Brother V Brother

This afternoon I'm going to see David Miliband talk to students at Goldsmiths College where I am a part-time lecturer in journalism. We've spent much of the morning researching his policy positions on things and discussing what to listen out for when it comes to identifying a top line for the news stories I have asked them to write on it.

Perhaps because baby number two has been kicking me throughout the morning and because I'm wondering how our own family dynamic will change when this one arrives, two years on from the leadership election (and from the arrival of our first child) what I really care about is not who would make the best Prime Minister but the whole brother versus brother thing.

Sibling relationships are complicated, necessarily so as you can't walk away from a complicated relationship the way you can from a simple one, and family ties are important. But regardless of the complexity, of feelings of rivalry, of love and hatred and grudges and emotional tangles, I just still don't understand how one brother can publicly stand against another in a fight where there is only one winner. Even the word itself, brother, should be one of togetherness, not conflict - we call people we are not related to our brother or sister to show we see them as part of our community, that we walk in solidarity with them.

Those on the right might take a different views of siblings. It is the unionists and oppressed minorities most likely to use this fraternal or sororal term greeting after all. Tories might put family before society when it comes to their rhetoric, but only when that family knows its place. It is still the party of inherited privilege and inherited wealth and this of course also means primogeniture. Cameron may have invoked his stokebroker dad in his recent conference speech, though his line "My dad was a stockbroker from Berkshire" is disingenuous in its suggestion that he was the Berkshire equivalent of a self-made Essex man, what with wealth and aristocracy in his line for generations, but he doesn't once mention his three siblings.

By contrast, those on the left should reject thoughts about whether it is the younger or older sibling who should get opportunities. As a younger sibing myself I've even rejected the kind of double buggy that places the older child on top of the younger child to the detriment of the younger child's view, feeling it is unfair for the baby to automatically get the raw deal. So it's not that the younger Miliband, Ed, beat the older Miliband, David, that bothers me, but that they couldn't reach a deal together, behind closed doors. In fact they should have been fighting to stand down, each wanting the best for each other.

My mum says that when my brother and I were young children she used to feed the ducklings in the local park when we went to feed the ducks. When we were teengers she'd go for the half white and half grey adolescent swans, in their own awkward phase. Once we were adults she switched her feeder attentions to the grown ducks with their flashes of green and purple. Now she has grandchildren she's gone back to the baby ones again. I understand that - we identify, be it ducks, or public figures, with the creature at our own stage of life. So I, like most parents I suspect, still think of the Milibands and think, first of all, about their poor mother, and to be even more biblical than the obvious Cain and Abel comparisons, think about the Judgement of Solomon* and his suggestion to cut a disputed baby in half in order to flush out the real mother. (Perhaps the Labour Party should have suggested a leadership job share, with the candidate who said 'oh go on, let him have it then' being awarded the job).

See, I think about it a lot, every time I see either of the brothers in the news in fact. So of course there are multiple angles my students may take this afternoon, and many directions their questions may take,  but still, yes still, what I really want them to ask David, when it comes to the Q&A part of proceedings, is about his relationship with his brother.


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*(I Kings 3: 16-28) Solomon must decide which of two women claiming to be the mother of a baby is the true one. He suggests cutting the baby in half so they can each have part of him. The 'fake' mother agrees. The true mother says in that case the other woman can have him so the baby lives, and it is therefore decided she must be the real mother as she wishes above all no harm to come to the baby.

A new fangled old fashioned phone

My daugter loves old fashioned red telephone boxes - it's my fault perhaps, as on holiday we found one and she went into it with her dad, who gave me the number, and I rang it from my mobile so we could have a conversation on the phone.

Who can blame her though - wonderful as mobiles are, there's nothing like a great piece of street furniture to brighten up your day, be it a phone box or a magnificent bright red pillar box (or the wonderful Olympic gold one we saw in Enfield recently in honour of Charlotte Dujardin).

She's been conditioned into such geekery since she was very young of course. At about six months old we took her to a family fun day at the British Postal Museum and Archive Store in Debden, Essex. (Play 'Where's Ellie' in the pic below).

Now I'm not one of these people who subscribe to the 'isn't it all terrible our children can use computers before they can talk' school of thought. I'm proud my daughter can swipe open my iphone, even if I worry about the number of times she'll accidentally call the emergency services on it, as she'll be living in a world where knowing how to use technology will be key. Nevertheless I like that she also has a feeling for design greats from before she was born.

