Archive: Dec 2009

Over twenty mothers who were mourning the deaths of their children and protesting government violence were arrested and jailed this past weekend in Iran. Valerie Young wrote a great post about it over at her blog, Your (Wo)man in Washington, which can also be found over at MomsRising. Connecting Iranian mothers’ activism with mothers’ activism elsewhere, she writes that

Motherhood instantly ups your ante in the human sweepstakes. It gives you a very personal stake in the future, and makes you vulnerable in every way. It can also empower. Women who hesitated to speak for themselves may find their voice and advocate energetically for themselves as mothers and for the welfare of their children.

Mothers in Iran have been organizing online, on twitter, and on the streets. They have set up a Mournful Mothers Committee with a blog and have been staging anti-government protests on a regular basis in Tehran. They were arrested before Student Day demonstrations planned this past Monday. Watch the video here. Supporters in LA have submitted a petition to the U.N. calling for an investigation of human rights violations in Iran.

I am reminded of the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo who protested regularly during Argentine’s Dirty War–when tens of thousands of Argentinian citizens were abducted, tortured, and “disappeared” by the government–as well as China’s Tiananmen Mothers, or the Welfare Warriors in the U.S. (The picture above is a poster from the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo.) Motherhood can not only be a powerful political motivator for individual women but also provide a potent moral ground from which to protest human rights violations and other injustices. Women in various movements around the world have mobilized the symbolic power of motherhood in ways that work within traditional notions of motherhood to claim authority and demand justice to leave the private space of the home and enter into the public sphere with potentially radical demands.

While it’s true that this form of activism can run the risk of perpetuating traditional definitions of motherhood, it’s also true that it can inspire a powerful activism grounded in an ethics of care. Women who may never have considered themselves activists can suddenly find themselves standing their ground in the face of soldiers with guns, as an anonymous Iranian journalist observes in an article about the ongoing women’s anti-governmental activism in the October 5 issue of The New Yorker.

I am inspired by the brave and media-savvy Mournful Mothers Committee and the mothers who have not let fear stop them from speaking out. They inspire me to consider how caregiving, by women and men, provides us all with an opportunity to extend our circle of concern to our larger communities, both locally and globally.

Anya and Teo are 7 weeks old today, and those first foggy days postpartum are only now coming into hazy relief. Going in, I’d feared postpartum depression; having had a few run-ins with that dark night before, I was all too aware of the risks. Thankfully, depression hasn’t hit. But my mind played some serious tricks on me those first weeks with the babies here at home.

My mind—anxious—obsessed. As in, when not attentively focused elsewhere (diaper, nurse repeat), my mind would wander into spin cycle, grasping over and over again a singular script. You’ll laugh when you hear it. The script went like this: I pretended I was Sarah Jessica Parker. Or rather, I wished I were.

SJP you say? Yes, that’s right. SJP became the object of my relentless postpartum mental gaze because SJP—a soon-to-be Brooklyn neighbor who had recently had twins herself via surrogate—was waited on, I was certain, hand and foot. Nursing at 3am and craving cinnamon toast and fresh orange slices, for example, I’d think: “Sarah Jessica’s cook would be bringing her cinnamon toast and oranges right about now.” And so on. It was the fantasy of the new mother who rather wanted to be cared for herself, and it just didn’t let up.

Until, that is, my hormonally crazed postpartum mind found a new object to twist itself around like a weed: spiders. I’d been up late one night after the hospital watching a National Geographic Special on newborn behavior in the animal kingdom. The program featured a breed of spider for which offsprings’ arrival signaled the mother’s death. Baby spiders hatch, so it’s not like the mother spider died in childbirth; rather, once the voracious offspring hatched, the tiny multi-legged carnivores would feed on the mother’s body, destroying her along the way. I watched, spellbound, repulsed, as she let it happen. It was nature taking its course. And while nursing, I just couldn’t let it go. It was the fantasy of the nursing mother who feared she might disappear.

My obsession with the baby spiders slowly gave way to one more—a fixation that is with me still and one I hope will not go away (unlike the others, which, thankfully, did!). This last postpartum fixation had to do with Marco, and our work/life arrangement, which is in flux. Following the mind meld with SJP and the fixation on the spiders, I became obsessed with the notion of Marco as a stay-at-home-dad. It’s one of many arrangements we are trying on, but in my mind, it stuck like glue. It’s the working mother’s fantasy, and it’s one that many couples have, of course, made real.

