A kind of woman

Yesterday morning, I watched about 30 seconds of television that rankled so much I’ve hardly stopped thinking about it.  It struck a chord particularly as it came not long after I’d read this great post about breastfeeding in public on the excellent blog Spilt Milk. I’d been thinking that surely it couldn’t be true that people were still so bothered by seeing women breastfeeding while out and about with their babies. That must be happening in Some Other Country.

Girl, oh girl, did I get a rude awakening. I flicked on the telly while taking out a dvd the kids had been watching and saw Mia Freedman on a chat show (it was the weekend version of Today). She was talking about breastfeeding in public (for more, see here), so I stopped for a moment. The male host, a fellow with a vaguely familiar face called Cameron Williams, interjected at one point, with something along the lines of “Yes, but it’s better to be discreet, a woman should cover herself with a shawl or something.” This is when I felt a sort of nervous twitch start up. I thought I saw Freedman’s smile tighten just a little as she tried to explain how hard it can be when you have a wriggling baby and you are dealing with the various difficulties of breastfeeding, to worry about covering yourself up. The male host was not to be deterred by such justifications. “Yes, but there’s a kind of woman who approaches it like she’s going into combat…” At this point I started hyperventilating. My husband, who’d been quietly reading the newspaper, said “Oh, my God. Any sentence that starts off like that cannot end well. Turn it off.” I promptly followed his advice, fearing that further exposure to such b******t could induce a grand mal seizure (and I’m not even epileptic).

For the past day I’ve had that phrase echo in my head: “a kind of woman”. I still don’t know how to express in words the outrage, the deep sense of personal offence that I feel. I remember the times, not long ago, when I breastfed my babies while out at a restaurant, a cafe, a shopping centre, a park. I remember battling with my own prudery and lack of confidence, telling myself to get over it and that no-one minded or even noticed if I gave my baby a feed there and then when he wanted and needed it. I probably did sometimes look like I was going into combat, struggling to calm a screaming baby who sometimes had trouble latching on, determined as I was to conquer my shyness and do the right thing by my baby. Thank God I didn’t really know that all along, some people were looking at me and thinking I was that “kind of woman”, or my milk would have dried up in about a nanosecond.

I like to imagine that after I turned off the tv, Freedman stood up and did a Matrix-style martial arts manouvre on Mr Williams, leaving him huddled and chastened. Or that the female co-host, who did not say much in the 30 seconds I was watching, turned and said “You know Cameron, I find your face quite offensive, you really should be a bit more discreet and cover it up with a shawl or something.” I can dream, can’t I?

Diagnosis

I didn’t realise that diagnosing cancer is a speedy process these days. Or in any case it can be in a Western country like ours –  in the Third World someone like my mother considers herself lucky to reach the ripe old age of 67, let alone have the luxury of regular checkups, gastroscopies and biopsies to reveal what it is that has made her feel rather tired lately.

It took a couple of tests over less than a week to diagnose it. First mum went for her regular check-up and casually mentioned the fatigue. The next thing you know, she’s got a camera taking photos of the inside of her digestive tract.  My sister Elly went to the gastroscopy with her and they saw a doctor straight after. “It’s not good news, I’m afraid,” he told them. Then the phone rang and he said he had to take the call and left them waiting for 15 torturous minutes. When he came back he was more forthcoming. “You’ll have to wait for the biopsy results to be sure but I’ve seen enough of these to know it’s Cancer.”

The first thing to do is rule out spread so the next day there is a CAT scan. The day after that, an abdominal ultrasound. This time I go with her. Mum is still in shock. She says it is like watching yourself on TV: it looks like it’s all happening to someone else. Perhaps it is a desire to make it more real that drives her to tell the ultrasound operator, a brisk and businesslike woman with a fake smile who clearly doesn’t want to be at work on a Saturday morning. She introduces herself – Belinda – and explains the procedure. “Perhaps I should tell you why I’m here,” mum says once she is lying on the ultrasound bed. Belinda stiffens. I can see that she doesn’t want to know.  I put my hand out to mum’s arm to try and warn her, but she ignores me. “I’ve just been diagnosed with cancer of the oesophagus.”

