Since there isn't a heck of a lot going on in uterine news, I'm going to use this space for reflections as I read a book I picked up at a Salvation Army in San Francisco, Misconceptions by Naomi Wolf. Subtitled "Truth, Lies, and the Unexpected on the Journey to Motherhood" it is supposedly a "powerful and passionate" critique of the culture of pregnancy and motherhood in America.
I'm not sure how far I'll make it, though. Chapter 3 and she's already bugging the fuck right out of me. After waving her hand vaguely at all of her (white upper-class) friends' c-sections, multiple births, playspaces and nannies, she lights into infertile couples who choose foreign adoption. It's the same thing I've heard a thousand times: the not-subtle accusations of racism (because everyone knows the streets are paved with poor black infants who need adopting by white families), the tsk-tsking at the commodification of children (because making a choice equals treating as a commodity), the cozy assumption that she would do differently, not that she is, you understand, but she would, if only she weren't so busy taking care of her own genetic children. Oh, and she takes a passing potshot at those who "put themselves through" invasive fertility treatment because the don't want to adopt due to aforementioned racism plus the "narcissism" that leads them to desire a child who is genetically related to them. Not like Naomi, see, who rhapsodizes that God and Nature clearly meant her to be pregnant. "For fifteen years my birth control never failed me, and then, when my heart and body longed for a baby, when I was newly married, when it was finally safe -- birth control failed me."
That's lovely, that is, cue the orchestra, but let's take a moment to juxtapose that with her casual scorn of narcissistic infertiles and racist adopters (and, incidentally, lazy aborters who just can't be bothered with birth control).
She does, in the midst of the drive-by strafe, at least say "While I knew that bearing this whole assortment of judgments about people looking for a baby of their own was cheap from where I sat, my midsection full of my own genetic offspring..." her knowledge of the cheapness does not seem to impinge on her own sense of moral superiority in the slightest.
The book was written in 2001. I do wonder what she'd have to say about the current shift towards Ethiopian adoptions. Nothing nice, I'm sure. Well, I look forward to Googling her when I'm no longer on a plane, and learning about how after her first pregnancy she undoubtedly chose to grow her family through domestic transracial adoption.
Oh, do you need me to mop up the sarcasm dripping from that statement, so's you don't slip and fall?
That was invigorating. On to chapter 4.
Chapters 4-7, somewhere over Montana
Things got a little better. She's still extremely annoying when bemoaning her pregnancy weight gain; "As a heavy woman in society (I hoped temporarily, but who knew?) I felt as if I'd slipped several notches down the social hierarchy of the world. My self-image had gotten skinned on the fast slide down."
This from the author of the much-lauded The Beauty Myth? One would hope that, since she had made her career prior to this point over writing about feminism and the culture of beauty that her self-image might have a wee bit more to it than the size of her waist.
She also is, apprently, stunned to discover that the birthing course she takes is sponsored by the hospital, and reflects a hospital-centric view of birthing and interventions. Now here I'm actually very sympathetic to her outrage about how she was not taught non-medicinal ways to cope with pain, and that the pain of childbirth was not frankly discussed, and about how the whole thing seemed designed to railroad women into interventions. Her descriptions of the badly decorated ("mauve and teal") stuffy uncomfortable birthing cells is depressing indeed, as is the chilliness of her OB practice referred to in previous chapters.
So I am left to wonder: is she an idiot? She's clearly wealthy (she discovers she is pregnant in a farmhouse in Italy, attending a wedding thrown by her hip and apparently also-wealthy friends). I refuse to believe that nowhere in the DC area was there a hospital with nice birthing rooms, nor a friendly obstetrician.
I think she's just a big whinypants.
Wait, did I say that this book was getting better? It is, a bit. There's about two pages where she recounts her brother's raising of her young virago of a niece, which I thought was lovely (p 70)
"...My brother Aaron is a hands-on father. He would take Yardena, his two-year-old girl, to a city park where the grass falls away in all directions. He would put her down on the top of a hillock and say, "Go and conquer! All this is yours!"
