Comfortable Disorientation

Parenting styles

Since Joseph made his arrival, the cat no longer has the run of the house. At night she's restricted to the kitchen and garden.  Matt and I have different methods of getting her off the sofa and into the kitchen before heading to bed.

I pick her up, give her a cuddle and carry her into the kitchen.

Matt encourages her to come into the kitchen of her own accord - by putting a small amount of food in her bowl and rattling it.

Hmmm...

Suburban and mumsy?

I'm struggling a bit with my self-image.  I feel like I've been unceremoniously booted out of my old life and identity and haven't yet settled into my new one. 

As I go on my daily walks around nappy valley, smiling and nodding at the other 30-something mums pushing their Quinnys/Bugaboos/PhilandTeds, I have never been more painfully aware of being a demographic.  It's only recently dawned on me that I've moved to suburbia, in my head it was just down the road from the gritty midpoint of Brixton-Stockwell-Clapham where I used to reside.

I no longer fit into my old clothes and as I slowly buy new ones I'm no longer sure of my style.  Is a new uniform in order or not?

There's a distinct lack of acceptable inspiration for my freshly evolving identity. I keep running into stereotypes I would rather back away from.  When it comes to mums of small babies the only images you ever really see are:

The Celebrity Mum:  I'm avoiding images of these at the moment. 

The Frazzled and Not Coping Mum:  The polar opposite to the celebrity mum, these run the full gamet from teenaged-single-mum-in-bedsit to previously-successful-and-together-professional-in-meltdown

The Poster Mum:  You see a lot of this sort of dewey skin-heavy idealised image in advertising and packaging. The Johnson's Mum if you like.  I think the idea is that the perfect innocence and purity of the baby somehow magically rubs off on it's mother.

The Nurturing Glow Mum:  This crops up mostly in health brochures particularly anything on breastfeeding.  It always feels a bit dated and 70's to me.

Oh and then there's the Yummy Mummy. Urgghh, don't even get me started on this one. The mere phrase manages to sound twee, smug and a bit ick all at once.

So you see, a lack of positively real images of mums.  Which is why the Be A Star campaign, intended to increase the number of breastfeeding young mums in Lancashire is so refreshing.  It's not often you see images of mums that are both real and aspirational.  There's nothing mumsy about these girls. Shame they're all so young!

IYHKYWU

Since becomming a mum, my perspective on the world has changed.  Not so much in a profound or existential way.   What I mean is that I've lost the structure of the working week; the distance I travel in any given day has shrunk dramatically; and I spend a huge amount of time and effort thinking about how to achieve and manage things that were once so automatic they were inconsequential (feeding, sleeping, bathing...).  I now see the world through a first-time-mum lense.   

On a forum I use arguements occasionally erupt over the phrase "If You Had Kids You Would Understand".  Typically a non-parent posts a comment (usually about kids/babies/parenting) which a parent considers insensitive or offensive and the infamous phrase is hurled forth. The arguement usually then gets sidetracked by a discussion over the validity of this phrase. Essentially, do you need to be a parent in order to truly understand what it's like to be one?

Those that answer no have the best of the arguement. As a researcher, I would want to believe that it if you listen, observe, empathise and imagine hard enough it is possible to get under the skin of someone else's experience.  But now I'm in the position of being in a situation I've previously tried to describe and translate through research, I'm very aware that I didn't completely get it.

I don't think I've ever grossly misrepresented the experience of the new mum. It's more that my understanding was sometimes shallow.  I didn't always understand the depth and quality of feeling that lay beneath things that I had previously described matter of factly.  Consequently, some aspects of motherhood have completely surprised me.  There are things I expected to experience, but now I'm experiencing them I realise my expectation was never quite right in the first place.

Does that make any sense?  I'm not sure I'm doing a very good job of explaining myself. Anyway I think I might try to set things straight over a few posts - describing how the inside experience of being a new mum is not quite as I thought it was when I studied it from the outside.