucky I am to have lost the weight so quickly, I think, not so much.
Yeah, me too – I peed out 70 pounds of water right after my son’s premature birth, and it put me down below my pre-pregnancy weight (still fat, though, just like before) and it was because the pregnancy had been so hard on both of us – he had restricted growth in the womb, I had constant puking.
Ah, yes, I remember doing all of that puking and peeing and IUGR–with the addition of post-partum psychosis afterwards, wherein I refused to eat. “You look great!” was the refrain of the day, I’m told.
3dianshui, your experience sounds absolutely awful. I’m glad you survived it.
Thanks lovely people – yes we’re all good now and I’m swimming in and out of gooey love with my little boy, now 9 months old. It is just so annoying that the focus is on weight and restoring your old body – as if motherhood does not totally and irrevocably change absolutely everything. Ditto sleep training and ‘getting your life back’. I wish people would stop pretending that everything goes back to normal. It would help a lot with the anxiety I know a lot of new mothers experience, and hide, when they find everything messy and unmanageable and out of control but also a bit wonderful.
I feel for you 3dianshui. I had a somewhat similar experience (traumatic birth, breastfeeding difficulties, insomnia, anxiety and depression), and I too was complimented about how fast I’d trimmed down. It’s called “feeling crazy”, “not being able to taste food” and “not being able to sleep” peeps!
…”everything messy and unmanageable and out of control but also a bit wonderful.” So beautifully put!
All the best to you. x
I’m so sorry about your experience, 3dianshui. How traumatic it must have been (still is?) for you.
Ms. Valenti’s childbirth experience was traumatic, too – and I empathize with her outrage at being asked about her weight loss! The only thing I am surprised about is the fact that she was surprised about this. She is a feminist; she knows how it is for women. But I guess she didn’t focus on how it is for mothers, until she became one – which is often the case, naturally.
But I think you’re right, blue milk – treating motherhood as something trivial is outrageous. Mothers, in spite of all the privilege we supposedly wield, are so marginalized. And it hurts quite a bit when our supposed allies (thinking of the recent discussions about Prof. Pine) belittle us and our concerns.
I also sense that sometimes, feminists who become mothers feel additional pressure not to come across as too “mother-y,” for that way lies shame, betrayal, and isolation. If more feminists, both mothers and child-free, would unite in this area, we could move mountains. I’m hopeful that Valenti will continue to heal from her trauma – and I hope you will, too, 3dianshui – and I hope that the more we talk about this, the more things will change.
The pressure to not come across as mother-y is all about sexism too. Because pregnancy, mothering, nurturing, caring for children etc have long been coded as feminine subjects and feminine acts and thus not as valuable as those things coded as masculine in our society. That women and even feminists feel they need to still give in to those sexist messages is terribly disturbing. Not that I think we all need to embrace these things and go all mother earth on them either, but letting society continue to get away with looking down upon women and these supposedly womenly things must end.
I wonder about the value of this particular kind of femininity, more than the encouragement of feminine/masculine things. Stereotypically sexy women and girls are rewarded for their way of expressing femininity but that display is *for men*, whereas the femininity/mothering you describe is for children and their mothers first (could even include disadvantaged groups who depend on carers and volunteers), not fathers and not a male gaze. Could the audience also be what’s looked down upon?
Sterotypical ways of women appearing physically attractive/sexy may be rewarded in some ways by our society (in that women who meet these standards are considered more marriageable or fuckable) but the downside is the accompanying assumption that these women are not terribly intelligent or able to know their own minds. So I don’t think that these things are really seen as valuable socially as they appear to be at first blush.
The discussion of who benefits from these traditionally feminine aspects is interesting. I don’t know if it’s necessarily true that they aren’t valued because they aren’t intended to value men or to provide additional sexual attractiveness for those men. Arguably, men often benefit from traditional feminine nurturing and feminine labor in plenty of ways, in no small part because the men get either beneft directly from the nurturing itself or because they then don’t have to pay a 3rd party for that labor or nurturing.
Even after thinking it through some more, I think it still comes back to traditionally feminine characteristics not being as valued as traditionally male characteristics, specifically because it is women and not men doing or being those things.
I love this response. You are saying what I couldn’t quite get to. Thank you! It does seem as though motherhood is quite the icky, girly, non-feminist, oogie, tacky “woman” thing – even, and sometimes especially, among feminists. I wish it weren’t so.
I think you might be onto something, Ali. If it doesn’t really benefit men, why should society pay for it/value it/not ridicule it/support it? In a patriarchy, there would be no reason to do so.
Something I remember as a conversation which often occurred after I had my first child, was me sharing some of the difficulties I experienced when I gave birth. So often the response would be “well at least you have a healthy baby”. That is true. It was worth it. But I just don’t think that if an older man was telling the story of being mistreated in hospital and traumatised as a result, that people would so readily remind him that the main thing is that he is currently alright.
Yeah. If some man were having a vasectomy, say, and the knife slipped and cut from his perineum on upward, I don’t think his friends (provided he would even TALK about it) would be dismissing it. Yet, that’s the experience I had with my Class III perineal tear when giving birth to BigHead number one. But, gee, at least HE was okay – sorry about the damage to the “vessel.”
I am going to use the vasectomy-gone-wrong image EVERY TIME someone trivializes the risks of birth and pregnancy from now on, tinfoilhattie. That is perfect.
Especially since the number of dudes I know who stonewalled on the vasectomy front on the basis of “oh no my bits!” until their partners got accidentally pregnant an extra time is more than 0.
Really keen to hear what you thought of Valenti’s book before I decide whether to read it.
Thank you for all the thought-provoking comments.