Homebirth Barbie

From here at inhabitots.

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One more time for breastfeeding while glamorous

Nicole Trunfio breastfeeding her son on the cover of Elle.

Trunfio has used the cover as an opportunity to advocate for a change in the stigma surrounding women who breastfeed in public.

More models and others being glamorous while breastfeeding and why I like it.

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The cultural shift in ‘Mama’

Fascinating thoughts on the rise of the term ‘Mama’ and what it represents. From Elissa Strauss in Long Reads:

Like most cultural shifts in language, the rise of white, upper-middle class women who call themselves “mama” seemed to happen slowly, and then all at once. And like most cultural shifts in language, the rise of “mama” is about power and discontent. “In the interstices of language lie powerful secrets of the culture,” writes Adrienne Rich in Of Woman Born, Rich’s influential book examining the institution of motherhood.

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“You’re so busy playing house, which in the beginning is such a new adventure”

Want to see this film. (Review here).

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For parents who look good during school drop-off

Some of you really have it together in the mornings.

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Rachel Cusk reviewing motherhood memoirs

God, I love Cusk’s writing.

Here, as elsewhere, the appearance of honesty, the willingness to “own up” to certain unorthodoxies, merely conceals a deeper strain of social competitiveness. The “good” mother, with her fixed smile, her rigidity, her goody-goody outlook, her obsession with unnecessary hygiene, is in fact a fool. It is the “bad” mother, unafraid of a joke and a glass of wine, richly self-expressive, scornful of suburban values, who is in reality good.

A review of Confessions of a Bad Mother by Stephanie Calman in New Statesman.

Enright is a patient writer. Her real triumph, as she plots her slow transformation into the mother of two children, is to capture the delicate sense of parenthood as something that, for all its frequent impositions, stems so profoundly from the self that it is almost an act of reading, of self-interpretation.

A review of Making Babies: Stumbling into Motherhood by Anne Enright in New Statesman. 

 

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On passive aggressive martyrdom

Another writer to watch is Glosswitch for the NewStatesman, she writes about parenting and politics from a feminist perspective. Perfect combination, in my humble opinion. Her latest article asks why is it that mothers end up having their lives marketed back to them, piece by piece, as “me time”?

Then it’s “me time”! Yay! Hooray for “me time”! Aren’t you really, really grateful it exists? For this is one of the first rules of motherhood: be pathetically, ostentatiously thankful for any time whatsoever which isn’t spent wiping arses or cleaning behind the fridge. For lo! You have been granted some “me time”! Rejoice! Whether you spend these precious “you” moments drinking a cup of tea or shaving your pubes, never forget to do it with a beatific smile on your face. For you are so, so lucky! All that stuff other people, including fathers, just do — well, for you, it’s now a bit selfish to do it. But go on, we’ll let you. As an extra-special treat.

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