Then there was the breastfeeding awareness campaign that equated not breastfeeding with riding a mechanical bull while pregnant, as detailed in the New York Times article, Breast-Feed or Else.
And then, the constant policing of mothers was recently brought to light in the mainstream media by the Britney Spears interview on NBC's Dateline.
It's a tough time to be a mother.
Thankfully, there is a wave of mothering activism which is countering the mother judgement. MomsRising.org, a grassroots organization dedicated to moving motherhood and family issues to the forefront of US politics, is one such group. It was founded by Joan Blades and Kristen Rowe-Finkbeiner, authors of The Motherhood Manifesto. Literary Mama recently became one of their aligned organizations.
Recently, Judy Stadtman Tucker, founder of Mothers Movement Online, an organization founded to promote economic and social justice for mothers and caregivers, was the guest of honour at a Bay Area Mother Talk. Literary Mama Reviews Editor Rebecca Kaminsky gave her recount of the evening:
The latest Bay Area Mother Talk's guest of honor, Judy Stadtman Tucker, founder of Mothers Movement Online, led a discussion that lasted late into the night. We all left with our "inner activists" energized. Judy is dedicating her life to being at the forefront of the new Mothers' Movement, and it shows in that she came into our small group of Mothers and immediately had everyone involved in the discussion. The evening's topics included: how we can best further our cause, the meaning of "caregiving" and the place it should hold in the world of "work", the role writers play in activism, the latest in rocker mama bands, if and where "mommy wars" take place, parents' rights in the workplace, and what we'd like the USA to look like in ten years with mothers (and fathers and all caregivers) in mind. The evening's guests included Motherlode members Ursula Goulet, Sarah Raleigh Kilts, and Rebecca Kaminsky; Bloggermom and LM contributor Mary Tsao; and attorney and motherhood activist Charlotte Fishman. For a more detailed recap of the evening check out Mary Tsao's blogpost here -- and be sure to check out the comments which include a fascinating back and forth between readers and author of the MMO essay "Lucky": Shannon Hyland-Tassava. Thanks to everyone for a wonderful evening!
Leslie Morgan Steiner responded to Mary Tsao's review of her book Mommy Wars: Stay-at-Home and Career Moms Face Off on Their Choices, Their Lives, Their Families on Literary Mama. In her review, Tsao wrote that while the book is a good one, its title and subtitle are unnecessarily divisive. Steiner responded:
I loved the Literary Mama review of Mommy Wars. I just wanted to explain the title.
What I found in talking to hundreds of moms over the past three years is that the worst "mommy war" is the one inside women's heads as we struggle to come to peace with our choices (or lack of choices) regarding work and kids. Nearly every college-educated mom I know struggles with whether she's made the "right" choice about how to balance raising kids and working. It's an inner dialogue that sometimes causes us to lash out at other moms who've made different choices -- hence the so-called "mommy war" between working and at-home moms.
No one in America tells moms that we are doing a good job. We all need to tell ourselves, and other moms, that we are good mothers. No "perfect mom" exists, despite the commercials, television programs, and articles that seem to insist that some kind of perfection is possible if we try hard enough! Moms are like snowflakes -- no two are alike. This doesn't mean we are better or worse than other mothers. We are simply ourselves.
Ask yourself "would I like to be my own kid?" This will give you a lot of answers about just how fine a mother you are.
All the best,
Leslie Morgan Steiner
Meanwhile, I had emailed Caitlin Flanagan to let her know that the author profile and book review had been published on Literary Mama. Flanagan did not comment on either piece, but instead sent me this:
Spray a pyrex baking pan with Pam
Put halibut steaks in the pan
Drizzle with combination of teriyaki sauce and olive oil
Put crumbled feta cheese on top
Bake at 375 degrees for 15-20 minutes
Serve with couscous to which you have added some chopped pecans and fried cranberries
Different authors, different approaches to publicity.
