A better version of today

It’s a funny old thing, this business of making people.

On the one hand, it’s hard graft: forging a  whole new human being out of little more than snot, sleeplessness, and the refusal to eat peas. On the other, you know perfectly well it’s the ride of your life; you should be enjoying the view, dammit, not just wiping the sweat from your eyes.

I always mean to enjoy the view. It’s just that I’m forever going to do it later or tomorrow, when I’ve cracked the colic, or the tantrums, or the endless questions, or the Minecraft addiction. When I’ve folded the socks and wiped the table and made sure the homework is ready for the morning. I will look out of the window properly and take in the beauty…I just need to sort out a few things first.

Last night, I sat with my firstborn as he drifted off to sleep. He is so like me in so many ways that we are constantly bashing heads and elbows in the jostle of family life. Grumpy from staying awake to finish a latest book, I get annoyed with him in turn for reading when he ought to be doing something else. We’re not enjoying each other at the moment, caught as we are in a grumpy escalation of distractions and temper.

Cuddling him, in a lovely (temporary) truce, I comforted myself that I’ll fix it. That this is just a phase; that we’ll be back on track soon. We will. I know we will. We always have, we always do. We got past the colic and the tantrums (sort of). I can answer the questions without really saying anything. I have long since conceded that Minecraft will always win.

It’s just, I realised last night, that it’s another stint of passing the time as time passes by. The tricky phases always end, but when they do, there’s always another challenge waiting.

Children grow and change so fast, that you don’t get the chance to have your two year old without the battle of wills; the four year old without the incessant “whys?”, the eight year old without the boundary pushing. You just get, in turn, a three year old, a five year old, a nine year old, with their own issues and joys. They’ll never be two, four or eight again. And the socks will still need to be folded, the table wiped, the homework done, just as they did today.

Tomorrow doesn’t bring a better, improved version of today. Today won’t come again. I can’t enjoy it later, when all the difficult bits have been removed and there’s nothing blocking the view. Today, in all its makeshift, humdrum, obscured glory, is as good as it will ever be. And that’s pretty good indeed.

Left luggage

The whole issue of childcare has been on my mind again recently.

I’m one of the lucky ones, in that – for now, at least – it isn’t an issue for me. I am the childcare. I’m here to take the children to school each morning and collect them at lunchtime/3.20 respectively. I’m here whenever we get the dreaded call that one of them is unwell. My husband and I no longer have that ill-tempered hissing standoff when it becomes apparent that one or more of the children will have to stay at home; that fraught under-the-desk text exchange as 5.30 approaches and neither of us is really in a position to leave the office in time to get to the nursery before it shuts.

There were other factors at play when I gave up work, but beyond the cost and the quality, the logistical considerations of childcare played a big role in our eventual decision. I may be a stay-at-home mum now, but I have the badges (and the scars) of being in a two-earner household with two children in nursery and no family on hand. I know the desperate tug of being unable to take time off while being unable to send a child in for the day; of unpredictable long days, travel and a partner who is often literally unreachable during office hours and childcare which, though adequate in quality and extensive in hours, just didn’t really meet our (and our children’s) needs.

It’s tempting always to brandish the badges and the scars when talking about work and childcare, but it’s counterproductive. I know well that we were lucky not to have to factor in zero-hours contracts, night shifts, public transport or minimum wage pay-packets. That we were lucky to be “we”, and always to have had another parent on hand, no matter how inflexible their work requirements. That we were lucky, above all, to be able to opt out of the whole thing altogether for a few years.

The discussion shouldn’t hinge around the personal, but about the culture of work and childcare which is tending, increasingly, to insist that the latter is there purely to serve the former. Superficially, increasing the hours of school nurseries, for example, from 8am to 6pm to give parents more flexibility, as Liz Truss (among others) has called for is a step in the right direction in facilitating the two (although when we had those hours at our private day nursery, magically, they were never long enough). So is addressing the cost, which for many parents makes working unaffordable. My fear is, though, that the current debate does little to address the fundamental imbalance, the fundamental disconnect that working parents face: having to leave the “parent” side of themselves to one side when working.

