Ramping It Up: Children w disabilities, opinions, books

Doctor's Wives: An annoying, sexist, supposedly demographic label

Well, we know there's an election in the offing, because one of the most annoying labels ever has started popping up in media "analysis" again. "Doctor's Wives." 

The morning began in its usual, weekday manner: alarm goes off at 6, and while nobody south of the border believes it, it's cold in Brisbane. Wrap myself around beloved and try to ignore the time. Then the brain kicks in. What if M's feeding pump finishes and the alarm goes off. What about getting to the Children's Hospital for a bloodtest. Is there any glucolyte made up. I'm not working today, but Abe is, so life will be easier if I can get to the hospital with Miz M before he heads to work, so he and Clancy can hang together.

OK, so get up. Get going. Engage brain courtesy of coffee (thank you, darling, beautifully made). Read part of the paper while we both feed children, eat breakfast, plan the day. Not too much conversation yet.

I'm driving to the Children's Hospital, hoping they'll manage to find a vein to take blood from my girl, while listening to RN. And then, there it goes.  The label that makes me sit up straighter with annoyance, and begin the endless bloody debate with myself about whether it's worth jumping up and down about.

The inestimable Geraldine Doogue on Radio National Breakfast, talking to Michelle Grattan about the election, whenever it will be, and the role of the Asylum Seeker debate, and what Julia Gillard's approach will be. And Grattan says something about the "Doctor's Wives".

This, my friends, shits me.

OK, the whole tenor of the reactive Asylum Seeker debate is annoying too; and Abbott's claims are unspeakably awful. Not wild about the fear and loathing underpinning the public discussion, and maybe that's what I really should be frothing about. And yet and yet and yet.

The casual sexism of the "Doctor's Wives" thing is so ingrained that it's never ever pulled up, interrogated, slapped down, or even seemingly noticed.

I can see why Geraldine couldn't stop mid-discussion to say Oh by the Way isn't it timed you stopped using that outmoded crappy term. It would be supposedly too PC by half. But what exactly is it meant to represent? Supposedly, it's about Middle Class Women of Affluence, whose lives are defined by their man's career and income, and their implied political views. It's lazy shorthand, that creates a group of Trudes and Judes from KathandKim, and gives them supposed political "clout". Sure, demographic analysis might be useful. Sure, trends can be followed. Sure, politics can't be truly subtle enough to allow for the real twitches and switches and thoughts of even a single street . . . But who is really doing this research? The likes of Bernard Salt, who's trotted out to repeat platitudes and generalisations and claim that it's analysis of the Australian population?

Where's the real research? Where's the qualitative research that goes beyond surveys dreamt up by particularly unimaginative marketers who once did a course in sociological surveys, couldn't quite remember the principals, and didn't do any of the humanities courses because they decided they were too "wishy washy" (or, perhaps, too challenging)?

I mean, fuck.

And who are these "Doctors"? 

All male, apparently.

All married, apparently.

And I'll swear to my last ever election campaign this is not merely a self-serving argument - but I am, indeed, while following the Prime Minister's own unmarried style (and bugger off Bettina Arndt, too), living with a Doctor. 

Oh, so it's me that they mean? Feminist lefty grumpy Labor supporters who wishes there was more Light on the Hill and a bit more vision, with a disabled child and an interest in the Yarts and Culture. A very specific demographic, that one. If only we wielded the power . . .

Then again, my own beloved could be a Doctor's Wife, too, if by their shorthand they mean PhD's in history.

Oh, no, don't tell me, they only mean medicos who are GPs or possible surgeons. Who are male. Who maybe work in a private hospital or own a chain of medical clinics.

Come on, Michelle Grattan, isn't it time you interrogated your own labels? You're smart, you're sharp, how about not throwing out these lazy lines in the lead up to an election. So many other presumptions and assumptions are examined in the media, but this one slips through year after year. 

Oh, I stand corrected: just did a quick search and in an earlier election, Antony Green made a comment about how demeaning and silly the term was. Yay, Antony!

On righteousness - and motherhood (or, there's a lot of it about)

I'm about to be self-righteous, indignant and opinionated about the degree of righteousness directed at women. So yes, there're a whole lot of contradictions imbedded in that sentence: too bad!

I met an extremely nice woman last night, who was consumed with anxiety about the way she's been judged and the way she knows she will continue to be judged. She's pregnant with her third child, and for various medical reasons she had to have caesarians with her first two children, and there's a very good chance she'll have to have one again. And although having a caesar is no picnic - pain, recovery, limited movement, a helluva wait to feel normal - she's more worried about the snide asides, the judgment, the commentary, the presumptions, the RIGHTEOUSNESS than she is about the procedure itself.

