Behold! Mothering!
Posted on | November 19, 2008 | No Comments
We interrupt ‘Fun Highlights’ for this BS…
Posted on | November 19, 2008 | 7 Comments
So first and foremost, Salma Hayak has come out with some ‘interesting’ comments about breastfeeding. Now, here at mama-is.com we’re always happy to have a celebrity talk about breastfeeding. It helps to legitimize, ya know? But, what the heck?
“I’m like an alcoholic. It is like, I don’t care if I cry, I don’t care if I am fat, I am just going to do it for one more week, one more month, and then when I see how much good it is doing her and I can’t stop.”
Apparently she didn’t get the memo that people freak out if they know you’re breastfeeding beyond a year (her baby is still nursing at 13 months) AND that you better not talk about it as if it’s for your own pleasure. And seriously, ADDICTED? can’t you come up with a better way of putting it? And don’t even get me started on her comments about how painful it is (IS? at 13 months?) and how it doesn’t help you lose weight at all. Oh no, I fear breastfeeding will need to hire a PR agent for the backlash.
Ms. Hayak, good for you for breastfeeding, and still going at 13 months, but if you can’t think of anything helpful to say about it, maybe you could attend a La Leche League meeting and get some advice on helpful responses? Nodding and smiling and giving vague responses can also be a tactic, I use it at the pediatricians office and it seems to work very well.
I appreciated this blog post: Salma Hayek “still” breastfeeding - world can’t decide whether to jerk off or prosecute
by LAUREDHEL
It’s not as simple as “The Patriarchy wants women to not breastfeed” or “The Patriarchy wants women to breastfeed”. What The Patriarchy “wants” (if you’ll bear with me on this somewhat teleological train of thought) is to have control over breastfeeding. Sometimes that might involve coercion to breastfeed (while withholding full support), sometimes coercion to not breastfeed, sometimes breastfeeding is a tool to confine women to the domestic environment, sometimes guilt over not breastfeeding is cultivated to sell women more products. Above all, breastfeeding women are reminded day after day after day that their bodies are public property, that breastfeeding isn’t a free pass out of the sex class, and that whatever they do, there will be no shortage of people telling them that they’re doing it wrong.
Australian and USAn societies are down there with the lowest breastfeeding rates in the world. We have developed a peculiarly pernicious mix of:
* half-secularised Puritanism;
* half-baked woman-hating Freudianism;
* toxic capitalism;
* mother-hostile workplace practices;
* social isolation of new mothers;
* a deep-seated fear and suspicion of any bodily intimacy that isn’t sexual;
* and an overwhelming sense of proprietorship of breasts by heterosexual men.
Absolutely!
And then, you’d have to be under a rock if you didn’t hear about the Motrin ad this weekend (thanks Ellen, Lori, April and everyone else!) By the time I was ready to respond the furor was over…Twitter Moms Sink Motrin Ad and Moms and Motrin By LISA BELKIN Congratulations to moms everywhere for winning this one, even if they liken us to the borg. What are we going to do? they like to pick on us, and then when we fight back and win, they have to give one more kick on their way out the door. Fine. We’re mothers we can deal.
So, todays comic is a sideways glance at these two topics…enjoy!
xox,
Heather
Fun Highlights 4 (transition)!
Posted on | November 17, 2008 | No Comments
Fun Highlights 3(Meeting the Hospital Staff)!
Posted on | November 14, 2008 | No Comments
Man, where is my head?
Posted on | November 14, 2008 | 12 Comments
I had this great post to link to here, it’s from a midwife’s blog, and it’s a response to a certain Doctor who has a website that professes to be a debate site about homebirth, and somehow through obfuscation and down right lies, hospital birth always wins. You know the one, dear reader ;o) I won’t post it here. And if you don’t know what I’m talking about, trust me it sucks and though you’re probably curious, don’t google for it. Googling just makes it stronger.
