Big Daddy is watching you…

Reading Anji over at Mothers for Women’s Lib writing about her regrets that her son doesn’t share her last name reminids me of a story…

See, my kids do share my last name. It was a no-brainer for me: before my daughter was born, not a single person with my last name had ever appeared in the records of Scotland, since 1580. Who wouldn’t want to be the first? And being someone with a slightly odd and very unusual last name has been a fairly big part of my identity all my life. I couldn’t imagine bringing up children with one of the frankly pedestrian options on offer from the other three parents. (I did offer to hyphenate with one of them, but everyone pointed out that that would sound stupid.)

This episode happened when we went to register Secondborn. (I don’t recall it happening with Firstborn, which is odd.)

The registrar had filled in all the details of Secondborn’s names and biological parentage on the computer. She turned the screen towards me and his bio-dad and asked if we were absolutely sure that these were the details we wanted, as after she clicked the button, there was no going back. Yes, we agreed. She clicked. And a pop-up window appeared:

Child’s surname is not the same as father’s. Continue? Yes/ No

Yes, that’s right. The patriarchy is actually programmed in to the registration system. Wow.

Hobbled

Another post about buying stuff, of course. These pics are from December, actually, but: Here are some boots I wanted to buy for Firstborn – cute, and zip-up so she might actually manage them herself:

Until I saw the soles:

Seriously? In Scotland, in winter, for a child of four? No grip at all?

So we got her these:

Which obviously were from the “boys” section of the shop.

It isn’t the first time I’ve notices that shoes marketed to girls often have no tread on the sole, but with winter boots it seems even more marked.

I don’t think there’s much more I need to say about it than that. If little girls try to run or climb, they clearly deserve to fall and be taught a lesson.

Inheritances and taffeta

Just a quick link for you from the excreble Guardian Family supplement:
Gay Godfathers Rule

Oh, where to begin? With the stereotype of gay men as childless, rich and brimming with “good taste” and bonhomie? With the cheerful encouragement by the mothers of the writer’s (three-out-of-four) female godchildren that he will, better than any actual woman, police conventional femininity? With the fact that the article might be mocking the parents who think in this stupid way about their fabulous gay friends, but is probably dripping with self-hate? Because he talks about his status as a qualified counsellor and the experience of growing up gay and isolated, but the quotes from the parents are all about inheritances and taffeta.

My kids have gay actual fathers, as well as, in Secondborn’s case, a gay Oddfather.  Just occasionally, people take my comment that one of Firstborn’s dads is much better at plaiting her hair than I am, and run with it. Gay men have such flair for these things, don’t they? I bet she’ll have lovely clothes as she grows up. They’re sorely disappointed when I point out that he works in tech support and keeps  a pile of What Car magazine in the downstairs toilet. Not to mention that he’s a good feminist ally.

I still have a shred of hope that this is a belated April Fool or, perhaps more likely, that all of the Guardian weekend supplements have been infiltrated by performance artists literally making a mockery of liberal Middle England. If not, I’ll get back to you when I’ve finished bashing my head off the wall.

(I can’t, in all seriousness, actually manage to write “hat tip”, but I got the link and a healthy dose of articulate rage from the fabulous Glitzfrau.)

Sacrificing choice

So, I wrote this article for the F Word, and there have been comments (scroll down – that’s not all the comments I’ve had, though). Mostly, actually, supportive and pleased that someone’s talking about breastfeeding from a feminist perspective. A few have disagreed with my take, and this one I’d like to address:

On that, I can’t see how ‘battling through’ breastfeeding when it is agony is healthy, and it feeds worryingly into patriarchy’s ‘mother as martyr’ dynamic

And then, of course, there’s the now infamous Case Against Breastfeeding article. In that, too, Hannah Rosin frames breastfeeding as a “compulsory self-sacrifice”.

Okay, so, say I’d written an article about becoming a mechanic. I initially found the work really physically hard. Because I hadn’t yet gained all the skills I needed, I burned my arm on a hot engine.  I hated it.  I dragged myself into work every day for a month. But this is what I’d always wanted.  I was determined to stick with it. Gradually I gained skills, got strong, proved to be really good at this. Now I’m making progress in my career and my sense of self has been transformed. Who would have thought someone like me (a woman, someone who doubted herself) could do this? Wow! Feminist role model; personal triumph.

Or I was a doctor. Punishing hours; awful things happen; many skills to learn. But I got good at this, and people got better! All that early hard work has made me fulfilled, skilled and able to help other people. Isn’t it great that there are women gaining those skills and doing those jobs?

Say I was a nurse. Hard physical work; hard emotional work; lots to learn. But I learned, grew, and got huge emotional and intellectual satisfaction from my work. That’s a  bit sus, isn’t it? Emotional satisfaction from nursing? From doing a traditionally female job of looking after other people?