As such, this amazing iPhone cover is top of my Christmas want list, £19.99 from www.gettingpersonal.co.uk
 

Some blogs and articles I like (an occasional series)

We went to a wedding last year where a young girl, about four years old, turned to a woman my age who had no children and said "If you're not a girl and you're not a mum then what are you?" Had she said that to me in the trying to conceive years I'd have had to run outside for a not so quick cry. I was so busy thinking about this at the time, and cuddling my baby daughter, that alas I forgot to listen to her answer. I was reminded of the question however when I read this brilliantly hilarious article in The New Yorker by Jenny Allen.

 I'm a mom by Jenny Allen

Mothers for abortion rights

When I became a mum I used to enjoy joking about the new found legitimacy this status gave me in being morally outraged. "As a mother," I'd say, "I really hate paedophiles," as if I thought abusing children was perfectly acceptable before I had one.

There is one area however where I think being a parent makes it even more important to stand up and be counted, and that is when it comes to abortion rights, particularly at the moment as Jeremy Hunt (Secretary of State for Health) has told The Times that he'd like to see the legal abortion limit halved from 24 weeks to 12 weeks.

This is because it is very easy to get confused when it comes to abortion and to think that it is about women not liking, or wanting, children.  Actually abortion is very little to do with children and everything to do with grown women looking at their lives and working out whether to ruin it or not by going ahead with an unplanned and unwanted pregnancy or a pregnancy in which the foetus faces huge medical problems. In fact it is only now I have a child and realise how all consuming being a parent is that I realise how catastrophic having parenthood forced upon you would be.

This doesn't mean I believe in sugar coating what abortion is by using euphemisms about collections of cells or worrying about the exact number of weeks at which a foetus becomes, with huge medical help, viable.  We do ourselves a disservice when we do this, as if we cannot face up to what abortion is. Yes, abortion is killing a potential baby. But not allowing abortion is ruining an actual, not a potential, life. And faced with two horrible possibilities I would always choose the actual life. That's why Hunt is being dishonest with himself if he really thinks abortion is okay, but only until 12 weeks. Either it is okay, and we value the actual life more than the potential life, or it isn't okay and the number of weeks is immaterial.

When I was less than a week old, in 1978, I went to a party. It was to mark the first anniversary of the opening of the day care abortion service, where my mum worked as a counsellor - though she was on maternity leave at the time. Some people may find this odd - taking a baby to celebrate abortion. But it wasn't to celebrate abortion, it was to celebrate the fact that women could end pregnancies, if they chose to do so, safely and legally. That is, it celebrated the opportunity to save lives, not end lives.

That's why abortion is one of the areas where mothers in particular need to stand up and be counted when it comes to supporting access to abortion. Because the anti abortionists, and those who want to limit access to abortion, need to know that women who are in favour of access to abortion are not baby hating monsters. In fact they may well already be mothers, very good ones probably. No, they just like women, actual women, with actual lives, and want to help those lives go as well as possible.

The language instinct

A month or so ago the language switch in my daughter's brain seemed to turn on. Practically overnight her vocabulary grew vastly, and she started to have enough command of language to tell us stories. "Daddy, big hole, water," she told me after a day on the beach. It's brilliant, even when she uses it to send back her bedtime milk for not being warm enough. Chomsky, Pinker, eat your heart out.

But I have one nagging fear about her language instinct. It's been at the back of my mind since she started nursery shortly after turning one. Nursery routine goes something like this: Wash hands. Breakfast. Nappy change. Wash hands. Play. Wash hands. Lunch. Sleep. Nappy change. Wash hands. Play. Wash hands. Tea. Nappy change. Wash hands. Play. Wash hands. Snack. Home time. And ever since she started I've been dreading the day when she is able to turn to the nursery nurse helping them in the bathroom, and as soap is applied and they are encouraged to rub their hands together, says "We don't do this at home."*  

*We do, after a very messy poo or a session with paints, but not, you know, all the time.

On being fat and pregnant

It was perhaps a mistake, shortly before the birth of my daughter, to write an article on being fat and pregnant for Easy Living Magazine. Not because I didn't strongly believe the article should be written - it was about the one size fits all approach to fat women when it comes to a failure to conceive and the determination to blame this on weight when weight is only an issue here if it prevents ovulation - but because it meant speaking to experts who were mostly all doom and gloom about pregnant women.