Treating childcare like some kind of left luggage facility, where encumbrances can be safely stored out of sight and out of mind while the owner gets on with other things, causes as many problems as it solves. What about the circumstances when a child can’t go to nursery or childminder or school, or where a parent is put under pressure at work to do additional hours? What about the transport crises or other emergencies where no-one gets there to pick up until long after the setting has closed? What about the effect on children of consistently spending almost all of their waking hours away from home, only seeing their parents in small, stressed  segments at the start and end of the day?

The push to get mothers back into work at pretty much any cost seems to be a unified one across all political parties, and I agree that no-one should be disbarred from employment purely because they cannot afford or access decent childcare. Nor do I think that childcare away from the home is inherently bad. All three of my children have benefitted hugely from time spent in dedicated settings, doing things I have neither the experience nor patience to do at home. Childcare alone can only be one part of the solution, though; one part of a balanced approach to childhood and family life.

At present, as a nation, we rely hugely on informal help from those around us to make childcare and work…work. Grandparents prop up many working families, unpaid and largely unsung. Parents who don’t work, or work part-time, provide slack in the system for friends, neighbours and relatives. If we force through expansion and take-up of childcare at the same time as using policy to increase employment among older people and mothers, we must pay  more attention to the gaps around the edges of even the best childcare. We must ensure that employment rights are enhanced to allow parents to leave work or take time off at short notice, to leave bang on time, to be able to prioritise children over deadlines when necessary, to be, in short, a parent, without the taint of being a skiver and without fear of consequence. The trend in employment rights is, of course, in completely the opposite direction, with many mothers in particular finding that having a child pushes them, without remedy, out of the workplace altogether.

Children deserve more than to be treated as a nuisance; as baggage. We can find a way to demand that employers accommodate army service and time as a magistrate. Isn’t it a shame that we seem unable to approach reconciling employment and childcare with the same maturity and determination?

Planning Families

Announcing that No3 was on his way caught everyone by surprise. We already had a full house, after all, in that weird form of Baby Bingo we all seem to play these days: two healthy children, a boy, a girl. What could possibly be the point of a third?

“Was it an accident?” asked more than one person, until I was tempted to make up some exquisitely detailed story of a burst condom, just to teach them some manners. I didn’t, of course; I just smiled in a noncommittal English way intended to convey both that the baby was very much intended and that conjugal intercourse is never the subject for third party small talk.

It’s weird, though, this notion of family planning. You can spend years – decades even – frenziedly trying to prevent conception until you find, when you try, that it doesn’t happen anyway. You can follow the instructions down to the last (French) letter and be caught out at the most inopportune moment. You can dream of girls and breed a football team; you can dream of boys and spend your life surrounded by the opposite. You can go for a baby and end up with three; you can go for a baby and end up, heartbreakingly, with none.

You can’t really “plan” your family any more than you can plan who your children will be. You can have hopes that are fulfilled, but that’s not the same thing. I look at my two younger children, and wonder that they would not be here, that I would never have known them, if their shadowy immediate predecessors had made it. I wonder who those little ones would have been. What would have changed in our family dynamics; what would have changed in the characters of the others, if brother had been sister, or vice versa? If a different little person had been in the car seat next door, across the table, running and squabbling and laughing to school? If there’d been no one there at all? There are infinite families we could have been.

It’s futile to wonder, but I still do. Even with my three beautiful children, it’s tempting to assign aspects of personality to their position in the family and to muse what difference a delay or advance of a few weeks would have made in changing their school year: their friends, their development, their progress.

It is as it is, and they are who they are: products of their genes and their timeings, of their surroundings and a million tiny influences I won’t even have noticed. As it is for everyone, as it always has been. There isn’t a recipe to follow; no pattern for perfection. Being able to control fertility in a way which our grandmothers could only have dreamed of is a gift, but the flip side is to think that we have more control over the children born to us than we do – or should. We may plan all we like, but the scariest bit of all is that it’s still, fundamentally, a leap of faith. A gamble, with love.