Anyway, the post I’m looking for is a response to that site, and is a collected list of many terrible, rude, abusive things that have been said to women while giving birth. I stored the link away for a rainy day and now I can’t find it!
As my Mother-In-Law would remind me, it’s proven that my pregnant brain is just getting smaller ;o)
Hi MIL! Thanks for reading my blog!
SO, if anyone reading here today knows where to find that link, can you post it please?
xox,
Heather
Fun Highlights 2(arriving at the hospital)!
Posted on | November 11, 2008 | No Comments
Synchronicity!
Posted on | November 11, 2008 | 2 Comments
It turns out that as I’m posting the series: Fun Highlights of my First Birth here on Mama-is.com, over on thecowgoddess.com (which happens to be running through classic comics) is right now posting the First Birth series from way back in 2003! Together, the Fun Highlights and First Birth comics will tell the whole story I suspect…so keep checking both sites and enjoy!
Love,
Heather
Fun Highlights 1! Prenatal Care!
Posted on | November 9, 2008 | No Comments
Fun Highlights!
Posted on | November 7, 2008 | 1 Comment
Industrial Childbirth (new article!)
Posted on | November 7, 2008 | 15 Comments
Industrial Childbirth
This article, by Shonagh Strachan, is the article I wish I had written (but am so happy she did). And I just stumbled across it by accident, in Adbusters magazine, an issue that I had sitting in my house for weeks before I finally picked it up and in a hurry, flipped through. Imagine my excitement when I found an article about childbirth, in a magazine that never ever really talks about childbirth (except remember when they published my letter about my unassisted birth in their Big Ideas of 2005 issue. that was cool.) And that they decided to print this one, that so eloquently says what I think you’ll agree so many of us want to say. Is just, well, great.
Here’s some enticements to click through…
how about this metaphor:
“Our collective idea of childbirth is pretty nasty – blood and fluid, panting and screaming, stretched anatomy, the emergent gooey greyish-purple alien… horrible! Remember when you first heard about sex? Remember how horrible that seemed? But sex isn’t horrible, is it? What’s missing – and indescribable to a virgin child – is the emotional element. Sex is a natural and beautiful process, all entangled with love and passion. So too, and a million times more, is birth. In essence, our modern patriarchal institutionalized world has a childish view of childbirth. It can’t imagine that something that looks so gruesome could be anything but a horrendous experience and one that should be shortened and medicated. But childbirth is not a medical procedure any more than sex is.”
and her sum up (but don’t read it yet, seriously go read the article!):
It is my belief that at some deep level, we all feel that we have been robbed. We pass through our childbirth initiation to become disempowered, disconnected, long-suffering, patriarchal mothers. We tell our horror stories as just that, or we say nothing at all. But it doesn’t have to be this way. If I ever have another child, it will not be in the same way. And it doesn’t stop there. I will never again blindly place my trust in authoritarian professionals and institutions. I will recognize all capitalist patriarchy for what it is and I will do my best to speak out against it.
Every day, in every way, my son is a wonderful gift. I would go through ten more hospital births just to keep him. I am sorry for his shabby entrance into this world but I am thankful to this little person for helping me to see something: the bald, blatant, oppressive, damaging, misogynistic forces at play in the most vital aspects of women’s lives. Revisiting his birth has made me angry, but that has made so much else clear: how blinded we can be by the guise of protection, how crippled we can be made by fear.
I wish that we talked about it. That we could stop reveling in horror stories and better place our fingers on the reason for our traumatic births – not the curse of Eve medicated to by our benevolent system – but the systematic violence that delivers our babies for fear that we might give birth to them ourselves. For in the process we might begin to understand our own strength and find words for our anger. We might begin to disobey.
and finally, the comments section is being ruled by some idiots that think that being born gives them the right to weigh in on this issue. How about we add some of our voices?
Love,
Heather
ps. Shonagh writes for this group’s magazine: Revolutionary Anarchafeminist Group and can be reached through her facebook page Shonagh Strachan
