Don't Blame Mum

The last dress she ever wore

Another baby has died at the hands of her mother, the very person who is supposed to champion her rights above all else.

Why this keeps happening is anyone's guess, but it is an enduring feature of humankind, and our friends in the animal kingdom, that babies die, sometimes often, and often at the hands of their mum or dad.

The biggest cause in modern Australia is depression. The self loathing some mothers feel when they 'fail' to breastfeed or settle their babies is all consuming. The effects of sleep deprivation, a popular and very successful torture technique, combined with clinical depression can be toxic. I do not want to demonise mothers with depression or even try to imagine the horrific combination of factors that could push you over the edge.

What I want to do is mourn the loss of this little child's life, just a baby girl starting her life. Eighteen months is the most adorable age, when grandmothers come up to your little one in the street and say My Goodness, I just wish they'd stay like this forever! Their eyes sparkle with mischief, their little cheeks dimple and their fat rolls are irresistible as they skip ahead of you, tiny versions of their future selves.

This little eighteen month old was deliberately left by her mother to drown in the one place most toddlers adore, the bath. The image of her scrabbling for air, trying to get out, screaming and finally choking in the bathwater is deeply upsetting. She died alone in her own home. After her death, her little body was dressed in a christening gown and she lay next to her suicidal mother for two days before someone found them, or missed them.

It is this image that speaks to the core of what I am constantly concerned about: the isolation of mothers in our harried society and its lack of support for new mums. If they feel like there aren't a lot of options out there, it's because there honestly isn't.

Baby health centres, playgroups, local libraries, modern hospitals and highly regulated childcare centres are wonderful but many of them could be more accessible to mothers. For my baby's first six weeks, for example, I couldn't walk or drive to the shops so couldn't access my baby health nurse. She was also solidly booked weeks in advance. So I didn't find out my baby was losing weight steadily for two months until she ended up in emergency. Some of the reason she lost weight was my low milk supply, something I wasn't given information about because I did not have any lactation support. The complex list goes on.

Our one playgroup is 30 minutes away. There are no support groups, meals or anything to help a new mum without mobility, unlike the elderly. A lot of what is on offer is expensive. And many in our generation can forget about grandparents: our parents tend to be more interested in their next promotion or trip to Europe than their new grandchild.

It's not just lack of governmental and civic support for mums, it's also our cultural expectations on mums and our opinion that bearing children is a lifestyle choice, like being gay (ha ha ha), choosing solar or driving a BMW. We don't berate car accident victims that they shouldn't have bought a car. We don't even tell lung cancer victims they shouldn't have smoked, or diabetes sufferers they should lay off the sweets. So why we tell mothers they shouldn't have chosen to have children when they hit a rough patch is beyond me.

I think it's the old Women are to Blame acorn. Blame the ladies for men's collective inability to retain self control. Blame the rape victim's dress for the crime. Blame the mother who kills her baby for her isolation and untreated depression. "You chose to have kids, didn't you?" is the one thing most mothers really do not want to hear when they are in trouble.

Not to mention the glaring fact that about half of all babies are unplanned (for more, see contraception failure or heterosexual couples having spontaneous sex) so were not actually conscious decisions or choices. And of the babies that were planned, not all of their parents carefully planned on having a child with autism, with projectile vomiting that lasts for 3 months, who screams ten hours straight every day. No. Not many parents happily make a choice to sign up for that! It's a miracle more babies actually survive babyhood considering the raft of pressures on their new parents, and a glowing reflection on the stamina of parents that more are not relinquished to state care. 

So let's think carefully on what we're expecting of new parents and consider how we might as a society offer more support and relief to new parents and activities for young children.

Sex at Dawn in Australia

The myth of monogamy?
Try the myth of primary care!

Apologies to anyone who thought this post would be about pre-coffee coitus. It actually touches on the brilliant bestselling book Sex at Dawn which puts to rest once and for all the myth of monogamy, and how this premise fits in with the Australian cultural context...and its denigration of mothers who work.

So let us define our Australian cultural context. We have an increasingly matriarchal society, where women and men enjoy sex freely from puberty. Serial monogamy is still the standard, contrary to what Sex at Dawn explains is against our nature, but we have quite a few features of a matriarchal society.

Many individuals of both genders are free to pursue multiple partners without fear of legal consequences or social censure. When a couple, hetero or homo sexual, decide to live together they often move to the female's home. And women in Australia are generally strong, bossy and all too quick to put in their $6 worth. Most husbands in Australia will agree their wife has the final say.

Sexual jealousy and male aggression similar to chimp societies are, however, so much a key feature of Australian culture that is would be folly to suggest Australians are becoming matriarchal. An examination of these aspects as well as our sordid recent past of female convicts, institutionalised rape and floating brothels, and our current reality of unfavourable rights for working women, expensive childcare and the persistent gender pay gap will render any claim to matriarchy null and void. Australia is far too diverse to impose one social context, so what I am really referring to is modern Sydney.

Here we see women flaunting their sexuality with abandon, free to pursue as many sexual trysts as desired. Just watch The Shire, visit a beach or peep into a nightclub and you'll see women of every age and persuasion available for free. And happy about it.

I would go as far to suggest that the myth of monogamy can be held up to another biting parallel: the myth of the primary caregiver. Women are forced to read study after study showing that children under three thrive under the care of only one primary caregiver. Try telling that to the billion of infants who thrived in the village!

The idea of being a primary caregiver, while flattering, is simply outdated. So How Not to F--k Them Up and all those other books can go back to their studies and start looking at incorporating some of the multiple realities of post modernism, one being that a father or mother may easily hand the baby over to a close relative or paid mercenary (this is my only option, thank you to my government subsidised day carer) and baby will NOT SUFFER.

Not only is this true, but this is how almost every generation have been raised: not by one person, typically an isolated female living in the burbs, but by a collective.We have plenty of modern, successful examples of happy infants in kindergarten and childcare in Scandinavia, in addition to millennia of farming and pre-agricultural gatherer communities raising children together, to prove that infants don't suffer if mummy works.

So let's just admit child rearing is about multiplicities and stop making rude comments (to me) at the shops or writing mean spirited newspaper articles that unless I stay home with my infant she will end up disabled. She's doing great and if she were to contract permanent emotional damage, it will be due to my emotional blackmail of her as a teenager, not her happy early days with her carer in the garden because mummy was working.