Controversial Children’s Clothes

This has been a bugbear of mine since having my darling daughter 6 years ago. I’m conflicted: I want to be cool and appear to not be fussed about silly things, but the old-school feminist, pro-people-having-respect part of me gets annoyed and cross about them.

Gallery of children’s clothes here.

I mean, The Babymop is just funny. Surely no mom would think it was a real item.

But this one?

I just find this offensive. It’s age-inappropriate, not to mention that it smacks of misogynism.

The baby bikini body is just humorous to me: .

I don’t see it as making a child look older than she/he is. It’s obvious that it’s a onesie and it’s surely obvious that the little kid wearing it is years away from being curvy and filling out a bikini.

I’m not cool with onesies that have swear words on them or intimate that the child is looking for a MILF. That’s just yuck.

The more I think about this, the more my head hurts. I’m going to have a cup of coffee and read the newspaper. That’s less controversial.

 

Dating (I can’t remember what it’s like so here’s a couple of pictures)

 

International Women’s Day

Ok, my personal list of women I admire.

1. My mum
2. My daughter – for her resilience, fun, and potential
3. Julia Gillard (my daughter is her greatest fan)
4. A number of my friends who’d be embarrassed if I wrote their names here, but who have shown tenacity, determination, ambition, empathy and more.
5. Eva Cox
6. Germaine Greer
7. Samantha Stosur

Rachel Hills has compiled a list of 21 Women to Admire. And yes, Eva Cox is on the list!

 

Working mothers – will the guilt never end?

Opinion piece here.

Like the writer of this piece, Amy Gray, I don’t feel ‘working mother’s guilt’. I may feel guilty about other things (like when I demonstrate poor language choices by swearing at other drivers in Canberra’s annoying traffic!), but I don’t feel guilty about working to earn money so we have a roof over our head. I’m a widow. I don’t have a big fat pension to lean on and we hadn’t paid off our house when DH died. Like my mother, I’m giving my daughter an example of how to work and how to be a mother, and that neither is a walk in the park, yet both can be enormously rewarding on many different levels.

My paternal grandmother was widowed young with two small children. She also worked and had support from her mother with childcare. I have support from paid childcare. Believe me, I appreciate the fantastic young women and men who run exciting activities after school. I couldn’t come up with that variety of activities (soccer, monkey bars, tag, cricket, craft, etc.) for DD and me to do on our own – some things need a number of kids to make it work. DD loves being with other kids. She’s extroverted and very sociable. Hence the endless cries for playdates on the weekend.

 

Commuting makes mums mad

 

 

 

http://www.elsevier.com/wps/find/journaldescription.cws_home/505560/description

 

 

 

Jennifer Roberts | Robert Hodgson | Paul Dolan
 It’s driving her mad: gender differences in the effects of commuting on psychological health Journal of Health Economics  

doi:10.1016/j.jhealeco.2011.07.006

 

 

 

 

Gen X women – career before babies?

Article .

This is research from the NY think-tank, the Centre for Work-Life Policy. 43% of Generation X women (born between 1965 and 1978, my generation) do not have children. I find it interesting that the article sees this as a choice and a preferred choice at that, rather than the usual comments one hears of “There are no worthy men around!” I can think of quite a few Gen X women who would have loved to have children but so far have not found a partner with whom they would like to have children, and they do not want to have a child on their own via assisted reproduction technology. Sure, I see that most of us were aware of how much we could achieve and we totally went for it! We could do anything, take on any career, and we believed (still believe) in people being promoted due to their merits rather than just because they’re a bloke.

Ninety-one percent of the surveyed women in relationships were part of dual-earning couples, and 19 per cent out-earned their husbands. Similarly, 74 per cent considered themselves ambitious, compared to 65 per cent of women from the baby-boom generation.

 

Nigella Lawson and my kitchen

Ah, Nigella, how I love your cooking shows. It’s like cooking in my kitchen, only cleaner, tidier, glossier, and a whole heap more fun. (Dare I say, sexier?) I wish I had your glossy hair and beautiful eyes and your dear way of talking while effortlessly creating delicious dishes. Sigh.

I read a piece from The Telegraph today about her book from 2000 and had to giggle a bit at the idea that it really is a feminist tract.

Speaking of baking (whence the feminist tract comment), Nigella said

There’s something intrinsically misogynistic about decrying a tradition [i.e. baking] because it has always been female.

Good point.

In my family, being able to cook, whether baking, making a roast or stir frying vegies, is an essential life skill. No ‘reclaiming the kitchen from mean chefs who are usually guys’, no ‘worrying about what people will think of your cooking’. No, instead it’s a simple fact that you’ll save money and eat far better by being able to plan a menu from seasonal foods, cook it yourself, and save some in the freezer. You’ll know what’s in your dishes, you can be in control of fat and salt, adapt recipes to what suits you and be in charge of your nutritional health. Better still, you can share what you’ve cooked with your family and friends. Actually, you can make friends through sharing food. Not a bad idea, eh?

Easy scones

2 cups SR flour
1 cup cream
Pinch of salt (optional)

Sift SR flour with salt. Mix flour and cream together in a bowl until it forms a dough. Don’t over-stir it or the scones will go flat. Put the dough onto a floured board and pat it flat – but gently! You don’t want flat scones (How many times can I say that without sounding nuts?). Make the dough as thick or thin as you like. If it’s really thick, you’ll get fewer scones and they’ll take longer to cook and they might end up sticky in the middle and not taste very nice.

