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I used to be a trashy magazine whore. I just loved them and was always happy to lose myself to cheap gossip and pretty pictures. A few years ago, this all changed. Call it maturity, I guess, but I started to get sick of reading about the exploits of Paris Hilton and Lindsey Lohan, and appalled by the way magazines patently made up stories. Now I know gossip magazines go with the territory when you are famous but nobody deserves having false and hurtful stories written about them. I realised that by buying the magazines, I was contributing to the situation. So, one New Years Eve a few years ago, I vowed to stop buying trashy magazines. And, apart from a few falls off the wagon when I’ve bought those annual ‘25 Most Beautiful/Intriguing/Sexy People’ specials that Who Weekly publishes, I’ve been a good girl. Well, I’m not completely snow white, I do read them at the doctors and the hairdressers….
Anyway, yesterday, I was at a fast food outlet that will remain nameless with my kids. Child number 1 had made friends with another kid and was happily playing, Child number 2 was asleep and I had a cold pot-mix coke in my hand. So I decided to avail myself of the free reading matter. I picked up a well known women’s magazine that, on its front page, trumpeted a story about Kate Middleton (Prince William’s girlfriend) and her secret pain over not being able to have kids. I swear that’s what it read – “Kate’s secret pain. I can’t have kids’….or something along those lines. I’m no Royalist so I didn’t actually pick that magazine up because I gave a rat’s about Kate Middleton – it was just something to read - I'm one of those people who'll read the back of a cornflake packet if there's nothing else at hand. I started to read the article and was astounded by what I was reading. Kate is not medically unable to have children as the front cover suggests. Instead the article waffled on about Prince William having to commit himself to his Army career for a good ten years before marrying Kate. By this time she’ll be in her mid-thirties and possibly unable to have children. Nowhere does it state that she has articulated this concern or that the scenario they are painting is fact. Whaaat!? How does a magazine get away with this spurious drivel? If it wasn’t for the fact, the edition I was reading was months old, I would have written a letter to the editor.
Actually, reading all the ancient women’s magazines that doctors’ offices seem to have gives you a good insight into the amount of crap printed by these magazines. You can see which rumoured pregnancies never eventuated; which relationships never started or ended; and which pieces of gossip were incorrect. And, by golly, it’s a lot.
In the past few years, celebrities have started to fight back and have sued over false stories. I think that we the readers need to start holding magazines accountable too. We need to write and complain about false and misleading stories; especially the main stories – the ones on the front cover that may lead you buy the magazines. We Australians love our magazines but we deserve a lot better than what we are being dished up. In the meantime, I will continue on with my vow of abstinence and will now take books to read at doctors, hairdressers and fast food restaurants.
Post natal depression is a subject covered by all books on pregnancy and babies. Generally these books acknowledge a level of loopiness is to be expected in the first few months and then discuss the ‘possibility’ of post natal depression. It always seems to be portrayed as something that could happen. The more I talk to mothers, however, the more I am convinced that some level of depression is inevitable in the first year of motherhood. I have no statistics or research to back this up. My feelings are based only on my own experience and whispered conversations with friends and acquaintances. And these conversations are often whispered as women almost confess the strange, often violent, thoughts they had in the first few months and the feelings of dread and anxiety that wouldn’t lift from their shoulders. They confess to taking a while to bond with their child and to feelings of dislocation and unhappiness. Feelings that have scared them and shamed them.
Admittedly these conversations have taken place with mainly middle-class professional women so I can’t claim to be representing a wide sample of women’s experiences. Actually the status of the women I’ve spoken to makes me wonder if the depression stems from our tendency to fight the change in our lives. We’ve worked for fifteen to twenty years before having kids and lived a self-determined life. Does this mean we are more likely to swim against the tide of motherhood and send ourselves mad in the process? Anyway, I digress.
Post natal depression is still a taboo subject despite the public discourse arising from the experiences of celebrities such as Brooke Shields and Jessica Rowe. It’s not something women happily talk about in their mothers groups. But it should be. We mums would help ourselves a lot more if we stopped pretending we are coping when we are not. By opening up about our own struggles, we can help our friends open up. Maybe too we can start to develop coping strategies for ourselves and for other mothers. If we realise what we are feeling are inevitable and typical, we can open ourselves up to what is going on inside ourselves. Struggling against the depression doesn’t help. Accepting it and going with it just might.
If there's one thing guaranteed to raise the hackles on the back on my neck, it's an article or an ad aimed at the so-called Gen X. I'm sick to death of hearing about Baby Boomers, Gen X, Gen Y and so on and what they are supposedly like. To me, it's lazy journalism and advertising. It also seems that it gives people license to bash the generation coming after them. At the end of last century, it was all about slagging off at Gen X slackers and now it's about stigmatising brattish Gen Ys. And of course we all hate Baby Boomers, don't we?