Belinda jumps in before mum has a chance to reveal any further uncomfortable details. “Oh I don’t have anything to do with that!” Her nostrils flare and she shakes her head slightly. “I don’t do any of the air-filled organs like the stomach or the lungs. I only do the liquid-filled ones.”  All we can do is smile tightly and move on. The ultrasound continues and I try to make some sense of the greyish blobs on the screen.  I am very familiar with the machine and the process: it is exactly the same as for a pregnancy ultrasound, but without the excitement. There is no growing foetus, only blobs which, for all I know, could be growing metastases. What are those little spots on the kidney screen, I wonder? What about the shadow on the screen called liver? Belinda refuses to tell us anything. “No,” she chops. “Talk to your doctor.” She finishes, hands mum a kleenex, smiles vacantly and is gone. I wonder how a health professional could be so cold. Would it have hurt her to say “I’m sorry to hear about your cancer”? Or to wish mum luck with everything? The more I think about it the more I want to slap her.

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I’ve been wanting to write about this, but I still feel hesitant in re-starting my blog. This will be my first post about mum’s cancer. Will there be a last post one day? When? Under what circumstances? What will be the path ahead?

I’ll be back

I’m finding it just too hard to sit down and write anything cohesive at the moment. Hopefully I’ll be back within the next few weeks. Thanks for popping in.

Somewhere (a place for us)

I am a long-term fan of renting as a lifestyle. It has many benefits: it’s cheaper than a mortgage, it’s easier to move on when you want a change, someone else has to pay when the hot water service breaks down, and so on. And I have a habit of getting attached to rented houses as if they were my own. That is, I believe that while I was living there, they were my own. The concept of “home” goes so much further than a mortgage. I know the smells, the cracks and peeling paint, the cupboard doors that stick, the creaking floorboards.  Each of my past homes has a special place in my nostalgic heart and I even feel a little violated at the thought that someone else is living there now.

I think I’ve retained a child’s view of the matter, as I was recently reminded by my firstborn (whom I will refer to here as Primo). We were driving home from my mum’s place and Primo asked if we could go to Nonna’s house. I replied that we’d just been to Nonna’s house and now we were going to our own house. But that wasn’t quite correct and I felt I had to elaborate. “Actually it isn’t our own house. It’s somebody else’s house. Soon we will have our own house. But right now we’re going to the house that we’re living in.” He was silent for a moment while he mulled it over, then he simply said “Home.” Wise word for a three-year-old.

Home. I’d never had a problem calling our rented houses “home” until now. Now that I have two children, one of them about to start preschool, I want to live somewhere where I can scout the local primary schools. Somewhere where I know the owner can’t ask me to leave with only a couple of months’ notice. Somewhere where I can paint the walls whatever colour I like, hammer up a picture hook without asking for permission, let my cats come live inside if they want (OK, I already did that, but don’t tell the real estate agent!). I want to get to know the neighbours, instead of thinking “Why bother, we’ll only be here a short while.”

So, we have now completed the last remaining stage of what my husband cynically calls “the adulthood triumvirate”: marriage, kids, house. I wonder how this will affect my concept of home. Will I be more at home in this house than I have in my rented homes? Will I get bored after a couple of years and yearn for the ease of moving without having to sell?

In the meantime, I have to confess I haven’t started packing for the move.  A few days ago I scrubbed the visible surfaces and hid the mess so that fifty or so people could trundle through my home to consider renting it for themselves. I felt as though they were judging me and yearned for their approval – at the same time I wanted to kick them all out, yelling “Go away, it’s my home!” But in four weeks it won’t be mine anymore, even though I know all its peculiarities and oddities better than anyone.

One day I might drive past and feel a twinge of jealousy when I see someone else’s car parked outside. I will remember bringing home my second baby here, celebrating birthdays in the back yard, running loops with the children indoors and hundreds of other little things that happened in the years we have lived here. Those memories are of our home and it will take some time before we make new memories in our new house. You can’t buy that.

Precautionary measures

I’ve just discovered the tag surfer function in WordPress and found a great blog site dedicated to answering FAQs on feminism (see new link at side). I read the interesting entry on “What’s wrong with suggesting that women take precautions to prevent being raped?“, where comments digressed into a discussion on the finer legalities of carrying a handgun. Then I came up with my own idea for a precautionary measure and thought I’d post it here too.