Check out LM columnist Sophia Raday’s essay in the NY Times Modern Love column at Diary of a Soldier's Wife: Tie-Dye and Camo Don't Mix
From the column:
My husband is like the Lone Ranger: he leaves a trail of bullets in his wake. Not silver bullets, but gold 9 millimeters, orange "simunitions" and menacing hollow-points with bronze tips.
I find them at the bottom of the washing machine, next to the pile of mail in our front hall or mixed in a heap of change. He is a police officer in nearby Oakland, Calif., a former SWAT team member, and a colonel in the Army Reserve. Sometimes when I gather the cool bullets in my palm, I stare at them and wonder: How did I, a Berkeley resident, a former peace activist, someone with a "Bread, not bombs" button, end up married to The Man?
After reading the essay, you can read more about her love affair with "The Man" at her column here at Literary Mama: Mama Athens, Daddy Sparta
Just wanted to let folks know that today (Tuesday, June 20) LM's own Rebecca Kaminsky will be a guest blogger, filling in for Leslie Morgan Steiner at her parenting "work-life" blog on The Washington Post's website. You will find her at: On Balance.
And please join in the dialogue by posting a comment!
You can read more of Rebecca Kaminsky's work at one of her columns here at Literary Mama: Down Will Come Baby
Call the American Academy of Pediatrics; turn me in. Call the SIDS foundation folks. Tell 'em all I did the unthinkable. I bucked the advice. I put my babies, both of them, to sleep on their tummies. And if I danced around that truth before, now I'm willing to admit it, to own up, to tell the world that I put my own instinct (unhoned as it was when I started this parenting gig) ahead of received wisdom.
I didn't set out to defy this rule -- the one that states all babies be put to sleep on their backs, all the time. Pregnant, I had the best of intentions. With the smugness (or is it naiveté?) we're prone to when the babe is still safely tucked on the inside, I believed that the experts must have it right. Plus, I'd seen the research; I knew that an unbroken line could be drawn between the Back to Sleep campaign and the plummeting rates of Sudden Infant Death Syndrome.
In the hospital after giving birth, I watched, dazed with post-C-section painkillers and puffy with IV-induced edema, as the nurses swaddled my son, Daniel, with such deftness and speed that I despaired of ever doing it myself, and laid him, face-up, in his rolling plastic bassinette with the chipper "I'm a boy!" sign taped to its side. Later I did my own sloppy swaddling, and placed him the way I'd been shown. The way all the books admonished me to do. The way the articles in the baby magazines practically hyperventilated about. The advice was written in a friendly tone ("best to put baby to sleep on his back!") but the subtext, though subtle, was clear ("don't you dare put that baby to sleep on his tummy!").
It worked. For the four days in the hospital, anyway.
Then I took Daniel home. As my drugs wore off, as my scar slowly healed, as we both became adjusted to the rhythms (which is to say, lack of rhythm) of home, my son started crying. And crying, and crying. Our pediatrician showed us how to flex his legs into his chest to help him expel the excess gas he couldn't get out on his own. I bought gripe water from England on the Internet. I pumped my milk and tried low-air-flow bottles. I gave him very, very weak chamomile tea. My husband drove him around and the block. And still he screamed.
When Daniel was three weeks old, I took him to my parents' house for Thanksgiving. My mom, handling her new grandson, tried all her moves, honed over three children and three older grandchildren: She held him draped over her arm, over her lap as she rubbed his back. And, without consulting me, she put him down for a nap--face down. "You can't do that!" I yelped. "He has to sleep on his back."
But my mom hadn't read the articles. She was going by sight, and the sight was plain enough: my tense little baby had relaxed, flattened out, fallen peacefully to sleep. He did seem to like it that way. Before, no matter how gently I placed him face-up, he flailed a bit, his eyes wide, as though he was falling through space, as though he didn't trust the firm crib mattress beneath him. Maybe all that air above him freaked him out. Maybe being on his belly physically soothed him the way a hot water bottle might.