Working it out

I often spend my time involved in things which are improbable, if not fantastical. Only this weekend, I was engaged in a lovely game with my 3 year old in which a nice flat stone he’d found was standing in for the Millennium Falcon. It stood me in good stead when, later that day, I came across an online questionnaire circulated  by the Conservative Party. In the interests of fair disclosure I am obliged to say that I am as likely to vote for Messrs Cameron & Co as Han Solo is to be found flying a small pebble, but I thought it might be of use to them to know that the entire country is not obsessed above all else with paying off the credit card and kicking out the lodgers (or whatever household metaphors are currently being used to portray the nation’s perceived ills).

As it happens, they’ll never benefit from my opinions, because you had to put name and email address on the bottom before submitting it, and the prospect of spam mail from Michael Gove was enough to put me off the internet forever.  It was still worth doing, though, because it was the first time I saw an explicit reframing of “welfare” as “making work pay”.

Current policies are undoubtedly aimed at making work pay and undoubtedly succeed, in the sense that something will always be more than nothing. What matter if work is scant, inaccessible or insecure? If you have no other source of income, then work, comparatively, will always be financially worthwhile.

Of course, though, it does matter if work is scant, inaccessible or insecure. It matters if there are no jobs available, or the only ones which are are beyond you, in terms of your qualifications or your capacity to travel or be available 24/7. It matters if you’re not in a position to work at all, temporarily or forever, through ill-health or caring responsibilities.  It matters if, even if you do work, you bring home too little to live on while the safety net of welfare is snipped away from you strand by strand.

Do some people cheat the system and avoid work in order to live on benefits? Of course they do (though unless you’re on the fiddle the sums involved aren’t an attractive proposition), but recasting our entire social security structure in order to shake them out smacks somewhat of closing down Tesco because kids have been pinching KitKats from the bottom shelves.

There is a second (related) issue here, though; an increasing emphasis on work as an absolute good. I entirely agree that work, in the abstract, is a Good Thing. It is right that people should be educated and supported into paid employment which rewards them with purpose, security and the means by which to live independently. I believe it is right that by working, people should in turn make a proportionate financial contribution to the services that we all use, and do so in the knowledge that destitution does not await them if ever they can’t work for whatever reason. That’s like the ABC of Citizenship.

What’s more, whether from a surfeit of Victorian novels or a semi-religious upbringing, I’m a subscriber to “the Devil makes work for idle hands” school of thought. I like being busy, or occupied at least. I know from personal experience that feeling without purpose – having no structure to my days, no apparent reason to get up in the morning, no sense of any kind of achievement by the evening – leaves me exhausted, miserable and perversely disinclined to any kind of activity.

Where I struggle is with the idea that paid work confers some kind of moral virtue in and of itself.  I choose not to work outside of the home for the time being in order to be at home when my children are small, and I’m lucky to be able to choose. I keep coming back to this theme in my blog, though, because I feel such a cultural undercurrent of opprobrium for being economically inactive. I am strong enough to withstand it, but so many others, who’ve had no choice in their circumstances, aren’t.

I  know that many of my days now are a million times more productive than those spent filing paperclips and dictating memos; if I were paid by output, I should be earning far more than I ever could have done in an office. How can I calculate which is more valuable, though; how can I tell where my contribution has been greatest?

I went for a coffee at my church’s cafe this morning, and met up with one of the men who lives in a local home for those with learning difficulties. He was on his way out with his companion to do the weekly food shop. Sometimes he helps in the cafe. He proudly showed us at church a few weeks ago the paintings he has been doing at his art class. He has a productive, happy, dignified life and he has his own, well-loved place in his small community. He will never be employed, he will never, no matter how much welfare is recast as being aimed at “making work pay”, be a net financial contributor to society. It sickens me to my stomach that this reframing brings with it the implication that he may therefore not be worthy of support.

Because that, surely, is the logical conclusion of all of this. Be seen at all times to work and to pay into a system which increasingly won’t pay you back. Don’t lose your job. Don’t become ill. Don’t have an accident. Don’t have parents who become elderly and frail. Don’t “choose” to have a child who has extra needs of any kind. If this sounds, in its turn, improbable or even fantastical, bear in mind that the Department of Health has already proposed that the cost of treatment be balanced against the wider “societal benefit” of curing that person.We already have the use of “taxpayer” and “hardworking people” when what is really meant is “society”. We’re already on that road.