But in fact, I am not a mechanic, a doctor or a nurse. I’m a breastfeeding mother. I get huge emotional rewards from it; I feel like it’s a worthwhile thing to be doing; I know, also, that it is the best feeding option for my children, and a straightforward and healthy way for them to bond with their mother. But that’s suspicious. Going through difficulties to succeed at nurturing my own children is the wrong kind of narrative for a feminist to take pride in.

It’s got to  be a different story. We have framed so much of feminism as about choice; so much of feminism is about choice. But a narrative of motherhood can’t be like a narrative of a profession. Motherhood isn’t entirely abstractable – you have to be someone’s mother. Motherhood is a relationship, or a web of relationships, not a qualification. It’s unfair: you just do  it, you just are that kid’s mother, whether you’re better than the infertile woman next door or not. Furthermore, since you are that kid’s mother, there are things you can do that nobody else (pretty much) can do. And breastfeeding is a key one there. So, to a degree, there is no choice: the best food for your child is one only you can make (wet nurses and milk banks being vanishingly rare options). Which is a bummer when it’s hard to do, because of work outside the home, because of pain, because of inhibition, because of hating it.

Yes, it’s every mother’s choice to breastfeed or not. But let’s not pretend it’s a neutral choice, or that it’s a choice made in a vacuum.  Let’s not deny evidence and silence individual stories in order to fit in with a currently orthodox feminist notion, any more than we silence feminist voices to fit in with the patriarchy. Let’s also be clear that demonising any broad sweep of opnion, be that breastfeeding advocacy or formula-feeding advocacy, is a stupid move. I’ve never said formula feeding mothers are “selfish” or that I “pity” them, despite both those words being used in comments to my article.

There are a lot of problems with the notion of “choice feminism” (oh, so many problems…). Breastfeeding brings some of those to the fore very actutely. Let’s react like a mature, self-confident feminist movement and examine those problems. Meantimes, I’ll continue to breastfeed and other people will continue to interpret that in ways that are about them, not me, and definitely not my children.

Click to gender

That’s it. My relationship with Early Learning Centre has been strained for some time  now (see previous post on the pink/blue issue), but I’ve finally decided to end it. You see, it’s the “filter by gender” thing. Yes, I know it’s been there for a while, but today I’m trying to buy a tea set for Secondborn’s second birthday, and this time, it’s personal.

“Dressing up and roleplay”
Items for girls: 118
Items for boys: 73
Items for both: 72

“Learning and books”
Items for girls: 212
Items for boys: 203
Items for both: 201

“Cars, trains and construction”
Items for girls: 81
Items for boys: 122
Items for both: 81

I particularly like the cases where “both” is fewer than the smaller of the “boys”/”girls” options. You can’t just add them together. Some of that pink stuff is so toxic it can cause penises to spontaneously drop off. And, yes, imaginative play and reading are for girls, while spatial skills are for boys.

ELC is exclusively for kids under 5. At what point, with what evidence, will people figure out that “natural” gendered preferences could be fully explained by this shit?

It’s not just them, of course. Loads of sites offer gender-filtered search, or boys’ and girls’ categories, particularly when it comes to imaginative play or dressing up toys. There’s something odd about parents/ other toy-buyers not being trusted to perpetrate gender stereotypes themselves, isn’t there? Anyway. I’m boycotting. It’s over between me and ELC, but also all those other crappy infant gender programming sites.  Boycotts’r'us.

Poo, bum, willy

Obviously, all radical mothers, particularly those interested in sex-positivity and queer liberation, should read Susie Bright’s blog. A while ago, she was writing about the fact that “clitoris” is banned from Google’s safe search, while “penis” is not. Here is a list of all of the banned words. It also includes “anus”. I guess that’s the final admission that the anus is, in fact, for sex.

I want to see the GoogleMap of the human body. Obviously, it’ll be clothed, because both “nude” and “naked” are banned words (which does at least keep our children safe from Jamie Oliver’s early work). There’s no asshole, though there may be an arsehole, defecation being okay for Brits but not Americans. Oh, it’s as you would expect: “clitoris” is the only banned word which is the medically accepted one for the body part in question. And, this may be an error on the part of the Banned Words blogger, but they seem to have banned a misspelling of “cunnilingus”.

I’m looking for some queer-family-affirmative books for Christmas/ Solstice presents for the kids, and kept coming across The Family Book by Todd Parr, aiming to show the wonderful diversity of families. Amazon’s Look Inside feature reveals the first page here: while families may take many forms, all families like to hug each other.

As a middle-class British person, I’d like to lay a formal objection to that. And, more seriously, it’s hard enough to grow up in a family where affection isn’t often overt or physical without being told it’s actually not a family at all.

But also, it’s interesting what writers think are crucial things that families have in common, and are thus the key things to represent in an “our queer families are just like your non-queer families” book. “Do they work? Do they play? Do they cook? Do they cough?”, indeed.

I’ll post reviews when I’ve got the books, but in the meantime, buy One Dad, Two Dads, Brown Dad, Blue Dads (from which the above quote comes), because that’s just excellent.

