New legislation in Australia aimed at tidying up insurance for the midwifery model is about to make home births virtually illegal. If home births were unsafe then you could understand this move, but they are not. Home births are simply less common in this country, at this time.

Yet, all too often, those who favour home birth are presented as a fringe group of maternal kooks, the sort of women who recklessly put ideology before health and safety. Of course, there is a long tradition of dismissing troublesome, non-compliant women as kooky, and of deriding their views as irrational or even childish; a tradition that is implicitly continued in the proposed scheme.

(From Monica Dux’s excellent article in defence of home births).

I have had two births, both of them in a hospital (although one of these was in a birth centre). I am a strong advocate of home birth, though I have never chosen it for myself. Dux’s article reminded me of a work lunch thrown in my honour before this baby was born. I was sitting at the management end of the table, surrounded quite naturally by men, and we were talking vaguely about my pending birth. I told them how amused my partner and I were by our hospital’s policy of prohibiting men from being naked during their partner’s labour. Amused because a birthing suite was the last place my partner felt like getting his kit off, and amused because enough men had got naked during births to warrant a formal policy, and amused by the slightly panicked way nurses informed us of the policy.

The men at the table were surprised. All but one of them has children, and all but one of those fathers has children born in the last couple of years, however they all thought fathers routinely wore surgical gowns during labour as a precaution for mothers and babies. Why? Because all of their babies had been born via cesarean. It dawned on me then..  among this group, vaginal birth itself was radical.

You have to be very careful defining what is radical and what is mainstream when it comes to legislation, especially when legislation is going to limit choices.

I’m looking for great books to read while I’m breastfeeding, and seeing as you’re all so smart and well-read I’d like your recommendations. I have been given a bookstore voucher by my father that will probably get me three or four books. Here are my three favourite books I’ve read this year so far, what are yours?

The Emperor’s Children by Claire Messud

Dreams From My Father by Barack Obama

The Reader by Bernhard Schlink

From my picks you can see that I like relatively weighty/thought-provoking books, enjoy both fiction and non-fiction (though given that I am sent a lot of non-fictions for review I am looking more for novels right now), prefer contemporary to historical stories, and that I’m pretty predictable and like a lot of the books that everyone else likes.

So, what you got for me?

Week 11 in life with two children, both of them now sick.

Me: “Honey, not only is the house looking reasonable but dinner is cooked ordered.”

Roll up, roll up.

Read the Stunned: The New Generation of Women Having Babies, Getting Angry, and Creating a Mothers’ Movement extract? Got some thoughts on what you read? Questions for the author? Comment away here and we’ll get the discussion started and later I’ll invite the author, Karen Bridson to join us…

(Some of you emailed me directly with your thoughts on the book, would you mind posting them here in a comment instead, so everyone can see them?)

Alternatively, if you haven’t received a copy of the extract from me but you’re interested then email me so you can hop on in. If you emailed me previously and I neglected to send you the extract then (sorry and) please email me again with the word “SLACKER” in the subject header.

I was meant to leave him with someone while I went to the library, which would have been for the best, any trip to the library is better done with as few children as possible. And anyway I’m the sort of person who not only acquires enough library fines to be blocked from borrowing books, but who also forgets that this is the case until she is at the counter with, in one arm, the books her four year old has lovingly chosen and in the other, the baby, being jiggled because he needs a nap. And if that wasn’t enough to exasperate I am also the sort of person who isn’t carrying cash on her person. So off we go, through the rain, back to the car, and I strap each of us in and I drive until I find somewhere to withdraw money. Who can break a four year old’s heart, particularly when they so sensibly said well isn’t that a shame when we had to leave the books behind?

But the baby gets more and more impatient with all the getting in and the getting out of the car and the jiggling soon seems a pointless irritation to him and I wonder why I couldn’t leave him behind. Because my arms ache to be free of the weight of a baby and my head clear of the distraction and yet here I am with a bond it seems that can’t be broken, even by me. The hours and hours of lying side by side in bed together, the sharing of intimate space, the way a certain shade of lamp light can conjure immediately for me those first few nights of his life, the studying of him, and the yielding to him, only I know what all this means, only I can soothe him, and in the end I just can’t leave him behind. Not even with someone who has raised more babies than me, not even with someone who loves him too.

We’ve just instituted ‘date night’ in our house so I read this piece from Sandra Tsing Loh on her divorce with amusement.