I never got my cinnamon toast exactly, though Marco makes me waffles, which do the trick; I no longer worry that I am that mother spider (phew!). But I do still dream about Marco, pictured here reading Michael Chabon’s Manhood for Amateurs with Teo strapped to his chest, being a primary caregiver. Postpartum blur, or potential solution? We shall see. In the meantime, we’re both enjoying these babies, and being home with them, so very much!

GET IT WHILE IT’S HOT: Demystify the blogosphere with GWP’s very own Courtney E. Martin. Attend the live online event TOMORROW or order the download to enjoy any old time! Register here, at She Writes.

Here’s the full court description (pun intented!):

What distinguishes a blog from a website? How do you find a blog that deals with your particular passions and interests? What is proper etiquette for getting bloggers’ attention and/or participating in the blog conversation? This workshop for beginners demystifies blogs once and for all, breaking down both the basic anatomy of a blog (blog roll, categories, comments, etc.) and the landscape of the larger blogosphere. Participants will walk away with a clear understanding of how to find blogs that interest them or pertain to their field, search for particular issues and experts within the new media landscape, and operate with savvy in the blogosphere—using blogs for research, promotion, and platform building.
Stay tuned for Part II, in which Courtney will demystify starting a blog and finding content to keep it fresh and attract traffic.

Courtney E. Martin is a writer, speaker, and consultant based in Brooklyn, New York. She is the author of three books, including the award-winning Perfect Girls, Starving Daughters: How the Quest for Perfection is Harming Young Women (Penguin, 2007). She is also a Senior Correspondent for The American Prospect and an editor at Feministing.com, the most widely read feminist publication in the world. She has appeared on most major media outlets, including The O’Reilly Factor, CNN, and GoodMorning America, and won numerous awards and fellowships for her writing and activism. Courtney is happy to coach both individuals and organizations in blog and book proposal development, new media outreach, and engaging young people. She also loves facilitating panels, developing conferences, and speaking on topics such as feminism, intergenerational dialogue, activism, youth culture, politics, and writing.

With Tiger Woods in the news for this latest round of Very-Public-Infidelity, guest blogger Ebony A. Utley weighs in with her expertise on the issue. A research expert on marital infidelity, Utley confronts common stereotypes and raises questions about cheating, talking, silence, and power.

The proverbial cats are out of the bag as the tabloid media collect stories from Tiger Woods’ alleged mistresses. The mistresses are increasingly chatty — talking about “I was with Tiger here” and “he left me a voicemail there.” Woods is busy denying what he can and apologizing for what he can’t while Mrs. Woods remains silent.

None of this is unusual. With a slew of high-profile unfaithful men in the news lately, it’s hard not to notice a pattern. These men haven’t come out in public to say, “I had inappropriate sexual relations outside my relationship” without first facing an impeachment trial, sexual-assault accusations, blackmail threats, texts, sexts, voicemails … you get the picture.  Rarely have these men come clean without some sort of provocation.  Often, famous unfaithful men confess to their infidelity because the other woman beat him to it.

Mistresses are notorious for telling their side of the story because the world wants to hear it. The sex secrets of sexy women are titillating. Be honest with yourself. You wanted to know whether Tiger’s mistresses were prettier than his wife. Some of you readers out there also wanted to know whether she looked like she was better at sex than the wife. Admit it. Those are our society’s infidelity stereotypes. The other woman had to be offering something that the wife did not.

The wife wasn’t giving it up. Or if she was, her sex was boring.
The wife let herself go.
The wife was too invested in the kids.
The wife didn’t (emotionally) support her man.
The wife was emasculating.
The wife was never around.

Mistresses are quick to perpetuate these stereotypes, but the husbands are quick to offer their wives $4 million diamond rings and $80 million prenup revisions.  If the wives were such horrible people, why dish out all the cash to keep them? Since the husband can no longer keep the mistress quiet, is he buying his wife’s silence? I don’t think so. Men who cheat on their wives rarely want to leave them; usually they’re genuinely sorry. The silence on the wives part is not about his money. It’s about power.

