Masochistic Mommy

Everyone loves Roosevelt's motivational mantra: “No one can make you feel inferior without your consent”. It adorns fridge magnets and keychains the world over. But it seems, there is one group of people who don’t appreciate this sentiment. In fact, they argue exemption from it. Yup, I’m talking about mothers. For a group of people who celebrate so passionately their prerogative of choice, it is bitterly ironic that mothers are keen to dispose of this belief when their emotions are involved. “Stop being judgemental, I should not be made to feel guilty” is their mating call. It’s so common that almost everyone takes heed, lest they be seen as a kind of evil Morton Downey Jr. Yet contrary to what some mothers and stand-up comedians may claim, women are not fragile simpering wallflowers at the mercy of iron-tongued tormentors. They are not passive pawns pushed around by the force of others’ words. The image of the female as a boiling pot of feelings, a puppet to her emotions, easily t...

If you’re been alive for the fast five or so years, you may have noticed something peculiar: the emergence of a new zeitgeist of contempt for breastfeeding. Even a cursory look at the lifestyle section of many online newspapers reveals a contemporary back-catalogue now groaning under the weight of the collective bitching of a vocal minority of failed breastfeeders. In this post I question the motives of these failed breastfeeders, let’s call them ‘formula apologists’ – the folk who make it their raison d'etre to criticise breastfeeding - that is, to criticise its promotion and its significance. You see, nobody comes immaculately to the infant feeding debate. Its discussion can never be abstract. As I discussed in the chapter of my book  aptly titled ‘Defensiveness’, the agenda of these people is not as transparent as they would hope. Ask yourself this question: by virtue of being failures, do these people really qualify as noted dispensers of feeding advice? Do they have the well-b...

You see the world from your own perspective – of course you do. What can be harder to recognise is that not everyone else does. When you’re a child, most of the people in your world are focused on you most of the time. When you’re two, for example, you can scream when you’re hungry and someone will produce food for you. But that’s not going to work when you’re 20. Okay, so you’re thinking “No shit Sherlock”. But there are other ways in which we can all too easily assume that the world is focused on us when in fact no one is giving us a thought. Parenting is the mother of all imagined theatrical stages. We picture ourselves centre-stage, with all eyes on *our* performance. Either we think people are “breastfeeding at us ”, or a scientific study is a conspiracy to make us feel bad , or someone pointing out the risks of circumcision is spoiling for a fight with us. Such self-centrism is an easy trap to fall into. Yet part of growing up is recognising that other people might not have us in...

Today I was enjoying a very informative episode of Peppa Pig – the one where Peppa and her pals are learning to ski and their teacher, Madame Gazelle, is a world champion... Anyway, I was having a great time and then, during the commercials, this crock of shit appeared: Before I even had a chance to recoil in horror, a Mary Poppins’esc woman’s voice announced giddily: “All the princesses of the kingdom want to go to the ball! When the music starts, if you're lucky, the prince will choose you to dance with him around the ball room.” Cue a live-action sequence of three simpering girls grinning like cannabis-addicts in a greenhouse. Everything in the ad is pink with a tinge of pastel thrown in. Glittery effects and cartoon graphics overlay the clip of the live-action girls, who are shown hunched over a pathetically under-sized plastic boardgame. The voiceover continues: “Who will he choose?” “Destiny has decided you’re the lucky one!” One of the simpering girls opens her mouth in mock...

If you're a breastfeeding mother with the audacity to step foot aboard the Good Ship Facebook, prepare to walk the plank. For, as everyone knows, treasure 'chests' of the lactating variety are prohibited on these seas. And, because everyone knows this, there’s a good chance a buccaneer from your (so-called) matey list will betray you and hit report. Indeed, the motley crew at Facebook proudly boast that they’ve: “built industry leading technical and human systems” and: “developed sophisticated tools” to help their crew evaluate the reports they receive. “As a result, we believe we are able to remove the vast majority of content that violates our standards” ( Facebook 2013 ). Rightyo. I decided to test these ‘industry leading’ report systems. For the first time in my long and illustrious relationship with the t’internet I hit the ‘report’ button on a load of memes. The results are below. Be forewarned: the results and the content I reported (particularly the content!) fail t...

Devolution - n. formal: descent to a lower or worse state; biology: evolutionary degeneration ( Oxford English Dictionary, 2013 ) Much of contemporary society is dominated by child-feeding perceptions and practices which I can only qualify as retrograde. In the last hundred years or so, we have regressed in varying degrees from embracing the original default food and feeding system - breast milk and breastfeeding - in favor of an illusion of normalcy served up via synthetic substitutes based mainly on the milk of a species that's totally alien to ours. Myriad explanations are routinely offered as to why this is so; but there's no need to await consensus before concluding that this is indeed the case. Not surprisingly popular media provide a mirror image of an artificial feeding culture. It doesn't require cynicism, only a measure of awareness, to understand that these information avenues rely for success not in leading the charge for change but in reflecting the status quo....

Whilst indulging my inner bookworm at the local city library, I unwittingly stumbled upon a book written by a man called Geert Hofstede. Hofstede is an influential Dutch researcher well-known (in the social-psychology clique at least) for his research of cross-cultural groups and organizations. He played a major role in developing a framework for assessing and differentiating national cultures. Reading his jaw-dropping, hugely under-utilised trove of research has radically deepened my understanding of why we suck at breastfeeding in our society. It triggered an epiphany of sorts. And his book wasn’t even about breastfeeding! I have always known that our culture is hostile towards breastfeeding at worst, and apathetic at best. Who’s to blame for this? I had all the usual suspects lined up: capitalism, the patriarchy, rampant individualism, formula company greed. However maybe the net of blame is far, far broader than I ever imagined. Hofstede’s research revealed an interesting phenomeno...