Work should pay, unquestionably. That is its primary purpose. Making work pay should be an end in itself, though, not an excuse for eroding social security. Work should never, ever, come to be used as a substitute for worth.

Sinkholes

It’s not often that the news brings me to nervous, hysterical laughter, but one item did last week. BBC News at Ten ran a story on a sinkhole which had sheared away the brick wall of a house in Ripon and caused three families to be evacuated. This was followed by a jaunty little trot through the six sinkholes across Britain in February so far (more by a factor of about a million that heretofore), a map showing the areas potentially at risk (everywhere, at a quick glance) and a brief scientific explanation of what causes them; ending with a cut back to a lost-for-words George Alagiah, who may well have felt that he’d stumbled into the filming of some low-rent UK geo-porn.

It was so horrific, so improbable, so utterly, fantastically appalling – the ground literally, with no warning, swallowing up to open whatever was on its surface in that second – that it couldn’t help but be hilarious.

And so we laughed. And laughed. And laughed. And looked at the map more closely.

That night, lying awake as my family slept, as is my wont; mind buzzing and circling and picking away at the bones of long-dead problems, the sinkholes came back to me. It struck me that I suddenly had an image for the mental landscape I have inhabited for years. A way to visualise the anxiety which makes any decision to build or explore or often even simply move feel too fraught with danger to be risked. The constant, gnawing dread of what lies beneath the surface, of what catastrophe may be unleashed by one unwitting step.

The thing is that I know it’s both rational and irrational. Just as with the sinkholes, external factors beyond my control are by far the most likely cause of disaster. Retreating ever further into a smaller and smaller spot, shrinking myself to take up the least possible room and exert the lightest possible tread, isn’t a recipe for a risk-free life, let alone a happy and fulfilled one. Even worse, it is my mind itself which has eroded the strata of rock beneath my feet, fretting it to fragility and treacherous chasms of doubt. I can see this and recognise that it’s so, yet still be too afraid to put my foot down on a new space, just in case.

It’s only been recently that I’ve learned that not everyone picks their way through life, afraid of each new step. That being frightened as a defence mechanism is the exception, not the norm. That surveying life and all the decisions it entails as a series of booby traps lying in wait for the unwary or the intrepid is neither healthy nor helpful.

What to do? I don’t know. I don’t want my children to pick up the message that life is so mined with danger that inertia is the safest policy. I suppose that knowing it’s not right is a start, though I suspect that backfilling the excavations will take as much time as learning to step off the spot.

The Dummies’ Guide* to the First Twelve Months

*(or No Dummies, depending on your preference/opinion/latest evidence-based research…)

Who are you calling dummy?

The hospital bags are packed; the car seat is waiting in the hall; your phone is switched off to avoid any further kindly enquiries from friends and family in case you’ve had the baby, and, you know, forgot to tell them. But what happens next? What about once the baby is home, and you’re into that shadowy land of Parenthood? Here’s a  list of top 10 tips which you won’t find anywhere else, on how REALLY to survive your baby’s first year

1. Make a To Do list

By this, I mean a real List. Think about all the things which you will need to remember over the next few months, write them down, and stick them to the fridge door. This way, you’re less likely to forget small matters like your car’s MOT, your house insurance (you think I’m kidding, don’t you?) and Aunt Mabel’s 100^th birthday. If you’re particularly organised, it’s worth buying and addressing cards for all the birthdays and special occasions coming up too, so that you just have to take them out of the box and remember to post them at the right time.

2. Invest In Decent Soap and Handcream

Studies show that new parents wash their hands approximately four dozen times a day. Your skin will turn to pumice, and you will start hosting life forms under your rings. Invest in some lovely handwash, dry your hands thoroughly, and have tubes of handcream stashed within easy reach all over the house.

3. Have a Smart Phone

One way or another, you are going to do a lot of sitting over the next few months. It sounds lovely, it can turn out to be less so. Holding a book one-handed is tricky, and TV is unreliable. Whether you virtuously spend your time learning a new language and reading lecture notes from Harvard, or fritter it away on Twitter and Facebook, believe me: you will feel a lot more in touch with the adult world. Also: photos.

