Elaine Webster
When my baby was born I was astonished that nothing in the world had told me that birth is a miracle. Out of my body came this entirely new being: it seemed incredible, yet more real than anything, and entirely personal. And then I couldn’t believe how hard it was to take a baby into town, how so little in the culture supported mothering, how devalued its status. I could not reconcile my experience with the fact that all the billions of people who walk or ever walked the earth are only alive through the same miracle of the mother’s body, her fecundity and succour and work. I thought about the magnificence, vulnerability and ferocity of mothers, of how bodily and messy it all is. How it’s a result of sex but not very sexy. I thought about the hunger for the breast, about yearning and weaning, about how we all drink milk.
As a child of the 70s and 80s I was raised with the idea that women could (and did) do anything, and always eschewed the ‘traditional’ feminine trappings of makeup, skirts and heels. As I got older I became aware that this slogan was frequently understood to mean that women should do everything, including juggling work and family, but it was not until I started thinking about whether – and if – I wanted children that I fully realised the extent to which social attitudes towards motherhood remain among the most potent and pervasive constraints on female (and male) identity and freedom.
During her recent trip to the United Nations, New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern used her speech to recommit the government to making New Zealand the “best place in the world to be a child”, ensuring that:
On Tuesday morning I was sitting at my desk working on this article, struggling to put my research into comprehensible sentences by avoiding any scientific jargon that would drive my potential reader(s) away. That was when I came across this cartoon. A pregnant woman is putting on a brave face, saying that her pregnancy is going “just fine”, when the truth is nowhere close! Her thought bubble precisely sums up everything a pregnant woman is most likely to face during those precious nine months of her pregnancy. Although I was spared the varicose veins, thank God!