In the past, it was suggested to her that if she'd been fitter, tried harder, been more committed to natural labour, more in touch with her body, less swayed by the medical establishment, then maybe she could have had a vaginal birth. Now, why is that ok? I'll confess, I'm all for active births and natural labour myself, preferably with little intervention, and without an Obstetrician as God figure hovering. I think midwives are fabulous, and trust them enormously. And maybe all this is an act of self-centred, self-serving defensiveness, as after a good long active labour, full dilation and all the rest, I also had an emergency caesarian. Among other things, M's disability means she has a larger than usual head, and even with the moulding and platest crossing over and all that terribly clever stuff that happens, she was never going to fit through. And the air of scepticism that can be directed back from people committed to an active vaginal birth, is really dispiriting. (But I'll say a hallelujah to the midwives in the Birth Centre I went to where, even with the non-birth centre outcome, were totally fabulous and positive, and were too professional and thoughtful to lay on any guilt and anxiety!)

And Id like to make a case that this sceptical, judgmental, self-righteous schtick is anti-woman, anti-feminist, and indeed part of a refreshed (I won't say it's new: how could I?) mysogyny that sees women being blamed for so many things. And while it may be true that an increased medical model, and tendency to pathologise women, is also part of the problem - then how is it that women are the ones blamed, rather than medical systems or a tendency to treat the uterus and foetus as if it has no social, cultural or even bodily context? (Although to be fair, many anti-caesarian forces are also clear that women themselves should not be blamed.)

Phrases like "too posh to push" are also insulting and simplistic; as are the simplified arguments claiming that more and more women are "choosing" to have caesarians. This is partly an uninterrogated counting of procedures referred to as "elective caesarians". The woman I met last night gets put in that category, even though what we're talking about is a complex set of medical issues, that have affected her and her sisters. But because, after the first emergency caesar, it can be tracked and assessed beforehand, it's put in the "elective" category, and judged as if it's a botox injection. I have another friend with pre-eclampsia, a serious condition, who will have to have a ceasarian. Because it's planned, because her health is being monitored closely, because she may or may not have to spend weeks and weeks in hospital beforehand, she's also in the "elective caesarian" category. And really really really, having major abdominal surgery, plus a brand new little person to deal with, is not an "easy option".

So why the attitudes, the judgment, the righteousness, the thing that made this woman I just met -- intelligent, competent, warm -- be fearful of both her own defensiveness and reactions she might get?

Some of it, I think, is because "The Mother" is public property. She's a political figure, although often an invented one, used by all sides of politics. She was used, in Australia in the nineteenth century, to make claims about nationhood and whiteness and goodness, and her role in nurturing the cradle of the nation as we moved towards Federation; she was used by Labor's Billy Hughes during World War 1 as he tried to garner support for conscription; she was used by his opponents in a protective role as the mother of working class boys who should not be sent off to the trenches. She was used and embodied by politicians like Dame Enid Lyons, who herself had a dozen children, to exemplify work and respectability and the christian ideal. Every century, and every decade, it seems, mothers of all types are reinvented and used, not as people but as political mastheads - barebreasted in the French revolution; with a maidenly coiff in another; and even with the appeal of bloody Peter Costello a few years ago, asking that women produce three children each - one for mum, one for dad, one for the nation.

And of course, the "mother" is also used to judge other women. Single women. Women with partners choosing not to have children. All of this is obvious.

But it does mean that walking down the street, feeding a baby, having a meltdown, wearing the wrong shoes, she's judged. This isn't surprising, on a cultural level. What is surprising, to an idealist like me, is the ways in which other women enter into the fray, and do the work of the mainstream. Breastfeeding? Not breastfeeding? Judge the woman, without any evidence of what's going on. I read an article in teh last six months, from the Australian Breastfeeding Association, about the myths and otherwise of "failute to thrive". A useful piece of research and analysis, or it should have been. Again, here comes my self-serving defensiveness. The author pointed out, in way that was entirely un-thought through, that it's all exaggerated and only in 1-3% of cases did real medical reasons exist that might stop a child from feeding and thriving and beign able to breastfeed. And so, having a child, M, with a disability that means she was seriously skinny at 8 weeks, had ot be supplementary fed, with (yes) some pretty serious medical issues . . . somehow, she's dismissed, marginalised, and not counted by that very phrase. As if that 3 % somehow doesn't count! I was so furious my head nearly exploded ("Calm down," Abe says to me regularly, "Just calm down". And he braces himself every time the mag turns up, and keeps asking whether I really really want to read it.) Marginalising and judging the marginalised, now there's a technique!