4. Develop Selective Vision

That’s not dust under the sofa, and they are definitely not skid marks in the loo. If it’s not going to make you ill, it’s not housework which needs doing.  Honestly.

5. Develop Selective Hearing

The trouble with child-rearing is that almost everyone has done it or seen it done. The secret to remember, however, is that no-one has ever reared YOUR child. You are well-informed, you have a powerful instinct, and unless you are advocating that your newborn rides a motorbike without a helmet, you are more likely than not to be right. No-one else will believe this, unfortunately, so the correct response to comments from anyone (other than a health professional) is a smile and a “Thank You” (along with a mental dismissal). It will add years to your life. And possibly theirs.

6. Make a Date for Photos

Take a picture of your baby every Saturday morning (or Wednesday evening, or whenever suits you, at a regular interval). One cute idea is to photo them each time next to the same toy, so that you can see them grow. While you’re at it; film them too. Even if they’re not doing anything particular, they’ll never not do it like that again. I never did this, and I wish I had. You think you’ll remember every stage. You really won’t.

7. Cheat

Unless being slovenly genuinely upsets you, this is no time for standards. Buy ready-meals/prepared sauces/disposable duster wipes. Convenience can be a marvellous thing, and can help you feel on top of things – which is Very Good Thing.

8. Pack

Babies can grow like weeds. If your little darling is sprinting out of his/her clothes on a regular basis, do yourself a favour and bag them up by size, with labels clearly visible. That way, when you get them out of storage to pass them on or use them again, you won’t have to spend an afternoon of your life turning tiny white vests inside out to see if they’re 0-3 or 3-6 months.

9. Go Out

The first few weeks of having a new born can feel as though you’ve had a layer of skin or two removed, and the world outside can seem a bit daunting. Add to this the logistical nightmare of sleep/feed/nappy times, and the need to pack for a short holiday just to go to the shops, staying at home seems really attractive. Meeting other new mums is really important, though, and it’s worth trying to get to baby groups as much as you can. You might not make friends for life, but having someone to rate the previous night’s sleep out of ten with, or who are as fascinated as you with the contents of a nappy will make the early days easier. You might not want to believe it, but it’s true.

10. Look after Yourself

Having a new baby is really hard. It’s hard physically, mentally and emotionally. You owe it to your baby, your partner, but most of all to yourself, to be kind to yourself. Take any help which is offered (or ask for it!), try to find time to pluck your eyebrows/read a book/go out for a run (delete as appropriate) or do whatever it is which makes you feel more like yourself again. Don’t be afraid to say if you’re struggling. Being honest about finding it hard, and needing help to get you through the difficult times, doesn’t mean you’re ungrateful, undeserving or unworthy.

I wrote this originally for a local parenting magazine. It’s not really my blog style, but it sums up a lot of what I wish I’d known before I had my first baby. And yes; it makes a lot of smug assumptions which won’t apply to everyone. It’s just what I wish *I* had known.

How to talk to boys about periods

This is one of those blog posts that should really feature a question mark in the title.

How to talk to boys about periods? No idea. How about you?

It only struck me this week that it was a conversation I would have to have at some point (twice), if (adopts pompous voice) I want my boys to grow up into the kind of men I hope they’ll be. I’ve always known, of course, that it will come up sooner or later with my daughter; probably sooner, if the general trend of questioning from school friends with older sisters is anything to go by. Hopefully it will be more successful than when my own mum told me; after a long pause, when asked if I had any questions, I apparently replied “will I be able to do cursive writing?”

They’ve already got a hazy but fundamentally sound grasp of human biology. They know that daddies have seeds and that babies generally come out of holes in mummies’ bottoms, unless they’re like No1 and fail to ask for directions en route. We’ve so far magically avoided the issue of how the seeds turn into babies in mummies’ tummies in the first place, and how seeds work where there are two mummies or two daddies, but hopefully when we fill in that gap (so to speak) it won’t be quite as much of a shock as if they’d thought storks or cabbage patches had ever been involved. 

