Le Conflit

So the other night I’m in bed looking at my stack of unread Harpers and New Yorkers on the nightstand and thinking I really should make an effort to flip through some of them. The top issue was a Harpers that had an article titled on the cover “The Tyranny of Breastfeeding”.  I thought, “oooh, that sounds interesting” and immediately read it.  Now just for the record I didn’t think it was a great article – lots of facts and figures thrown around with no human element (and I’m a chick and I always look for the human element), however it did back up a lot of the feelings I’ve been having and things I’ve observed lately on my March 2012 WTE board; mainly that this concept of women being made to feel profoundly guilty and like failures because they have difficulty breastfeeding (or can’t at all) is a fairly new phenomenon, and nobody ever wants to talk about the entire generations of Western adults raised on formula who turned out just fine.  This article mentioned a prickly French feminist I’d previously read about named Elisabeth Badinter (a highly controversial figure) and her new book Le Conflit: La Femme et La Mere (The Conflict: The Woman and the Mother).

I immediately got on my phone and googled her, her book, and various interviews about her book (I had actually already read one in the New Yorker some weeks ago), and was compelled to download the book to my Kindle (it’s not available until the end of April).  Apparently her stance is that this new focus on back-to-the-earth mothering (breastfeeding until your children are in school, cloth diapering, making your own baby food, rejection of pain meds during labor, etc) is all about throwing women back to the dark ages and essentially keeping us out of the work force.  And you know what?  I kind of agree with her!

And it’s interesting coming from me because I do intend on at least *trying* many of these green crunchy things – I’m open to trying anything – but I also happen to have a unique situation on many levels.  For one, I have the luxury of being home all day, so there’s no work I need to “return to” or worry about being demoted from since I run my own business.  I am also single so don’t have the luxury of letting my work slide – no, mama MUST make sure the business continues strong because it will keep a roof over our heads.  So I have the ability to do all of these time consuming green things like make the baby food (and I do love to cook, so that’s no problem for me) and cloth diaper and all that, yet at the same time at a certain point the business has to take priority otherwise we’ll be homeless.

So for ecological reasons (I do hate waste) I like the idea of cloth diapering; however as I took the newly prepped newborn diapers out of the wash for the TWELFTH TIME last night I couldn’t help but think, “wow, that was a pain in the ass.”  But at the same time I’ve always been suspicious of all this over the top focus on baby and kid stuff being so green and so perfect and safe…there’s always been that part of me that’s said, “but when we were kids we didn’t have X,Y,Z and we’re fine…”  Now I recognize there are certainly more chemicals in the world now than there were in the 70s, food has for sure changed, our environment has changed, and of course you want to do what’s best for your kids.  But I have a sneaking suspicion most people talk a good game but half the time are faking it (much like I think many people are faking it in their marriages).  I think for every mother who squirrels away reusable cloth bags of organic, locally grown carrots for her kid’s snack, that same mother hits the McD’s drive through for chicken nuggets from time to time because it’s just plain EASY and then hides the evidence.

I guess my main issue isn’t so much the mechanics of all this (the breastfeeding, the cloth diapering, etc etc) as it is the guilt and shame that’s foisted upon those who don’t fall lock-step into line with these ideas.  My WTE board is full of this every single day – new mothers absolutely at their wit’s end because breastfeeding is so difficult and they feel like failures and everyone around them is making them feel guilty.  And I think that’s just horrible.  And again, it didn’t used to be like that. 

So is it men making women feel like they have to be slaves to their babies unnecessarily with the consequence of causing women to let their careers languish or give them up entirely?  Interestingly enough, I don’t think so – once again the culprit is OTHER WOMEN.  Much like female genital mutilation in certain countries – it’s the women – the grandmothers, the aunties – doing this to each other, not the men.  And sure, it’s a male dominated society/religion etc, but it’s still women going along saying “this must be done”.  In this country, do you think men really give a shit if you cloth diaper?  I don’t think so. But I bet everyone has a judgmental female friend who does!

So I am very interested to read this book.  I understand Elisabeth Badinter is a very disliked character (especially by Americans) and of course I won’t agree with everything she posits.  But in the end I just love women who behave badly, so if for no other reason I’ll read her book just to feel naughty. My mother didn’t raise no pushover!

Speaking of women behaving badly, so I already had this post in mind when I went for my NST today.  Little did I know what a controversial day it would end up being!  Once again everything good, normal, didn’t even have trouble with the appropriate movements/baseline like I had been (because now I eat closer to the appointment).  And as usual we initially got a high blood pressure reading but took it 20 seconds later and found it normal.  This time the new nurse took this information to one of their high risk obs, who after my NST insisted I come sit in his office.  The first words out of his mouth were, “we really don’t see the point of your continuing this pregnancy at this point, so we’d like to induce now.” I was, as the Brits say, “gob smacked.” He said that even though my risk for pre-e appears to be “very low” that they’ve seen cases of sudden escalations and they don’t think it’s worth the risk; that the baby isn’t going to mature any more at this point (umm…not true, actually) and the risk of c-section being induced at this point is no more than if I were to go into labor naturally (also not true).  Then he stared at me, ready to make an appointment for induction.  I said (as best I could without laughing) that I was not interested in being induced at this time.  He asked why.  I said because even he admitted my risk was extremely low, that my “condition” hasn’t changed one iota for weeks, everything looks good, and I see no medical reason to induce me at this point.  Then he launched into a bunch of scare tactics about the risks of “staying pregnant” and studies done in Africa and how women in the West survive only because they do things like induce labor, etc.  Then he stared at me.  “No,” was all I said.  Then he asked if I wanted to do more blood work today and I said no.  No, and I’m not getting the effing flu shot at the end of March when there’s no epidemic going on, either, even though I’m asked this every five fucking seconds, thank you very much.  Seriously, I wanted to punch this guy in his smug, fat little face.  All I can say is thank god we live in a free country where you can’t be forced into things like this – you do actually have a choice in your healthcare (well, sort of); they just have to show on paper that you were offered things and made the choice to decline in case you decide to sue them later.  That’s what this is all about.  And personally, I find it appalling.

So talk to me in two-three weeks and maybe my position will have changed.  Talk to me if my blood pressure suddenly does something different, or if I get any actual signs of real pre-e instead of this “maybe, maybe not” bullshit I’ve been dealing with for weeks.  But so far with everything looking pretty damned good, and being only at 38 weeks, I think I can manage to hold out another week or two.  He’ll come when he’s damned good and ready…putain!