I was having a conversation about this subject yesterday amid the mayhem of the Melbourne Museum on a Sunday. The husband of one of my friends made a few good points about this birth cohort labelling. We call Gen Y techno-savvy and impatient but aren't all generations like this when they are young? We could program the DVD player before our parents worked it out. Our parents could work the TV before their parents worked it all out. And isn't being young about being impatient and brash? And don't we all gradually get more conservative as we get older and burden ourselves with children and mortgages?
There are obviously similarities amongst cohorts due to similar experiences. Our grandparents experienced war and the Depression and never lost that urge to save for a rainy day. But does that mean you can treat that entire generation as a homogenous block and assume one method of advertising will work on them or that they will predictably behave in a certain way? I don't think so. I think we are so much more than the sum total of our birth cohorts.
I was sitting in the local park with my friend, Jane, last Friday, discussing - as we do - life and our place in it. Friday afternoons have become our regular debrief session. We've been discussing the ins and outs of a duck's proverbial for over twenty years now. It's something that connects us.
I met Jane at uni in the first year and we got on like a house on fire. We spent hours and hours over the next four years in the small caf at Monash, drinking tea in polystyrene cups and talking about politics, books, films and our imagined future. If there'd been BAs handed out for the most time spent in lengthy bullshit sessions, we'd have been awarded first class honours. I left uni, worked and then went back for post-grad studies. Jane was still doing her law degree. In my post grad year, we flatted together. This time it was cups of Earl Grey tea in Jane's liver-coloured china cups - which I inherited and still have - in our little kitchen. Friday night debrief sessions were held to the sounds of The Doors ~ "LA Woman
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It’s all wonderful. You look down at that pregnancy predictor and there are two bold, blue stripes. You are pregnant. While your first reaction will be to telephone your partner and then your parents, what you should do is go to the mirror and take a long last look at the person you are because you are about to transform into someone else entirely different. Pre-pregnancy you were an individual with rights and sense of self determination. Now that you are pregnant, you are a vessel and that little embryo you are carrying has just sucked up all your identity and rendered you two-dimensional. Any sense of privacy you had has also gone. Everyone around you now feels they have the right to comment on your appearance, your behaviour and every parenting choice you ever make.
It is relentless. People happily comment on your body and in one day you can be told you are huge, small and hardly showing. People will offer their unwanted opinions about the hospital you are going to, the homebirth you are arranging and the names you are considering. The journey becomes a debate on choices
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There are many challenges faced by parents – on a daily basis and a stage-by-stage basis. The one we all seem to have in common and the one that we all whinge about the most is sleep – the lack of it for parents and the avoidance of it by children. There are many variations to sleep issues:
• babies who wake constantly at night
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We're in the middle of a baby boom. There are stats to tell you that but I'm sure you've noticed it anyway. Proud rounded bellies everywhere and parks full of little kids. We've been encouraged to reproduce by the pollies who've thrown money at us. And we've responded. More and more people are having more and more kids. All good stuff.
Except the resources needed to support parents and children haven't kept up
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"Abandon hope all ye who enter"
This line comes from Dante's Divine Comedy and is apparently the inscription above the entrance to hell. Me? I'd put it above every maternity ward door in the country. Granted, it's probably too late for any woman entering a maternity ward groaning and thrashing from contractions to realise all hope is lost from now on but at least she'd be receiving some honest feedback on parenthood. Goodness knows we parents are great at hiding the bad and exaggerating the good. Whenever I hear a celebrity who's just had a baby crowing about how blissful she is and how easy and wonderful motherhood is, I want to stick a fork in the TV and scream and shout "Liar, liar, pants on fire
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My son has swimming classes on Thursday mornings and I've become good friends with another mum. She's a big hearted soul who is a primary teacher. The other week she was up in arms about a meeting she'd been to the day before. Some of the other mums at the kindy her son attends had called a meeting between themselves and the kindy teacher. This is four year old kindy we are talking about here. These mums were not happy about the program this teacher was running. It wasn't structured enough. There was too much play. One mum commented that every time she drove past the kindy the kids were outside playing. My swimming lesson friend was astounded and went into bat for the kindy teacher. The day she told me about the meeting, she was still astounded. And I was too.
These kids were playing too much??? Since when do four year olds play too much? That's how they learn. About sharing, team work, exercising the imagination, making and breaking rules and making friends. What do these mothers want? A four year old with a degree? And what sort of a mum drives past the kindy to check? Not me. I drop and run. Kindy is as much about me having a bit of time out as it is about my son. I don't worry about what he's doing and not doing. As long as he's making friends and enjoying himself, I don't worry. Kindy is the last of the good times. As soon as kids start school, things changes
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My last post was in April this year. Very dedicated to the cause. And so I return.
A wise musician friend recommended a great book to me. It's called The War of Art and it's by Steven Pressfield. If you haven't heard of him before, he's probably best known for writing The Legend of Bagger Vance. The book is about breaking through your creative block. Pressfield says that on a daily basis all of us battle Resistance. Resistance is the enemy; the thing that keeps us from doing what we dream of doing. We resist by procrastinating, through fear and self-doubt; and diverting our energy into drugs, sex and soap operatic drama. Resistance is strong but not insurmountable
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Comment by Jacqui Horwood
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