So: sex and reproduction, yes. I knew they were on the parental to-do list eventually, together with the whole attempt to instil some peer-pressure-proof conviction that bedroom gymnastics are better not first attempted on a pile of coats in combination with Diamond White, or whatever fuels teenage parties these days. 

It probably says a lot that I feel ickier about approaching the topic of periods with my boys than I do that of sex. I’d like to say that I don’t think they’re somehow dirty, but I think perhaps the truth is that I do, or at least I have done.

In the decade or so since I stopped taking the pill and have seen my body conceive several times and go on to grow, deliver and nourish three children, I’ve developed what I can only call a hippy-ish fascination with its cycles and seasons. I’ve discovered and brought myself to use mooncups; I can, with a moment’s pause, have a good guess at where in the month I am, even though I always forget to star my dates discreetly on the calendar as my mum taught me thirty odd years ago. I rather like it. It’s all quite clever, really; a rational, orderly progression, not the chaotic, hysterical, hormonal tyranny that a woman’s body is so often painted as being. Having learned to understand and appreciate what my body is doing and why, the messy and inconvenient business of menstruation has ceased to feel embarrassing and alien. It’s not that I count down the days with glee, you understand; more that I feel increasingly disinclined to be ashamed or resentful of it.

I am some way from announcing what my gran called “daisy time” with pride. I can’t see myself holding a party to celebrate my daughter’s first period, but I don’t want her to have to hide it all away from her father and her brothers either. A small but bolshy part of me argues: if she has to learn to manage the discomfort and bleeding and mess, her brothers should also be aware of what her daily (or monthly) existence involves. I don’t want to fall into shielding their sensibilities by demanding that she keep it all secret and hidden. I don’t remember ever openly talking about period pain in front of my brother or my dad. If my daughter is feeling rotten for any other reason she lets us all know: I am determined not to induct her into the language of euphemism and insinuation which turns womanly woes into a kind of secret code, the only way to mention the unmentionable in front of men. Nor do I want my boys to grow up thinking that women have to hide away their bodily realities to avoid embarrassing or inconveniencing them. 

My boys – all my children – already know about periods of course, they just don’t know that they know. They have seen sanitary protection around the house (my 3 year old stealthily unzipped my handbag and, sitting on the floor behind me, waved a pair of Tampax above his head for several minutes during his sister’s Christmas show). At present, they just know that they are mummy’s special tissues (and yes, I know that I am thereby setting myself up to find a child with a tampon inserted nasally). They haven’t yet twigged that when they accompany me to the loo at certain times of the month there will always be a fast moving spider on the ceiling at one given moment. We talk all the time about children following their parents into the bathroom, but the sleight of hand involved in changing a tampon in the presence of an all-seeing toddler is one of the great unspoken triumphs of motherhood.

They are still little, but my eldest is at the age where girls in his class may well start their periods over the next year or so. I can’t change all the boys those girls will come into contact with, but I can do my best to make sure that mine, at least, doesn’t snigger or smirk or make things even more difficult for them.

I don’t know yet quite how I’m going to talk to my boys about periods. I just know that I will. I suspect that, after all, it will be pretty much like talking to my daughter about them. As it should be. And that they’ll be fine.

 

 

Moving on…up?

I had one of those moments in parenting yesterday when I realised that things had changed.

I was making up the children’s beds, while No2 washed her own hair in the shower, No3 was happily unaccompanied on the loo, and No1 was saving the world, or doing whatever it is that is so urgent and addictive on Minecraft.

I felt, quite suddenly, almost redundant. I realised, equally suddenly, that the baby days are really and truly over.

We have no more nappies in the house. The random collection of plastic crockery and bits of feeding equipment has been winnowed out to just a few coloured beakers. CBeebies is a rarity, not a kind of televisual sun-dial portioning out the day into manageable segments; we are four-fifths of the way to independent dressing; when we go out somewhere, the children can all jump into their (interchangeable) car seats and fasten themselves in. We do still use our knackered old Maclaren on a daily basis, but it’s just for the gun-to-the-head frantic rush of the school run. No3 rarely wakes in the night, and will stay (noisily) in his bedroom till he sees seven on his clock. I think, after eight years, we’ve finished with the desperate tiredness of starting day after day in the hour of five, or even four.