A mistress has power because she is the secret. She is the one tasked with being discreet. Once the secret is out, the mistress loses her power. She scrambles to get it back with revealing details, but the more she talks, the more her power diminishes. People know who she is, where she was, what she did, how she did it, and who else she did it with. Once the prurient details are all out there, people are free to pass judgment on the mistress and she rapidly moves from sexy story to object of public scrutiny to obscurity.

But the wife who refuses to talk gains power. Now she is the one deciding to be discreet.  No one knows what she’s thinking and everyone wants to. Did she know?  Did she have a revenge affair? Why didn’t she leave him? Does she love him that much? How is she going to spend those millions? The quieter she remains, the more dignity that wife regains.  Long after we’ve forgotten the mistress’ name and the seedy motels and the racy voicemails, the silent wife is still standing in the spotlight with an air of mystery about her. We might not understand her, but her secrets are the ones that garner respect. The most understated gift a chatty mistress gives to the wife is power.

Ebony A. Utley, Ph.D. is an expert in infidelity. She is currently writing about her interviews with wives who have experienced infidelity during their marriages. See more of her research at http://www.theutleyexperience.com/

Four years ago, Judith Warner made the argument that “hyper-parenting” in the U.S. has caused plenty of mothers to lose all semblance of balance in Perfect Madness: Motherhood in the Age of Anxiety. While the book received its fair share of criticism (for example, see the thoughtful analysis of Warner’s book on The Mothers Movement Online), I recently confronted the bubbling up and spiraling out of my own anxiety–slightly irrational but nonetheless all-consuming–which found its source in the shadowy threat of the H1N1 virus.

A few weeks ago, I was totally caught up in H1N1 anxiety. No doubt some of it had to do with media stories about cases of mortality; the rest of it was wrapped up in having young children. I was managing to control my anxiety surrounding my youngest son, who’s in nursery school, but couldn’t manage to quell the fears about my oldest daughter. J. is in elementary school and has asthma plus multiple food allergies, including to egg; this means she can’t get flu shots. We had plans to travel to see their grandparents for Thanksgiving on two planes. Given our past history of taking her to hospitals for various asthma- and sickness-related issues, both my husband and I were nervous about the whole plan.

What to do? Forego the trip to see aging grandparents because of our generalized anxiety about the possibilities of the kids catching H1N1 (from which plenty of kids have recovered)? Grit our teeth and try our best to get a grip on the anxiety and fear we knew were being influenced by media hype? Silence our concerns about a relatively new vaccine and do everything we could to find out if it was possible for both of our kids to get vaccinated?

In the end, we settled on choice #3. This wasn’t hard for my youngest one, but proved more time- and labor- intensive for my oldest. We finally managed to score a dose of the vaccine from the pediatrician, which we transported to the allergist–where we sat, all morning, watching Sponge Bob in the waiting room while the doctor skin-tested her for reactions to the vaccine and eventually administered the dose in two stages.

So, what does this have to do with global motherhood? For one, our little family drama was set into play by globalization, which not only affects the pathways of pandemic viruses and the constant flow of information about them, but also the fact that we were living two plane flights away from my parents. At the same time, our experience represents parenting from a position of privilege: we had health insurance, access to the vaccine, and the ability to take a whole day off from work in order to vaccinate our daughter. It reminded me how many U.S. families don’t have the resources to access preventative care, or even to navigate relatively minor medical issues.

Subsequent phone conversations with friends in other states made me realize how this global scenario was at the same time very local. My friend in Boston? Couldn’t get the vaccine for her two kids but didn’t seem overly worried about it. The pregnant friend of friends in Atlanta who wanted the vaccine? Wanted it but couldn’t get it. Those same friends in Atlanta? Had one child who got sick with H1N1, recovered, and subsequently got the vaccine with the rest of the family. These geographical differences are exacerbated when we look at other countries, where H1N1 has sometimes not even registered on the radar. In many countries, it’s diseases such as pneumonia, diarrhea, malaria, and HIV/AIDS that threaten children on a daily basis. (Here’s a link to UNICEF’s The State of the World’s Children 2009 report.)

Parenting in the time of H1N1: for those of us with some degree of resources, it highlights how caring for children often boils down to managing risks. Does the risk of a relatively new vaccine outweigh the potential risks of contracting a virus? Or is it the other way around? (For that matter, how risky is a plane flight to visit grandparents? The car trip to the airport? The list goes on and on.) Thoughtful parents perceive and weigh risks in different ways. There don’t seem to be right or wrong answers, except in hindsight, which can be kind or cruel. We can never know in the moment.

