This today from the guardian.
What's wrong with being a mother?
As the lead singer of 90s pop band Sleeper, Louise Wener had no interest in having children and ending up knee-deep in nappies. Then last year she had a daughter - and discovered that she loved motherhood. But she also found that for her generation admitting such a thing was almost shameful ...
Wednesday April 5, 2006
The Guardian
It is three weeks before my baby is due and I am sitting in my GP's waiting room. A woman sits down next to me and stares intently at my bump. She asks if this baby is my first and I nod, expecting some words of congratulations. Instead, she frowns and shakes her head. "Your life will never be the same," she says. She doesn't mean this in a good way. She means I have no idea what I'm in for.
I gave birth to my daughter last October and still find this woman's reaction bemusing. Perhaps I shouldn't. Her sentiment was entirely in keeping with an emerging gloom about motherhood. The summer I was pregnant, Lionel Shriver's novel We Need to Talk About Kevin won the Orange prize and the whiff of maternal ambivalence was everywhere. Written by a childless woman, it is the story of a mother who gives birth to a son she doesn't love. He grows up to be a mass murderer.
Shriver followed her success with a series of provocative interviews headlined Why Ruin Your Life? and Meet the Anti-Mom. She seemed to have sparked something of a trend. In the months that followed you couldn't open a magazine without reading about another women who had stumbled into motherhood only to find she didn't like it much. Newspapers ran stories called Kids, Who Needs Them? Bookshops stocked up on titles such as Mother Shock, The Mommy Myth, and, most recently, Perfect Madness.
My biological clock went off like a bomb when I was 36 but I wasn't certain how I would adapt to becoming a mother. I had never been that keen on babies. When I held other people's, they usually cried. In my 20s and early 30s I sidestepped adult responsibility in favour of the extended adolescence that comes with being in a pop band. For the past five years I have made my living as a writer. It is a less glamorous and anarchic existence but affords a level of autonomy and freedom that I had come to cherish. As delighted as I was to be pregnant, I wondered if the fact that I had delayed having children for so long might indicate some latent ambivalence of my own.
I needn't have worried. Six months in, I find parenthood absolutely wonderful. It is the most joyful and absorbing thing I have ever done. It is more physically demanding than I had realised but also less of a drudge. I enjoy looking after my daughter. I find it satisfying to keep her warm, clean and fed. The first eight weeks are as tough as advertised - if I found time to wash, or make a phone call, I was doing well - but in truth, I was so loved-up from the breastfeeding hormones I hardly cared. I felt as if I was on E.
There have been stir-crazy moments but I have relished being at home with my child. I find her superb company. I am enthralled by the changes she makes day by day; by her emerging character and inquisitiveness. I miss her when she is sleeping. I can waste whole hours gazing at her cheeks. The first time she laughed was more thrilling to me than performing at Brixton Academy. It is early days - and I am hardly the only parent to be thus enamoured with their firstborn - but, having come to it so late and been so resistant, her father and I have been surprised by quite how much we're enjoying it. It feels like being let in on a secret.
So what's the problem? The thing is, I'm a bit embarrassed to say how much I like it. In these days of falling birth rates, with more people choosing to be childless, it seems distinctly un-hip. Ever since Miranda feigned excitement at her baby's ultrasound in Sex and The City, it feels as if women are expected to display their maternal ambivalence like a badge of honour. Unless you're running around grieving for your liberty and your lost identity, or worrying that your child is going to grow up to be a Columbine-style killer, you are somehow being dishonest. If you claim to love parenthood or, worse yet, find it fulfilling, you are probably lying. Or Gwyneth Paltrow.
There is a sense that women of my generation are letting the side down if they confess to feeling unconditionally maternal. The word has come to mean mumsie. We are meant to be fighting the battles of our mothers who didn't have any choice. My own mother gave up having a career to raise three children. As a child I thought her a slave to domesticity. I feared turning into one of those women, the kind that leap up from behind the coffee urn at mother and toddlers mornings - coated in baby sick and parsnip puree - to harangue you for not using eco-friendly nappies. I craved freedom, independence, adventure, excess; a world away from the domestic landscape of marriage, mortgage and kids. I've long since settled down to monogamy and property repayments but having a child seemed like the final frontier.
I would be a pram pusher, a bottom wiper, manacled to the kitchen sink, a hostage to bottle feeds and bath times. But all that was a failure of imagination on my part. Domestic life is merely the backdrop to becoming a parent. Imagining that motherhood is all about the washing and the feeding and the vomit is like suggesting a surgeon's skill is all about keeping his hands clean. It's a long way from late-night recording sessions, foreign concert halls and Top of the Pops, but the sense of confinement I had worried about in my touring days has yet to materialise. I'm not saying caring for my daughter is all the validation I'll ever need - I realise it is not her responsibility to fulfill me long term - but, for the first time in my life, I can easily see how it could be.