I should feel sad, shouldn’t I? I really don’t. I am sorry, a bit, that a very distinct phase is over; I am grateful that we got to experience it at all. I just like this stage of having three small but largely rational companions, three sets of wildly different conversations (usually at once), three new takes on the world around me.

And of course I’m not entirely redundant. Just as I pulled on the final pillowcase, I was summoned from the bathroom.

“Mummy, come and see my poos!”

Roots and Things

The children had a taste of their cultural heritage yesterday. We spent the afternoon at the wonderful Chinese New Year celebrations in Newcastle’s Chinatown. It’s not that I think that my blue-eyed, blonde-haired children have more than the most infinitesimal portion of Chinese ancestry (at best), but I’m a Geordie, so seeing St James’s and driving across the Town Moor always feel like they must count for something in the identity-forming stakes.

After we’d done with the dragons and the dumplings and the whole smiling-people-having-no-idea-what-they’re-watchingness of Stowell Street, we popped into the Discovery Museum for – I’ll be honest – some warmth, as well as its child-friendly displays. We spent a half-hour wandering happily through a history of Newcastle from understandably miserable re-imagined Romans right through to today.

A sense of belated homesickness for Newcastle has been growing on me for the last few months, after I’d thought it gone forever. Whether it’s the pull of family after personal tragedy, or whether it’s that my own particular brand of post-baby otherness is finally wearing off, I can see what is exciting and interesting there, rather than just what is expensive and inconvenient and scary. It’s a strange feeling, after twenty years away from somewhere, to feel a sharp tug back.  Then, as we were leaving, I came across this:

As an initiative, especially alongside the beautifully curated memories of Newcastle in living memory, it was incredibly poignant. As a proposition, against the backdrop of my questions about home and belonging, it struck me. If we moved back, I would – on paper – undoubtedly belong. My parents were both brought up in or near Newcastle; I was born there, and spent most of my childhood living nearby. My accent has blurred into generic semi-posh Northern, but I still feel most at home when surrounded by the sing-song chatter of Geordie accents. My family’s heritage on Tyneside is there, too: I can show my children where their great-grandfather drove fire engines out of a city centre station, where their great-grandmother’s family were bombed in the Second World War, where their uncle watches the football whenever he can. I could read the memories on that wall, and I could add to them.

But would my children belong? They have a father whose name, appearance and family tree suggest that all genetic ambition was spent reaching Yorkshire from Scandinavia ahead of the Normans, and moving as little as possible since. They have a mother who, for all her creeping will to relocate to Tyneside, spent most of her formative years thrilling to any hint of Celt, and counting family fractions on her fingers to calculate quite how Irish she actually was (somewhere between a quarter and a half, if blood could be measured like alcohol). They have been born and grown, to date, in a small-ish community, nondescript to the passer-by, but which is nonetheless their element. So, do they belong here? They undoubtedly feel they do, but I am not sure that a village in the throes of massive expansion has a clear enough ‘something’ there for it to be reciprocal or permanent.

In the delicious Italy Unpacked series on BBC2, Giorgio Locatelli spoke repeatedly of satisfying his “culinary DNA” in cooking and eating his way around his native Italy. It’s a deeply sympathetic image: I love to think of people with an unshakeable sense of self and heritage connecting with some profound, indefinable heritage. But it’s surely, to some extent, self selective and illusory. Would Yeats and wild fiddle music have pulled at my heart were it not for the killer combination of  red hair, finding teenagerhood unbearable, and the perennial cachet of the Irish? They certainly had less formative impact on my brown-haired, brown-eyed, more socially adept siblings. Is there even such a thing as cultural DNA anyway? Surely it’s just process of refined memory; nurture, not nature.

That’s the thing about belonging: it’s both a need and a choice. You can choose to belong somewhere; Facebook shows me daily updates of the progress of emigrated friends throwing themselves into their adopted new surroundings, apparently successfully. And yet, of course, it’s a two way thing. My children are no less ‘immigrants’ than plenty of others on the streets in Chinatown yesterday afternoon, but they’ll never get asked to qualify and quantify their allegiance at a national level, purely because the origin of their ancestors allows them to blend in more easily.