Seeing my child snooze this way gave me the nerve to continue putting him tummy-down. My confidence grew. Daniel was a big baby, and strong. From his tummy, he could lift his head--in fact, he could raise his whole upper body in mini-push-ups--from the age of 3 or 4 weeks. When I'd put him down to sleep after a nighttime feeding, I found could tiptoe back to my bed (really, one thin wall away) knowing that he could easily lift and turn his head if need be. By 11 weeks old, he was sleeping through the night.
When I had son number two, James, I started again with the back-sleeping routine. But it wasn't long before he, too, made it clear that he really preferred snooze on his tummy, thank you very much.
So here's what I think: I think the Back to Sleep campaign has done a marvelous job, a necessary job. (Though of course parents now have to worry about plagiocephaly, and about giving their back-sleeping tots equal waking time on their tummies--not life threatening issues, of course, but just something else to consider.) I think we're all wiser and better parents thanks to the wealth of research-based, well-thought-out information available to us. The books, the magazines, the doctors: They all help shed welcome light on the perplexing world of first-time newborn care. But all this information may come at a price, and that is the dulling of our own instincts. We're used to deferring to experts; after all, would we refinish an antique armoire or invest in the stock market without first sifting through expert opinion? But when we put all our trust in the parenting gurus, listen to them slavishly rather than discriminatingly, we have less trust in our own budding parental wisdom. Expert voices shouldn't drown out the inner voice that tells you what your baby wants, what your baby needs.
And my babies, quite simply, needed to sleep on their stomachs.
When my partner and I were driving our newly placed, three-day old, adopted daughter home for the first time, my partner looked at the baby in the rearview mirror and announced, "You're a girl! That's a really complicated thing. Don't take it too seriously."
As soon as we got the baby home, we began to experience the complications. Some people gave us clothing for her that we couldn't bring ourselves to let her wear. Mostly this consisted of outfits featuring Disney princesses or Barbies. But my partner's colleagues from the Women's Studies department added a different complication. One gave us a little yellow dress with tiny, tasteful flowers on the hem. "My 3 year-old daughter picked it out," she explained apologetically, "but I told her no pink, because we don't know how you feel about that." I assured her the dress was darling (and it was). It was also soft and easy to get on and off. My daughter wore it often.
Maybe it's the Women's Studies connection, maybe it's because we're lesbians, but everyone seemed to expect us to have strong opinions about not dressing our daughter too "girlie." And in the past several months, we've met other lesbian moms who quietly raise their eyebrows when we bring our daughter to playgroups wearing floral prints or shades of pink. One book I read by a lesbian mom even chastises gay men for letting their daughters dress too femininely. "Gender-neutral clothing" seems to be a battle cry of the feminist mothers' revolution.
This feminist mother begs to differ.
I don't disagree that babies are mostly genderless. I have always thought those hospital newborn pictures of baby girls with pink ribbons velcroed to their heads were just plain, weird, if not cosmically wrong. And once, an old friend from college sent me a picture of his four week-old son so surrounded by sports balls that it was hard to pick the baby out of the pile.
But the fact that people do this absurd gender work upon tiny new infants is evidence that in our society, most adults find it impossible to relate to a truly androgynous being as a human subject. Because of this, the Intersex Society of North America, an advocacy group for those born with non-typically gendered anatomy, recommends assigning an intersexed child a gender at birth, though it strongly advises against surgical procedures until children are old enough to consent to them.[1]
Of course, children's clothing attests to this social need to gender babies. As every parent knows, children's clothing stores are always divided between a girls' section and a boys' section. Online, the distinction is even clearer, as browsers often have to choose from a menu that lists "girls'" and "boys'" clothes separately. With the exception of two newborn-sized onesies in yellow and green, everything in the stores is coded for either girls or boys. It can be a simple white shirt, but if it is on the girls' side, it will have a ruffle somewhere to make its intended gender clear.
Thus, I don't dress my daughter gender-neutrally; no one does. Like everyone else, I dress her in either "boys' clothes," or "girls' clothes." And when I dress her in the clothes I purchased on the boys' side of the store, people misread her gender every time.