The uses of nursery

Now, before you get the wrong impression, I am a fan of school. I think school is, on balance, a good thing. Firstborn will be going to school next August, when she will be (horrors!) only four-and-a-half; right now, she goes to a state-approved nursery.

But let’s call school school, so we can at least debate when it should start and when it’s “compulsory”. When Gordon Brown says he’s offering “free nursery places for 2-year-olds“, let’s not pretend they’re about helping mothers into work* with free childcare. What can you do with 15 hours a week, especially when most providers offer that only in 3-hour-a-day chunks? Well, either you can pay your own money to “top it up”, which a low-wage job won’t allow, so that’s just another subsidy for middle-class parents who can already afford to work; or you can stay home in order to do the drop-off and pick-up, in which case what is the nursery place for?

Well, clearly it’s a way to bring smaller and smaller kids into the system. Because the other thing about free nursery places is that they can only be taken up at “partner providers”: either the nursery departments of schools, state nurseries, or approved private nurseries. And those last, which theoretically allow parents the most choice about how their children are cared for, almost always charge a top-up fee of several pounds a day, so, again, the most”choice” is available to those who can most afford it. You get a bit of money; in exchange, you offer your kid up to an approved curriculum.

If it’s about childcare for work, why can’t you use it for a childminder? Or for relatives to provide care? What if you work shifts, or nights, or the sort of casualised crappy job the government are so keen on?

In short: it’s about when to put your kid into the machine. I think two is too young.

*Let’s, for the moment, leave aside the question of whether all a 2-year-old’s main carers should be encouraged by government funding to work outside the home.

I’m reading Naomi Stadlen’s What Mothers Do – especially when it looks like nothing and I recommend it to anyone. Particularly if you’ve ever cared for a baby. The relief of reading that just possibly you’re not wasting your life, and that “I haven’t really done anything today” might just mean “I can’t explain what I’ve been doing.”

But, obviously, I read it with gender glasses on, because that’s what I do with everything in the world. Okay, the author says she refers to the generic baby as “he” to distinguish it from the generic mother “she”. But the two pieces of information she gives about the babies of the mothers she quotes are the baby’s age, and their sex. They are referred to in the anonymised quotes as “G” or “B” according to sex.

The thing is, I would find it distracting not to know the sex of the baby someone’s talking about. Even though, as the mother of a girl and a boy, I empathise (or not) with what they’re saying with respect to both my children, or either of them (and in that case, mostly because of the child’s birth-order place), it’s information I feel I need in order to be able to move on with the content of the text.

Frustratingly, this was more or less the topic of the PhD I abandoned after having Firstborn. The more I raise kids, the more I’m aware of it. Maybe one day, I’ll be able to do something that doesn’t look like nothing and finish that.

Anyway. Stadlen’s book is one of those you just want to quote every line of. I won’t. But it’s great, so far, though a little inclined to the: “Ooh, traditional societies! We must learn from the savages!” thing.

Quibble 2: the book only acknowledges the existence of single mothers and mothers with a male partner. I have books like this, which strike me as true as a mother who is pretty much like most others, and books which affirm my identity as a lesbian and feminist mother, with pride in both those identities. But to be sad, to suffer from post-natal depression, to struggle with motherhood, to feel isolated and failing – these are not things that lesbian mothers do. Or not in books, anyway. We can’t admit that what we wanted might be hard; sometimes too hard. We can’t ever say “take these children away!” because we fear, more rationally than most, that someone might.

So there you go. I’m a feminist, queer mother. I have PND. I sometimes fervently wish I could throw my children out of the window and run away. I love my kids. I’m probably as decent a mother as the average straight woman. But it’s hard to admit that I’m not better, because we’re like any oppressed group: you’ve got to be twice as good to be seen as half as worthy.

Also, the lesbian mother books? Are boring, mostly.

“When I grow up I want to be a butterfly,” says Firstborn.

“Really?” I respond. “Well, perhaps you will.”

“I’ll go into a chrysalis and I’ll be a butterfly.”

“Or maybe a moth.”

-

“When I grow up I want to be a fireman,” say Firstborn.

And my instinct is to say something like “Yes, you could be a firefighter.”

-

And later, I’m singing “Brown-eyed girl” to Secondborn, only I’ve changed the words to “Brown-eyed boy.”

-

So what is it about gender? Why can I easily let my kids play that they’ll grow up to be a different species, but my instinct is to “correct” them when they play that they’ll grow up a different gender? I’m probably more relaxed than most, in that Firstborn’s saying “I’ll grow up to be a man” doesn’t get “corrected”, but it’s the smaller daily things that I let slip by – the smaller things that build up to constructing a child’s world where the only thing that isn’t mutable is gender.

Of course, there’s a feminist pressure to remove the “man” ending in order to make it clear to Firstborn that women do the job too. But how to balance that with the conscious desire to leave gender boundaries a bit blurrier than the rest of the world seems to?

And that doesn’t explain the song lyrics, does it? What’s wrong with singing “Brown-eyed girl” to Secondborn? I sang it to Firstborn, and her eyes are blue.