Belonging is infinitely appealing, but it requires unbelonging too.  However it’s determined – appearance, history, DNA - as long as we assert that someone belongs here, it must mean that someone else doesn’t. Furthermore, if you truly belong in one place, the obvious conclusion is that you can’t belong anywhere else. As we become ever more mobile, raising blended families who move frequently, what does belonging even mean anymore?

Perhaps the truth is a simple reverse of Groucho Marx. If you feel you need to question whether you belong, you never truly will.

Breastfeeding on demand

Every so often, I come across something on Twitter which makes me rub my eyes and check the date. 

Today’s laugh-with-nervous-incredulity comes courtesy of a Huffington Post article on a recent new law introduced in the United Arab Emirates. 

As part of their Child Rights Law (who could object to any piece of legislation with that title?), it is now a legal requirement for mothers to breastfeed for the first two years of their child’s lives. A woman who fails to do so can be sued by her husband, although presumably other penalties will be involved – how else to protect the rights of a fatherless child against its…mother?

I’m generally in favour of any measures which promote and encourage breastfeeding, from the availability of properly trained supporters to a pushback against a culture which sees it increasingly as a bolshy, narcissistic, unnecessary act. I think the proper promotion and support of breastfeeding is a women’s rights issue, too, in that it apparently takes uncommon sophistry to accept that a woman may retain all her personal, professional and educational attributes, while wishing also to capitalise on the relatively short period of life in which a child may be dependent on her. 

All other things being equal, there is little doubt that breastfeeding is the best start in life for a baby. Of course, however, all other things rarely are equal, and breastmilk substitutes (and parent substitutes) are an everyday part of life, without significant detriment. Breastfeeding doesn’t trump all other pieces in the jigsaw of parenting; we have to credit women with the ability to make choices in this as in all other aspects of their lives, based on their physical, mental, emotional and financial circumstances.

Which is why this legislation is so worrying. It has, surely, little really to do with giving a child the best possible start in life. For reasons which are almost too obvious to state, it is unenforceable on any practical or equitable level. Women who are ‘unable’ to breastfeed will be provided with a wet nurse, but the mechanics of doing so are unclear. In any event, how could ‘unable’ ever be determined? As with abortion, presumably those who have the money to do so will have the choice anyway, regardless of statute. What about babies who self-wean, as two of mine did, before the age of two? There is the ludicrous, but not remotely amusing, scenario of mothers desperately trying to continue breastfeeding against a backdrop of disapproving family or relatives who might relish the opportunity to cause trouble with law enforcement. 

Tellingly, although this proposal was ultimately deemed worthy of a place in law, measures which would protect and facilitate the rights of breastfeeding mothers in the workplace were not. It’s hard enough to continue breastfeeding after maternity leave even with the most supportive of employers and an appropriate workplace – breasts (and babies) unfortunately can struggle to understand the stress of a pumping schedule. Where there is a duty in law for any woman with a child under the age of two to be available around the clock for feeding, why employ her? Why educate her at all, since her ultimate place in life is so clearly and publicly defined? Why treat your wife as an equal partner, when the official message is that she is subservient to the perceived needs of your child? Why respect any woman, if she’s little more than a means to an end? I don’t mean to suggest that the new law would change women’s position overnight – but how can the message it sends fail to do so over time?

Writing this feels weird. I am no expert on women’s rights in the UAE; I have no more than general knowledge about the UAE at all. Nor do I think it is anything which could ever remotely be implemented here. But on a day when my Twitter and Facebook timelines talk of 100+ million girls and women worldwide affected by FGM; in a week when there is discussion – however abstract – as to whether a woman can be held criminally liable for harm caused to her unborn child; it is a deeply troubling thing to read of women being consigned in law to a status which effectively deprives them of agency for the purposes of one subjective, selective advantage to their children. There are countless better ways to further the rights of a child than seeking to criminalise its mother. If you really want to support children, you take the rights and welfare of women seriously.