Cut scones with a knife or a scone cutter. Place on tray. Glaze with milk. Place in a hot oven, at least 180 degrees Celsius (fan forced oven) or 190 degrees Celsius if not a fan forced oven. Cook for 10 to 12 minutes. Make sure the tops of the scones are a golden brown and use one scone as a tester to open up and see if it’s cooked all the way through.

ETA: Scones are perfect with home-made apricot jam or raspberry jam. Don’t alert kids to the fact that you’re cooking scones or you won’t have enough to share with your friends at afternoon tea. Alternatively, make a double batch and let the little tackers make their own.

 

No child left behind – by their mother, that is

I haven’t posted for a week. I’ve been off work for a while fighting sinusitis and getting back into the swing of dealing with pain again. Frankly, I must be a bit of an old crock! The variable weather hasn’t helped, nor has the lack of house cleaning.

Anyway, back to what is on my mind today.

Article from Yahoo.com here.

The article looks at Rahna Reiko Rizzuto’s experience of giving up custody of her children to become a non-custodial parent. It seems there are strong condemnations of mothers who give up custody, compared to men. If a man does not wish to take full-time or even part-time care of children after a marriage break-up, there will never be as much furore as there is with a mother who, even if there is a good reason, gives up the permanent care of children.

Rizzuto’s full essay is here at Salon.com. She writes:

The question I am always asked is, “How could you leave your children?” How could you be the mother who walks away? As if my children were embedded inside me, even years after birth, and had to be surgically removed? As if I abandoned them on a desert island, amid flaming airplane debris and got into the lifeboat alone?

Hyperbolic. Inflammatory. But that’s part of the point. Because my relationship with my children survives. In fact, it has improved.

I found this quite interesting. I don’t know if I would do that (in fact, since I’m widowed, it’s highly unlikely!) but I sort of admire her for speaking about it. I suspect my age and life experience has something to do with me not condemning her.

 

“7 Mummy Sins”, but not apparently the ones done by Daddy or Aunty or Uncle …

Seriously, the title of this article stinks. On the surface, it looks like one of those tee-hee, look at me, I do some daft things as a mummy and maybe some of them are ill-advised, so hey, let’s get some so-called experts give their take on it, and voila, here is an article with a snappy headline. And blow me down if I didn’t get caught in the trap of reading the darn thing.

Let me save you time. Basically you aren’t a bad mum if you feed your kid the occasional dinner of baked beans instead of a gourmet meal of pureed organic vegies and a teeny bit of steak from a named cow, or if your kid goes through a phase of only eating one or two things. Things are getting questionable if you use tv all the time to babysit your kids, or if they’re drinking from a baby bottle when they’re old enough to go to preschool. It’s inadvisable to give kids sweets every day – keep them as a “sometime” treat.

WHY is it necessary to make the mother the sinner, the evil one who has to cut corners to get things done, who does things sloppily or holds onto old habits because she doesn’t have time to work on new habits or behaviours? How about coming up with “7 Daddy Sins”? Let me start the list, thinking of some men I have known in the past.

“I leave my kid watching TV all afternoon while I sneak off to my study to play wargames.”

“I take my kid to fastfood restaurants because I couldn’t be stuffed cooking a proper meal for myself and my kid, and besides, I don’t really like vegies and I love hamburgers.”

“I do everything to get out of looking after my kid and I call it babysitting when I do look after him.”

Go on, make your own list!

 

And the mummy wars rev up again

Splat!Blog entry by Evan Maloney here. He commented on the article on Gen X women drop out of workforce.

From the article:

Only 38 per cent of Generation X, tertiary qualified women worked full-time, compared to 90 per cent of Generation X, tertiary qualified men, in a University of Melbourne study.

Life Patterns claims to be Australia’s longest running study of the lives of young people, tracking a group who left school in Victoria in 1991.

Its leader, Professor Johanna Wyn, said most of the group’s women, now aged around 37, had ranked career as their highest priority when they left school. [...]

Professor Wyn said Australia’s workplace policies had also taken their toll on the health of Generation X when compared to counterparts in a similar Canadian study.

I feel I have been a wee bit brainwashed by some of the comments that regularly accompany *any* blog entry that may be interpreted as pro or anti SAHM or working mom. Even one entry here where the plea was why can’t we all get along, there were problems further down the comments. There are *always* screams that nobody understands the plight of the working mom who is torn between her career and her children, or how expensive childcare is, or how her partner isn’t picking up the slack, etc. And similarly there will be screams that nobody understands the work that an SAHM puts in, the rewards and annoyances that she gets each day, and (OMG my favourite ever) IF YOU REALLY CARED, YOU WOULD GIVE UP YOUR JOB AND YOU COULD LIVE ON ONE SALARY. Please excuse the screaming capslock. As a widow, I think that one is hysterical and I have only avoided smacking some inconsiderate women because I can’t reach my arms through teh interwebs to administer some justly-deserved punishment.

So, the comments on this Australian blog are normal. Go figure. People who are Gen X, some who are Gen Y, men, women, people of different ages, some who don’t have kids, a few who whinge their pants off, others who show an unexpected kindness and understanding, and those whose candour would, in comment on a Momformation blog post, would see them scorched to the seventh level of Hell for admitting that motherhood is complex and sometimes unhappy and unrewarding.

Please don’t get me wrong. I value the many blog posts at Momformation, the bloggers’ humour, sense of perspective, sense of justice, their curiosity about the world, their honesty and more. I’m thinking of Beth Hering, Betsy Shaw, Joyce Slaton, Jamie Lee, Kristina Sauerwein and more. I think some of the regular commenters are fabulous, also. I may not agree with them all, but I look forward to their comments, as familiar members of the community!