And oh, how she believed him, tilting back her little head and crowing with victory. He called her "mastodon girl," and she staggered upright and roared, her power traveling form lungs to throat to outstretched limsb, the primeval forest of her imagination shaking at her approach. He lifted her up and swung her around: "Fly free, little dove! Fly free!" And she would zoom out her arms, navigating the air.
Already at two she was as tough a little sabra as you would ever hope to meet. My brother played hard with her, roughoused with her, accustomed her to loud noises and harsh surfaces, and her demeanor showed it: she was resilient and good-humored as a little all-terrain vehicle."
I liked that very much! although she seems to definitively associate this kind of freedom and power with maleness.
Oh, by the way, so far there has not been a single acknowledgement of any sort that non-hetereosexual people ever reproduce, and in fact no mention of single motherhood, either.
On to chapter 8!
P.S. I'm lying, I actually have no idea where Montana is. We could be over Botswana for all I know.
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Interesting brief discussion in chapter 8 of pregnant women's dreams.
Night before last I dreamed that I was at the maternity intake center of the hospital where my friend just gave birth. They correctly determined that I was not pregnant and told me to go home.
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Chapter 9 recounts Ms Wolf's deeply unpleasant birth experience, characterized by neglect and nasty nurses and culminating in a hideous and traumatic C-section. One suspects that this book is some form of revenge. She didn't get support. She didn't get love. No one told her she could do it, held her hair back, petted her arms. I'm sorry for her, but I have to wonder: where the hell was her husband? and was writing a whole book to process the experience really necessary? was publishing it necessary?
--
Ah-hah. Pages 145-211 have made the intense annoyingosity of the previous chapters worth it. I really appreciate a book that both critiques the cascade-of-intervention style of hospital birth and the childbirth-as-womanly-ecstasy style of unmedicated birth. I also appreciate that, unlike the also-intensely-annoying lesbian conception doyenne Stephanie Brill, Naomi Wolf *cites her references*. Bless you, Ms Wolf. I had been considering leaving the book in my seat-back pouch, but I may now actually keep it so that when/if the time comes and I need to make decisions, I can read the relevant papers in full. Cheers about that, although I still don't forgive you for the adoptives-and-infertiles-bashing.
Also spotted on page 191: first mention of non-heterosexuals.
We've just left Kansas. Beginning Part III.
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GAH. Two pages into Part III and already I'm annoyed; that respite was brief. She's all super-upset that her husband has had to go back to work, that they have just moved out to the suburbs, and that "none of the weight [she] gained in pregnancy had 'melted away'". She finds her diaper bag hideous. Nobody is impressed at cocktail parties when she says she's a stay-at-home mother. When she is invited to speak somewhere, they do not offer to provide childcare.
Oh, by the next page in I realize that along with staying at home, she has a "caregiver" (later, she says that she doesn't like the word "nanny". She finds it... condescending.) Cry me a river, beyotch. I'd just started to like you again.
According to her, women in other countries are nourished and pampered for forty days after birth. I am skeptical of the veracity of her account of the luxurious treatment postpartum women receive in rural China.
~ Bored now. She's complaining about how husbands don't take enough responsibility for the babies and housework.
*yawn* Not my problem.
Hunh. Okay, I'm trying to get interested in here in the problems of her overprivileged friends. She speaks of how they attempt to negotiate fair work distribution with their husbands, the same story over and over again: she works way harder, he doesn't understand or care, she loses her sex drive. At one point (p 249) when discussing one of these sad stories she says "...Sam wasn't a bad guy. And we did not know what it felt like from his point of view."
O RLY? If only we knew a REPORTER! She could ask him questions, and then write down what he says, and then put it in a book!
*headdesk*
It really makes me wonder how interested she actually is in getting a picture of what's going on, versus banging a very particular drum.
-- am now back home, whee! I finished the book just as we were beginning our descent into the airport. I'm disappointed to say that the epilogue reveals that she did in fact birth a second child. Narcissistic racist.
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