"He's gonna be a bruiser! Aren't you sonny? You gonna play rugby?" one man said to my 15th percentile-sized daughter on a day that she wore a yellow shirt and blue shorts sans ruffles.
If I correct people who think she's a boy, rather than re-evaluating their assumptions, they turn the judgment on me for dressing her "wrong."
Contrarily, when her clothes code her female, women coo and swoon at my daughter's beauty and charm. "Such a sweet little girl!" they sigh.
Rather than focusing on gender then, I dress my daughter according to the criteria of comfort, ease of movement, and fashion appeal, in that order. All of her clothes fit all three criteria, both her "boy" outfits and her "girl" outfits. She is too young to express an opinion about what she wears, so my partner and I choose according to our own tastes. This means that we dress her from both ends of a gender continuum. My partner tends to buy her miniature Hawaiian shirts and denim overalls (no ruffles or pink embroidery). I tend to buy her floral print sundresses and cardigan sweaters with heart-shaped buttons.
My partner and I are committed feminists. We are hoping for the great feminist revolution as much as any bebirkenstocked, androgynous lesbian separatist. But ironically, I think we believe both more in gender and less in it than those mythic separatists. We don't believe that "gender-neutral" options exist in this culture, but we do believe that actual gender is dynamic and can't be reduced to anatomy.
We believe that all children should be treated as intersexed, or at least as potentially transgendered. My daughter is a girl for now (albeit, an occasionally cross-dressing one), because having an assigned gender is a critical tool for being introduced to the world she lives in. But she may not always be a girl or quite a girl or quite the girl I make her out to be today. So I don't strive to dress her outside the codes of gender. Even if it were possible, it would be an unfair attempt to force a certain gender expression -- or rather, expressionlessness -- upon her.
Gender isn't going anywhere. If that revolution happened tomorrow, gender per se would not disappear. It may be an invention used to create hierarchies and oppress those on the bottom of them, but it is also a tool of self-expression, rebellion and desire. When my daughter is older, she will decide what her gender is. And when she is a little older than that, she might re-decide. There is no benefit as I see it, in artificially denying her the opportunity to experience the world through the lens of gender now. Her gendered experiences today will give her that much more to go on when she is determining who she is tomorrow.
My interview with Caitlin Flanagan and review of her book, To Hell with All That: Loving and Loathing Our Inner Housewife, have been posted. If you have any comments, we'd love to read them here.
Ericka Lutz and Marjorie Osterhout have taken on Senior Editor roles at Literary Mama. Ericka is responsible for the content side, bringing to the page the same fresh and bold content you've come to expect from Literary Mama. Marjorie will be making the very complicated technical side of running a web site look effortless. Amy Hudock continues to act as Editor-in-Chief. Andrea Buchanan, Managing Editor, is on hiatus for the summer but you can catch up with her on her blog.
Ericka Lutz will be teaching a four-week course through mediabistro.com on Writing and Reading Your Short Fiction in San Francisco (July 17-August 7). Ericka recently read one of her short stories at the Boston Fiction Festival.
DotMoms recently featured an interview with Managing Editor, Andrea Buchanan where she discussed Literary Mama: Reading for the Maternally Inclined .
If you've ever thought about submitting something to Literary Mama, you might want to check out the LM Editors' column, Mama Sez. Creative Non-Fiction Writers might want to read Editor Jennifer Margulis's tips for getting published in her two-part essay On Rejection. And those who like to end their pieces about mothering with "but it was all worth it" might want to read Shari MacDonald Strong's Pat Is a Name, Not an Ending.
Suzanne Kamata, Fiction Co-Editor will have an essay published in the upcoming anthology about mothering, Not What I Expected.
Poetry Editor Rachel Iverson has been accepted into the fiction program at the Iowa Writers' Workshop. She is starting the workshop this week and we look forward to hearing about her experiences at one of the country's most well-regarded writing programs.