One of my favourite anti-righteousness raves, about motherhood and ideology, comes from US writer and commentator Ayelet Waldman, who used to be a regular at Salon.com. I read this years ago (link is below), while still a dedicated singleton, and it resonated with me even then: I'd seen too many friends judged, spoken to by strangers, harrumphed at because they had their baby on a bus at midnight, walking down the street, dressed in the wrong thing, and so on. For Waldman, it's breastfeeding that's the prompt, and her own surprise that she's giving her life story to a complete stranger, and explaining that it really is breast milk in the bottle and so on.

But I wonder, as someone whose intellectual training and an embarrassing no of degrees has been entirely in humanities and qualitative methodology (which most of the time I stand by, completely, as allowing for nuance, context, history and poetry, all at the same time) . . . I wonder whether the problem isn't the numbers. Too often, statistics are misreported and used badly; cited in a way that fits a dodgy argument; and often just straight-out misunderstood. Like the supposed quantifying of "elective" caesarians as equating with "completely trivial and idiotic women who are too posh to push" rather than something more complicated. (Although it seems we also need to be better at collecting the date in any case, a problem that's been identified for a while, as here, for example.) And where would Media Watch be without someone entirely stuffing up a statistic?

But in case all this sounds too too earnest and po-faced, I'd better rush off and get my hair cut and coloured. Bugger the grey, time to deny ageing etc.

As a Feminist Mother

I still haven't got the "writing every day" thing sorted, which may be related to having no readers at all, and being ambivalent about how to get them. Now, that's a girlzone dilemma if ever I've seen one, given that that's related to blowing your own trumpet, confidently asserting your right to be heard, and networking like crazy. Still, I've worked out how to be assertive and confident of skills etc for years now in the workplace, and even academically in another context, so perhaps it's just the whole issue of working things out here as a parent, as a carer for a child with a disability, with no real "expertise" and with limited time for reading, theorising and contextualising what I'm doing.

And there I was thinking I'd grown out of apologising for existing.

I was also delighted to discover this sassy and opinionated blog, Bluemilk , on being a feminist mother, then had a slight crisis about whether describing another woman as "psychomum" was very feminist. Well, it probably wasn't very NICE, but I decided to justify myself on the grounds that my objections of her were decidedly feminist in any case, given the way they centred upon "competitive victimhood" and some very strange labelling of the self. Not to mention dodgy tones and a whole lotta self-righteousness.

I'll get back to righteousness later, because it interests me hugely.

But I think I'll stick to feminism. I"m luckier than many, I think -- and yes, luck is a dominant narrative trope for me -- as I've seen myself as a feminist for literally as long as I can remember. I've never had to fight it, resist it, be in any way ashamed of it. I have five sisters, the oldest of whom -- 14 years older than me -- was a 70s feminist who influenced my child self quite strongly. In addition, as one of seven in a working class family, I had a very impressive mother, and the self-consciousness of belonging to a "clever" family, where education was central and where we were strongly encouraged to succeed and not to see limits. Not that we didn't have the usual range of family alliances and misalliances, irritations and misunderstandings. But it did mean ideas, creativity, independence, and a strong belief in women and what they could do was inculcated.

And I really wish my parents had lived long enough to meet my little girl. They would have been confronted, I think, by all the things she won't be able to do, but they would also have been so positive and encouraging about all the things she could.

Interestingly, Abe and I had a bit of a run-in over potential and development and progress over the weekend. Our girl has to learn about cause-and-effect, and we have to be very deliberate about it. One of the reasons it doesn't come "easily" or "naturally" to her is because it's physically very difficult for her to have an effect on anything. Press here, and watch the jack-in-the-box jump up! Touch this lever and the dinosaur pops out of the egg! Nope, she doesn't have the strength to do that. But this perception is connected in a more abstract way to language development, communication skills, as well as to progression in physical stuff.