Perhaps as a precaution women should at all times wear a badge, or a T-shirt with a slogan on it, or even just get a tattoo on our foreheads saying: “I do not want to be raped.” All those altruistic sexual assaulters out there (”Your honour, I only did it because she wanted me to”) would find it so much less confusing to channel their inner desire to be helpful.
And *if* it doesn’t stop rape it would at least save time in court. Instead of all that searching through a victim’s sexual history, she could just point to her forehead.
But I suppose it could be argued that the victim’s clothing distracted the assaulter from the tattoo, so maybe to clarify things the tattoo needs to be more specific: “No matter what I’m wearing, I do not ever want to be raped.”
Or what if the victim got drunk and passed out – amend that tattoo to read: “No matter what I’m wearing/doing, I do not ever want to be raped.”
Or what if the victim had had sex with her assaulter in the past or she’s had sex with a lot of people – amend that to: “No matter what I’m wearing/doing/what my sexual history is/whether I’ve had sex with you before, I do not ever want to be raped.”
And it is true that occasionally men are raped too, so everyone should have the tattoo. Perhaps on our backs as well as our foreheads, just to cover all bases. It should be done at birth, sadly it’s never too early.
However by now everyone’s forehead and back is full of writing, you could even call it small print. And no-one ever reads the small print, right?
Hang on, I’ve got a better idea: as a precaution, why don’t we teach everyone to just ASSUME that no-one EVER wants to be raped? And even build that assumption into our legal system?
Genius.

The big whitewash

I am in a state of domestic limbo at the moment as I am waiting to move house. The big day is in about four weeks and I have a grand fantasy of being super-organised and undertaking a large-scale, Oprah-style declutter. But actually, despite my Goody Homemaker sounding pseudonym, this is unlikely to happen. I’m not great at domesticity. I’ve just posted some pics of my slovenliness on my fellow-blogger NDM’s Gallery of Domestic Godlessness, if you want to see the evidence.

Nevertheless, what with our new house’n'all, I’ve been indulging in some big-time, home-beautiful, backyard-blitz fantasising. I confess: I’ve been leafing through glossy magazines with pictures of fashionable rooms furnished in neutral tones, buffed wooden floors and low-backed leather couches. It’s all futile of course because now that we’ve swapped rent for a morgage, we won’t be able to afford any of this. But that’s not really the point. Because to be honest, these picture-perfect magazine homes are starting to get on my nerves.

The main thing that bugs me is the obsession with white. Walls, drapes, ceilings, ornaments, you name it: if you want to have a nice home, according to the style gurus, they’ve got to be predominantly white. There are dozens of online interiors stores dedicated to white homewares. I even saw a feature on white floors. I had to laugh. For someone like me, who mops the floors maybe twice a year, this is the height of lunacy. The hours spent on maintenance would be a kind of poetically just punishment for anyone crazy enough to want such a thing.

I suspect that the trend for hospital ward interiors is rooted in masochism. The more white, the more obvious your guilty housekeeping sins will be for all the world to see, and of course, the more washing and cleaning. Or perhaps it’s a conspiracy to give women more housework to do and get them safely back in the home… Starved of colour and surrounded by the fumes of bleaching agents, our brains will slowly decompose. And it’s strangely alluring, isn’t it? All that soothing, relaxing white, just like a fluffy white cloud waiting to swallow you up… reminds me of The Stepford Wives.

I for one am going to resist it. I pledge to you, my reader(s), that I will not indulge in this whitewashing madness. And if you see me getting a slightly vacant look in my eyes as I clutch a paint swatch with names ranging from Dove’s Song to Marble Mist, you’ll know what happened. Just throw a bucket of purple paint over my head. That should do the trick.

Sad thoughts for a sunny day

Just when I got up the gumption to start a blog, the hazy days of January came along and in front of the computer was the last place I wanted to be. What a stop-start beginning it has been.

But for the last couple of days, as I’ve been out playing with my kids and enjoying the sunshine, I have been trying not to think about this story. I first heard about it on the radio news during the week and the voice of the doctor who was interviewed has been echoing in my head: “Ten years ago, there would have been someone even in a small country hospital who would have been able to open up her tummy and clamp off the tube to stop the blood. Now that maternity services have been centralised in bigger hospitals, we have lost all that experience.” (I paraphrased.)