Shriver recently published an interview with three of her friends in which they explored their decision to remain childless. Among the reasons given were: preserving their relationship with their partner; the desire to continue meeting "fun" people, and a wish to go on holiday to Tanzania. Shriver describes her friends as droll and bright, with interesting lives. The subtext is clear. If you have children, you won't be interesting any more.
Similarly, Rachel Cusk, the original poster girl for maternal ambivalence, comes across as equally presumptive in her book A Life's Work. She paints a bleak view of early motherhood. She wanders into it with wilful unpreparedness then takes it as a personal slight when she discovers the effort involved. She bitterly mourns her pre-pregnancy life and behaves as if self-sacrifice is the lone preserve of parents. "We only experience ourselves sacrificing things - time, freedom, pleasure, sleep - for our children," she says. You wonder if she's ever had a job she didn't like, or how it might feel to be her ailing mother or sick friend. Women who didn't relate to her lament were written off as "Alice band-wearing mumsies". She had penned her memoir, she said, to speak to intelligent women.
I'm not claiming motherhood as an epiphany; the sun doesn't suddenly shine brighter than it did. It is not that I believe you can't know what it is to be a woman without having a baby, neither do I feel that anyone should feel obligated to procreate. There is much hyperbole on both sides. The point is, I don't feel fundamentally altered by having a child. I haven't suddenly stopped reading the newspaper and started making jam. I'm no less enamoured of the wider world than I ever was; in fact, I can't wait to share it with my daughter. But having a child is an altogether more complex pleasure than affording an expensive car, or experiencing an uninterrupted night's sleep. In a society that values personal ambition and acquisitiveness above all things, I wonder if we haven't lost the vocabulary to describe it.
The maternally ambivalent tend to think that having children is a burden. They think the culturally dominant view of parenthood is overly romanticised. In what way is it romanticised? Turn on the TV any night of the week and you'll be assaulted by the view that parenthood is a nightmare. You are Mel Giedroyc in the ghastly sitcom Blessed: dowdy, embattled, leaky of nipple, angry, remote and joyless. Your toddlers will throw bricks at you and call you a bitch and need consigning to The House of Tiny Tearaways. Your teenagers will cut themselves with razor blades and be carted off to Brat Camp. Their ambivalence toward their children is much of what makes the Desperate Housewives desperate. You're hardly a trailblazing taboo buster for claiming parenthood's not all it is cracked up to be.
No one is saying it's easy. A baby that doesn't sleep or cries a lot can test you to the point of insanity, and looking after two or three is clearly a different experience than caring for one. It's vital that new parents are able to vent their anxieties and frustrations without fear of judgment or rebuke. But could it be that reviews of parenthood are much like reviews of anything else? The negative ones are more fun to read and write, but for every parent finding it less than enchanting, there are a hundred others thrilling to it in secret.
Having a child is nothing like it is on the Persil adverts. Nothing so good is ever that anodyne. Parenthood smells funny. It's tough, uneven, dark around the edges; it's also glorious, stimulating and profound. If you're debating whether or not to do it, don't dwell too long on the thoughts of Lionel Shriver. Asking someone who has never had a child what it might be like to have one is foolish. It's like seeking relationship advice from a person who has never been in love.
I admit, I originally read this article, not only because of the subject matter but because, I have seen Louises's band live. Twas a very long time ago and she struck me then as being a bit of a party animal, not so dissimiliar to myself at the time, (although I had better hair). So she was a bit of a heroine to me and a fairly good social commentator, as anyone who's ever heard 'What do I do now' will testify.
Nevertheless, she makes a very valid point, we just don't seem to like our children very much. We berate them, we buy them off with money rather than our time and we always seem to focus on the worst aspects of parenthood. Not to mention the hoops we make them jump through to achieve at school (pointless sats tests, anyone), we victimise them for choosing to wear the uniform of youth and then we expect them to turn out as fully functioning, well conditioned members of society.
Now I do like my sprogs but I'll admit I'm a bit guilty of being a bit hard on them, (I always remind sprog not to mug old ladies, when he leaves the house with his mates) but in general I like them enormously. But I know many mothers who don't seem to like their kids (and twice as many who treat them as an extension of their ego).
And while I have no problems with the childfree (It would never occur to me to ask someone why they don't have children, though this is quite rare amongst parents, according to the childfree). I do keep hearing radio shows and reading articles, where the childfree keep asking why they are not accorded the privileges at work that their 'with child' counterparts do. Almost as if they begrudge the fact, that someone else could be raising the generation that will pay their pension.
Maybe, if we (and I include myself here) thought a little bit more about our attitudes towards children and the care with which we raise them. We could learn to like them and maybe they might learn to like us too.