So anyway, we've been lent this completley mad "switch toy" (as they're called) to try to encourage M to develop these skills. There's a big yellow button with a fairly soft mechanism, and when you press it this completely bizarre blue creature blows up from the base and sings dementedly. I'd been showing her this, to a combination of utter bemusement and delight, in her special chair that gives her full spport etc etc. We got sick of that after a while and I put her on the floor, which is not as good for her developmentally (she doesn't have to "work" so hard), but it does mean she can roll around a bit and check things out. I was doing something else, when I heard the "beeeee-baarrrgh" thing start to sing, and so I said with some pleasure, "oh look, Abe, she made the thing work herself".

To which he immediately replied, rather quellingly, "She probably just hit it accidentally".

And so, cue music, I slightly lost it. Suggested that what was needed was a bit of optimistic hopefullness, a sense of potential, otherwise we'd never survive; and that him thinking that she'd never be able to do anything didn't relaly help. Sob, hiccough, etc. With some righteous anger thrown in.

Anyway, we recovered from that and got on with the day.

Then, the next day, His Nibs had clearly been thinking about all this, and he could not have been more encouraging, positive, or helpful. I nearly ruined it by beginning to analyse it and asking him to "talk about it", then decided that nothing kills a bit of thought-through-spontaneity (you know what I mean) than hammering the point home too many times. M anticipated the soaking she was about to get, when she was placed in her new super-dooper shower chair, on hearing the shower coming on, and got upset BEFORE she got wet. Great, he said, that shows a new depth of understanding. Squirming and protesting before the eye-drops were put in? What a clever girl!

And so on.

Now really, you have to laugh. And I'll concede, too, that he teaches me things about living in the world, and living with our girl, continually too . . .

Why I'm here

Gday. At this stage, I know I'm only talking to myself but hey, there are many things I want to keep track of and make sense of. Y'see, 16 months ago I had a beautiful baby girl, and let's see I'm tempted to call her Flopsy Mopsy, but as well as a bit cute, it will in the end be infantilising. OK OK she IS an infant, but that's hardly the point is it. And I think FM because of her condition -- more on that in a moment. So how about I try to remember to refer to her as Morgaine? Yep, that'll do.

When my daughter touches your face, she does it the way blind people do in matinee movies. Gently, exploring your face. Perhaps that's unfair to those who really are visually impaired, but that - the cliches, the images, the expectations - that's part of the dilemma. Because Morgaine has a disability. We don't have a diagnosis, we don't have a name or a box to tick on the endless paperwork. She has very low tone and low strength. So she can't sit up, hold her head up, crawl, and will probably never walk.

So in the last 16 months we - my lovely partner and I - have learnt a lot. We've easily learnt to respond to her, as she's a smiley, happy, communicative wee person.

But we've also learnt the need for research and for communication skills; for assertiveness; for questions.

We've also been forced to learn about cognitive development and the steps that "normal" children take in order to develop. These things now have to be broken down and facilitated. And there's so much in that, I thought it'd be worth keeping track of. So from physios and OTs to speech pathologists and neurologists, we're learning with all the various systems.

But I've also learnt how frustrating some of this is. Support structures rely on categories; disability services for children in Australia fall somewhere between both state and federal systems; services have been outsourced to NGOs and charities, some of whom run on an unreconstructed "deserving worthies" model; and the public debate about "carers" is fairly crap.

If I see one more reference to carers as "angels" I'll puke. Reallly. Sentimentalising and depoliticising "us" is not the answer.

And then there's the "us" thing. Joining a group you never wanted or expected to join; being expected to be part of a "community" of parents of children with disabilities as if you necessarily have much in common with each other. Huh! Well, you do and you don't. It's like becoming a parent: there's an awful lot of us out there, and not all subscribe to the cutsey-wootsy-mumsy-wumsy version of the world.

That, and the fact disability info seems to happen via trends. When I first realised what was going on, when Miz Thing was about 6 weeks old, I began searching for information - as one of those people who make sense of the world by reading, talking, researching, how could I not? - and was amazed to find there was an awfu lot of info currently available on autism (a good thing, and obviously much neglected in the past blah de blah), but little on other stuff.

It was as if the cliches of disability were too obvious, and had to be avoided. What I wanted to know was, "what the hell do you do when you find out your daughter will never walk???"

But so much for the age-old cliches of "cripples", wheelchairs, and being bedridden! Instead, there seemed to be an awful lot of stuff on being a sibling of a child with a disability, on autism and aspergers, and on learning, developmental and other supposedly "invisible" disabilities. I'm sure those parents feel the same thing, of course.

A-huh, my Beloved has just arrived home, so I may end this ramble right here, and see what happens next. More focus and coherence perhaps. I hope I haven't accidentally made my real name public etc etc. Oh well, we'll see eh.