It’s hard enough to believe that a woman can still die from an ectopic pregnancy in Australia, let alone that she could have been in a hospital at the time. Why is it that some country hospitals have closed their maternity wards? I assume that means that local women have to travel far away to have their babies or access other reproductive health services. So far away that sometimes they don’t make it. It’s spine-chilling.

Sometimes it feels as though we are just going backwards.

Veronica Campbell was the same as age as me. Her little boy was exactly the same age as my youngest, 23 months. Her story will stay with me for a long time.

Nap time

Neither of us knows where we end and the other begins -
there is no Other, only our body.
You are more than just beloved.
But I am counting the breaths until sleep slackens
the clench of your arm around my neck.
Relief! Now I can stretch and be someone Other than mummy.

What would the feminists think?

Our extended family gathering over the Christmas season went surprisingly smoothly. My divorced parents agreed to be amiable to each other and attend the one event, saving us all the inconvenience of having to organise, cook for and attend two separate functions. We four siblings (the fifth and youngest currently resides overseas) enjoyed each other’s company and were pleasant to each other’s partners and children, in the main out of genuine love and affection. Yet I came home with something gnawing at me, and it’s been simmering quietly ever since.

The incident that troubles me occurred about half-way through our lunch, when nonno (my father), in an uncharacteristic burst of festive thoughtfulness, distributed gifts to his six present grandchildren. He gave my 22-month old niece (let’s call her Bubbles) a “Malibu Barbie”. There was a bit of laughter around the table as she unwrapped her gift: we’ve never been much of a Barbie family. My sister and her husband were somewhat surprised by the nature of the gift, but as nonno has not been a very present grandfather it seemed lovely enough that he’d got her something at all. And he is the product of a generation and a nation which still see Barbie as an entirely appropriate gift for a small girl.

I must admit I sighed inwardly, but I know that my niece will be brought up by liberal-minded parents who will instil in her the ideal that women are human beings with more to offer than pert breasts and a good tan. One little Malibu Barbie won’t do too much damage. So I wasn’t particularly bothered by the gift itself.

Then I heard my sister-in-law (let’s call her Domestic Goddess) comment loudly, “What would the feminists think?”

I bristled. Being a feminist is as much a part of me as being human.

“That would be me,” I declared, somewhat taken aback.

“Yes, I know, I was thinking of you!” she replied.

Then why didn’t you just use my name and ask me what I thought, I wondered silently.

“Well, I suppose I would have preferred Doctor Barbie but sunglasses Barbie isn’t too bad,” I managed, adopting as lighthearted a tone as I could muster. Those around the table who heard were a little uncomfortable, but, as usual, there were various conversations happening at once and several family members had not even noticed the exchange.

My father was one such person so Domestic Goddess related the incident to him and they had a chuckle together. Competing for my father’s attention and approval is a feature of my relationship with the Goddess. He is a very charismatic man and has this effect on people, particularly women. They often want to be his favourite.

At this point I rallied. “C’mon, I’m not the only feminist at this table, there are others here who might have something to say!” I motioned to my sisters and others around the table. But I got no support, either because they hadn’t heard the conversation or just didn’t want to get involved, especially on Christmas Day, in any kind of polemic discussion. And so it all blew over and we moved on. A confrontation was averted. Domestic Goddess and I were especially nice to each other for the rest of the afternoon and made sure we praised each other’s culinary offerings (I am not exaggerating when I call her a domestic goddess, by the way: she brought three amazing desserts to our family Christmas).

I’ve been digesting the incident ever since and have been wondering to myself about what I could or should have said. By making the Doctor Barbie comment I am afraid I was sending myself up, missing the opportunity of making a real comment.  I should at least have said that I could not comment on behalf of “the” feminists, being only one of many millions, and my own opinion on Barbie dolls is long and complicated and on the whole I did not feel that Bubbles was in too much danger of being overly-influenced by the gift. Or maybe I should have said that the opinion of Bubbles’ parents was far more important than my own on this matter. My husband, who did not hear the exchange, thinks I should not have said anything at all, that it was better just to let it go. Given my history of conflict with the Domestic Goddess, perhaps he is right.

Next time, hopefully, I’ll be better prepared and say something that is witty, non-confrontational and incisive all at once. If that is not too hard a task for a mere feminist like me.