Which is to say I can work at a career and child care and joint homeownership and even platonic male-female friendship. However, in this cluttered forest of my 40s, what I cannot authentically reconjure is the ancient dream of brides, even with the Oprah fluffery of weekly “date nights,” when gauzy candlelight obscures the messy house, child talk is nixed and silky lingerie donned, so the two of you can look into each other’s eyes and feel that “spark” again. Do you see? Given my staggering working mother’s to-do list, I cannot take on yet another arduous home- and self-improvement project, that of rekindling our romance.

The father of my children and I have had three dates so far, and during those evenings we have eaten some lovely home-cooked meals, seen some very good DVDs and spent many moments rather too joyfully reprimanding one another for overly familiar outbursts of uncouth behaviour. “But honeeeeeeeeeeeey, it’s date night”. Given that date night has been fun we consider it a significant success.

I would like to write more about the real negotiations behind co-parenting, co-housekeeping, co-income generating. I think there would be merit in it but I worry that too many people I know off-line read this blog and it may not be fair on my partner. Anyway, go read the fearless Tsing Loh. She has some wonderful phrases in her article, this being one of my favourites: Exhibit A of lazy, undisciplined attachment parenting.

His first holiday at the beach.

How much do I love this article about ‘Pop’, the gender-free toddler? A lot.

Sometimes when I dress Cormac I feel almost like I am playing with ‘drag’. Gee, I’ve really dressed you “Boy” today, little one.

Cormac is still so young that there seems little reason to dress him in a way that highlights gender, particularly when he looks so beautiful in white (instead he is regularly mistaken by passers-by for a girl, and I try to reassure them that I’m not insulted that ‘he’ might have been thought a ’she’ for a moment, really it is ok). Right now, to dress him overtly as any particular gender feels like ‘costume’ to me. But I remember it felt this way with Lauca when I dressed her in anything frou frou before she was old enough to look like a ‘girl’ or choose for herself to be girly.

Still, who doesn’t like playing with costume sometimes? I haven’t actually bought Cormac many clothes yet – I have plenty of left over baby clothes from Lauca in addition to gifts from friends and family. I’m not yet sure what clothes I’ll choose. But I like him in his ‘boy costume’ and it took me a while to realise why. Mostly it is because his boy drag consists of all the wintery shades of colour that I wear – gray, black, white, charcoal, chocolate brown etc.

So, mother and son, dressed alike. How naff.

Anyway, this article about Pop. Unlike some feminists I don’t believe gender is entirely a social construct, but I certainly think a good deal of it is.  I’m sure Pop is fine but I would love to know more about how Pop’s parents are coping with their revolution, because nothing is quite as rigid as gender stereotypes and babies. In reality the parents aren’t even being that revolutionary, it is not like they’re trying to imagine an entire lifetime for Pop without gender. These parents seem so reasonable, letting Pop choose what clothes to wear, and when it feels right to identify as a particular gender rather than just as Pop.. and yet imagine all the fretting going on. Take Susan Pinker for instance.

“Ignoring children’s natures simply doesn’t work,” says Susan Pinker, a psychologist and newspaper columnist from Toronto, Canada, who wrote the book The Sexual Paradox, which focuses on sex differences in the workplace.

“Child-rearing should not be about providing an opportunity to prove an ideological point, but about responding to each child’s needs as an individual,” Pinker tells The Local.

Precisely, Pinker. This is exactly the point the parents are trying to make: each child’s needs as an individual.

(Thanks to tigtog for the article link).

Everybody in this house has a bad case of the tireds.

In relation to my last post, this one.

Someone has emailed me privately and very politely (more than I deserve) pointed out to me that the hairstyle I refer to as “crazy” in the photograph in that post is in fact a very common hairstyle for African and African descended girls. They were understandably offended that I described the hairstyle as crazy. Now that they’ve told me this I can of course recall seeing the hairstyle many times on little girls, but I rarely recall seeing the hairstyle on white girls (at least in the places where I’ve grown up) such as is seen in this photo and so had not initially recognised the context of the hairstyle. However, I write on the Internet, a place broader than my own backyard and I need to think accordingly.

When I referred to it as “crazy” I was thinking it seemed like a lot of effort for the mother to style such short hair that way, on twins no less, and at least in my experience of doing little (white) girls’ hair it has been a pain in the arse to manipulate into tiny little pigtails. But all the same, crazy was not a good way to describe the hairstyle. And now that I am aware of messing up, I apologise completely for being racist.

(Also you may recall that I have a history of being a little lazy with doing little girls’ hair, so in general I should just shut it on the topic of hairstyles for little girls).

P.S. I just spoke to my partner about this post and he is little appalled with me. He pointed out that the little girls in the photo, and for all I know, the mother too, may be of colour. I have total white privilege going on. Sorry again.