Families without resources have fewer choices, less ability to take control of these anxiety-ridden situations. I suspect it’s far more stressful not to have choices, to care for small children when you can’t take control and you can’t battle fate with much more than prayers and crossed fingers. Even if “control” is anything but.

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I am pleased to introduce Susan David Bernstein, “Beyond Pink & Blue’s” first guest columnist! Susan teaches literature and gender studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and has published widely on contemporary feminist theory and the Victorian novel. She is currently working on a study of women writers and activists in the Reading Room of the British Museum, as well as a memoir titled Unlikely Loves.

Here’s Susan:

I discovered new realms of gender profiling before my child was born in August of 1992. Although the sex chromosomes of this eventual baby were recorded in my OB/GYN file, I was adamant that I did not want to know. “Don’t tell me!” I’d shield my eyes, when a nurse or doctor opened my file at an appointment. At that time, it was increasingly common for people to have this knowledge, and from what I witnessed, prenatal gendering took off with a vengeance. I’d hear comments like, “I know this little guy is going to be a quarterback! What a kicker already!” Baby showers became gendered affairs, and the first outfits for the ride home from the hospital were tooled to match that chromosomal information. I was happy instead to receive an array of baby clothes, some blue, some fuschia, one with a rodeo pattern, another with vegetables in reds, greens, and oranges.

So even back then, it was unusual to answer the “what kind of baby are you having?” question with, “I don’t know.” I had an elaborate birth plan which even included a provision about birthing room announcements: I asked my doctor not to say, “It’s a boy!” or “It’s a girl!” but simply, as he did, “Congratulations, you have a healthy baby!” My partner and I even joked about how we’d try not to know those gender-defining genital features of our baby (we’d have someone else do the diapering and bathing for the first month), so that our ingrained notions about gender would be kept at bay. And, we thought, so would those of the world we lived in. Not possible, I discovered, from day one.

I did of course learn I had a daughter within in minutes of her birth, and she was quickly swaddled in a pink blanket. A nurse held out a basket of caps for newborns, all knitted by a women’s league, and I chose a white one with lavender and blue stripes. But later that day my partner and I requested a different blanket, yellow perhaps, or green or white. We learned that the maternity unit only had blue and pink blankets.

This was Madison, Wisconsin, a university town with a history of progressive values; Tammy Baldwin is our congressional representative—the first open lesbian to be elected to the House. Today, in 2009, my daughter is taking a terrific women’s studies class in her high school (the same one Baldwin graduated from); all four public high schools in Madison offer such courses. But in 1992, there were only pink and blue blankets at the hospital. So I asked for a blue one. A nurse entered my room the next morning, glanced at the bassinet, and then asked me cheerily, “And how is your little boy today?” I responded, “I do not have a boy.” The woman peered in the basket, looked a bit alarmed, and hurried out of the room.

Within a few years, the hospital expanded its newborn wardrobe to include prints and other colors. Still, there remain many ways in which the straitjackets of gender identity flourish from before birth through high school. My daughter spent all four years of high school competing on the cross country team where the girls run 4K meets to the boys’ 5K races. And now she’s one of two girls on her high school team of forty wrestlers. She’s also in the gender minority in her advanced chemistry and physics classes. As a family, we’re still learning to navigate the updated variations of pink and blue that we first encountered in 1992.

As I slowly reenter the world–Anya and Teo are 6 weeks old!–I can’t think of a better place to start than She Writes’ webinar tomorrow, “Time Management for Mother Writers” with Change Agent extraordinaire (and mother of two) Rebecca Rodskog. It’s not too late to register.  It’s at 1-2 pm Eastern Standard Time, via conference call and web.  Join us! And if you can’t, you can always order the download after the event. And also do check out the Mother Writers group at She Writes too–for “moms who write with spunk and sass.”

Not sure I’ve got spunk/sass yet since I’m a little, how do you say, sleep deprived, but I do have a post up over at the She Writes blog called : “Finding Mother Writer” which excerpts a GWP post of course.

Here’s to all you mother writers out there who have been doing it for some time.  You inspire the heck out of me over here!