Parenting for the future
I’ve been dreading writing this post. And I thought it would be a few years down the track, to be honest. Maybe at school. Here’s the nub of it: my partner and I are queer, poly, pagan people. Somehow, that doesn’t feel like a good fit for the conservative, predominantly Christian and Muslim, overwhelmingly monogamous outer suburbs of Sydney.
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I haven’t posted for close to six months because just after that last post, I got a new job. It’s an intense job, where I am the manager of a network of web sites with just over 200 people contributing text and photographs. The thinking space I’m in during my work day is very different from my family space.
When I started, my daughter was in “junior pre-school” four days a week and my partner looked after her the other day. (Adorably, she said “junior picolas” because the consonant combos were a bit much.) Since January, we pushed for her to be moved into the 3-5 class five days a week (she turned three at the end of January but there are few places so many of the other three year olds are still in the junior class. Now she can say “preschooler” and she’s learning at the right level for her.
My partner is now looking for work. Part-time, full-time, we’ll take it. But we’re in a world which seems set up for women to do part-time work and look after their children after hours, not one in which men can do the same. We’re in a world in which women are expected to take years out of their careers and suffer the commensurate loss in salary and status, not men. So my partner is finding he’s not getting interviews. At all. I’m not sure whether he should start explaining that the four-year gap in his CV is one year trying to set up a freelance business in a new country followed by three years parenting or not. What do other stay-at-home parents do? I have no idea.
I spent International Women’s Day this year very aware of my blessings. Full-time work. A country with socialised medicine and abortion rights and a variety of other wins. A female Prime Minister. Penny Wong, our awesome out Minister of Parliament who recently had a baby with her partner and is publicly standing up for same-sex marriage.
It’s also a country where we still have far too much domestic violence and recently gave a bravery award to a man who kicked his pregnant wife in the belly (she later miscarried) just because he (once) saved some people. We live in a world where a singer who hospitalised his girlfriend can still have fame and awards and seemingly few consequences. We still have a rape culture and a slut-shaming culture. And that’s not even starting on the issues of gender in the developing world.
This is the world we raise our daughters in.
I wished my gorgeous three-year-old girl “Happy International Women’s Day” and I explained to her that there were many women in our history who had worked very hard so that she would have a better place to grow up in. I told her that she could be anything she wanted, a doctor, a bricklayer, a teacher, a scientist, a stay-at-home mama, a carpenter, a nurse, a sailor. She said she wanted to stay home and look after babies. I told her she could do that too… but of course, there’s a part of me that’s crushed. How is it that in such a short time out of my influence, in only a year of external socialising in a preschool setting, these kinds of gender roles are already embedded?
She’s started jazz and tap class and loving it but every single child in the class is female. She’s started to say that some games are only for girls and that boys can’t play. She still has some male friends at preschool but there’s a core posse of girls she’s in: her, Eleanor and Abigail, with Elise on the fringes of it.
Her favourite colours are still blue and purple, but she’s started to be pushed towards pink by the sheer overwhelming pinkness of girl culture.
It’s not all bad: when she plays Mummies and Daddies with me, she always says that Mummies have to go to work and that Daddy will look after me (the baby). I’ve also started talking to her about how some families have two mamas or two daddies or even three parents. And she still switches the gender of her favourite doll every other day, including my favourite sentence, “She’s a boy today.” She still says that some day, she’d like a “brother-sister”.
At the end of every day, she asks me, “How was your day at work, Mama?” and I tell her as best I can what I did. Then I ask her how her day was, and find out what she did. If we can keep up that mutual respect and interest, we should be okay.
I knew this day would come but I didn’t think it would come so soon. My daughter is sitting in the driver’s seat of my car, hands on the wheel. She has wound the window down all the way as the day is quite warm. “Come on,” she says. “We have to go.” Read more…
It’s hard to know how I feel tonight. After two years, two months and two days of breast-feeding my daughter to sleep every night, tonight her bedtime routine was missing that previously essential “Mama milk” moment. I expected tears on both our parts, even though I’ve been preparing her for weeks (it’s my decision, not hers). Instead, it was almost too easy. Read more…
I’m sitting in a lounge room surrounded by boxes. I had plans for packing some more but decided I’m sick of writing Modern Mama posts in my head and never posting them. The irony is that for the last six months I’ve been contracting and so I had (theoretically) more time to blog. Now, we’re moving to Sydney because I got a job with Greenpeace.
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The good news is that Harper’s hearing test went swimmingly. Although the line on the machine was still flat (no pressure in the system means no pressure peak to test), she turned her head to see the puppet at even some of the quietest sounds. She also said a bunch of words, showed that she knew where the doors were and bits of her body and so on and so forth. The audiologist was thrilled. And kept saying “good girl”. Which brings us to *that* post… about unconditional parenting and the enervating jabbering of “good job” that is a constant hum in the background of modern childhood. Read more…
It’s funny to look back and read that last post from only four months ago… I kept waiting for that next moment when we would hear sentences and it didn’t happen and it didn’t happen. At the back of my mind, I could hear my mother saying “but you spoke in full sentences at 14 months”. Another worry was that my daughter’s words were slightly off — she said “sha” for “shoe” and “ba” for “boo”, but when she said “mama” or “uh-oh” it was clear as a bell. What was going on? Read more…
Language acquisition is one of those major milestones that marks a transition from babyhood to toddlerhood but it is not as clearcut as a first step. In our case, communication and understanding move in leaps and bounds. We started baby sign language at eight months and now we are seeing the benefits: a calmer, more confident child who can express her needs. At 17 months, she also now comprehends a huge range of words and uses a few words in place of signs — like her favourite, car, over and over, when she wants to go out, when she sees one in a book and even as they flash by us on the road.
Where did three months go? Apparently, a one year old is more of a handful — who knew? More mobile (she started walking three days after her birthday, waiting until her party for maximum audience and impact), more insistent, more aware. I’ve been planning posts on language acquisition, how we’re faring with elimination communication (we recently bought a training seat for the toilet, which seems to strike some people as insane with a 15 month old), why Cry It Out is evil (and why the recent Australian study on it was flawed) and more… but I simply haven’t had the time to do the research (I recently got a promotion at work). They are coming, I promise! In the meantime, I want to share my amazement at the little things. Read more…
I cannot believe it’s been almost a year. In one week, my little baby will turn one. Some things haven’t changed at all (like the fact I wrote that sentence and then had to pat her back to sleep for 20 minutes). Others are radically different: she’s almost walking; she has about five clear signs and vocalises vociferously; she points at what she wants; and she now throws a mean tantrum with serious intent. Read more…
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