EXCERPTS:
When I'm looking for a page-turner, I don't usually head to the gender studies section of the bookstore.
But then, I've never read Elisabeth Badinter before.
The French feminist's latest book, The Conflict, came across my desk a week ago. I'd just arrived at the office, pre-exhausted after a typical working parent's morning: up at 5: 30 a.m., get dressed, get child dressed, make strong coffee with small creature clinging to left leg, put food in mouths, brush (plural sets of) teeth, push stroller to daycare.
On the cover of this book was the silhouette of a miniature woman pushing a gigantic baby in a gigantic stroller. Hmm, looks familiar, I thought, feeling suitably dwarfish, reminded (with a bounty of adoration, bien sur!) of the giant in my life who can barely reach a doorknob.
The Conflict, a bestseller in France and Britain that's finally coming to Canada in April, is a fast and furious read, and, a warning, it might make you furious, too. With the subtitle How Modern Motherhood Under-mines the Status of Women, you can imagine why.
This is a scathing, controversial and brilliant piece of writing about how moms have effectively regressed as women in their efforts to do every-thing the so-called "natural" way, be it drug-free deliveries, co-sleeping or on-demand breastfeeding.
"We have agreed to this regression in the name of moral superiority, the love we bear for our children, and some ideal notion of child rearing, all of which are proving far more effective than external constraints," Badinter writes. "As everyone knows, there is nothing quite like voluntary servitude."
The trend toward naturalism (boo, bottles! boo, disposables! boo, epidurals!) is all too familiar to me. Since entering this domain, I've felt like there's only one road: the high road. I constantly feel pressured to do what's smartest for my son and the planet he'll inherit, to make the earthiest choices, the most nutritious choices, the least chemical choices and the most ethical choices.
Sure, it's a free country, but I don't feel like modern moms have a lot of freedom. Not if we're to be good mothers. Not if we want to avoid the stink-eye, the guilt. Guilt, says Badinter, is "an extraordinary weapon."
Many women are, of course, furious about the book, especially the "ayatollahs of breastfeeding," as Badinter dubs them. Special aim is taken at pro-breastfeeding group La Leche League, whose "crusade," Badinter says, sup-ports traditional parenting (namely, that mommy and her milk supply stay home with the baby), eroding women's freedoms.
Ruffled feathers? Just a bit. France's foremost feminist (who by the way is a mother) has had death threats for her explosive views. I don't necessarily agree with everything Badinter writes. Still, I think this book is an essential read, whether or not you plan to have a child. Because she also touches on society's treatment of women who remain child-free, either by choice or not. Though it's becoming increasingly acceptable, the tendency is still to see these women as failures, she says, to view them with "pity or rebuke."
Yet we don't tend to question people's decision to have children, and we certainly don't care about their regret. "Society is not ready to hear that some parents feel frustrated and bitter and would perhaps have done better with-out children."
While many modern women pin their identity to their status as moms, even title themselves such (mommy bloggers, mompreneurs), others find this a tough row to hoe. It has nothing to do with how much we love our children. We love them! But as Badinter argues, a mom's instinct is not innate. In 2011, I read this essay by Rachel Cusk in Granta called Aftermath, which has just been expanded into a book-length memoir. The British author's description of the full-time mom sticks with me still.
"The child goes through the full-time mother like a dye through water," she writes. "There is no part of her that remains uncoloured. The child's triumphs and losses are her triumphs and losses. The child's beauty is her beauty, as is the child's unacceptability."
Part of me longs to be that sort of mom, to know how it feels to have that dye go through me (I imagine it's purple, for some reason). Yet, it is not in my nature. It is not in the nature of so many of us. Reading The Conflict, I realize why maternity leave was so hard for me: I am un-dye-able. I can-not be the full-time mom, the every-thing-for-my-child mom. I only wish I had read Badinter's book sooner.
It would have given me some perspective, eliminated some of my all-or-nothing thinking about the way things ought to be done. Maybe it would have changed my ways. At the very least, it would have allowed me to
-reprinted from the Vancouver Sun