"Fat women who are pregnant," one obstetrician told me, "are much more likely to die in childbirth." "Gulp," I said, "because I'm rather large and 38 weeks pregnant." "I'm sure you'll be fine," she said, unconvincingly.

The thing is, something I don't think non fat people understand, no amount of telling us something is dangerous is going to sate our desire for a baby. I don't know what odds they would have to have given me against my survival to stop me trying for a family but given that in my trying to conceive madness I genuinely felt that I didn't see the point of life without children, I suspect they would have had to be pretty low, and I imagine my husband would have stopped it before me.

Still, I couldn't bring myself to watch 'One Born Every Minute: Fatties' last night as I enter my third trimester with number two, though I recorded it to keep for a moment when I feel particularly vulnerable, when I shall hunker down to watch it with a big bowl of ice cream and a mansize pack of tissues. They didn't call it that, you might cry, and no, they didn't, but they might as well have, as the euphemism of 'One Born Every Minute: Plus Size Mums' is really no better.

I wrote an email to the hospital's head midwife after the birth of my daughter. Stopping short of a formal complaint it offered some friendly advice. Don't make fat women feel shit by sending them to the special fat clinic midwife, it said, if when you get busy you say oh sod it, see a normal midwife today. Either stigmatise us and follow it through with consistency that we actually need someone specially trained to look at us pitifully and ask how much we exercise, or stop bloody stigmatising us.

This time round I'm more confident. "I'll make an appointment for you to see the midwife who specialises in nutrition," my midwife said at my booking in appointment. "No thanks", I replied, "I'm not fat because I'm ignorant, I'm fat because I'm greedy." 'Refused' she duly wrote next to the appointment in my notes.

Nor are fat women allowed to use the birth centre, where women push out babies while sitting on space hoppers with whale music in the background. I don't mind this - I'm an interventionist when it comes to most things, be it world peace or birth - but I know plenty of people who do. On the other hand, I found the idea that I needed a pre birth meeting with the anaesthetist in case I wanted an epidural (I did) a bit insulting. I swear my friend's right that they are just checking you have a spine. Turns out that the same anaestheist looked after me while I had a (non fat related) post birth op for a retained placenta. "Hi", he said, "we've not met before." I wasn't too out of it, or, ahem, spineless, to put him straight.

I'm no evidence denier. I'm sure there are more dangers to fat women in pregnancy and birth than to non fat women. But my guess is the most common danger is to our mental health, when we're treated differently, told to worry and made to feel, ironically, incredibly small.

Still tired...

There is a photo of me on Christmas day two years ago, just four days after we were allowed home from hospital with our new daughter, and in it I look absolutely and completely shattered. I feel so sorry for the me of that day whenever I see the photo that I usually burst into tears, not least because I know that as the days and weeks went on after that photo, and though that photo looks like I was at the bottom of the tiredness well, I got even more tired.

It's no surprise I was tired of course. I'd had nine months of interrupted sleep during pregnancy thanks to a baby using my bladder as a trampoline, followed by six nights in hospital without more than 45 minutes sleep in a row, then a few days at home with our slightly poorly baby where any sleep we did have was interrupted by, you know, checking she was breathing and all those crazy new parent things you do. And that's before we start on the normal newborn waking every few hours thing.

Nearly two years later, and though I have had quite a few (though not enough) extended periods of sleep since then, I am sure I still feel the effects of that sleepless beginning. It's only recently, in arguments or negotiations or when making an excuse or working out whether I can bothered to do something, that I realise I can't really point to that time two years ago and say 'don't you know I'm exhausted, I have just given birth and now have a newborn.' My newborn is nearly two. At some point I am going to have to get over it, and move on.

Lots of people don't move on from things though. I know plenty of adults who blame their behaviour as a grown up on something that happened in childhood, or what they do in their current relationship on how they were treated in a previous relationship. Experiences can explain why we are who we are, but they can't always be used as an excuse. After all, should a ninety year old be able to treat someone badly and have everyone excuse this because 'they had a difficult childhood'. At some point we have to say, 'get over it.'

So I have decided - between now and the arrival of baby number two in a few months time, when once again I demand allowances be made for pregnancy, birth and newborn exhaustion, any unreasonable behaviour on my part is not because I am tired (though believe me, I am) or dealing with a young child (though I am doing this too), but just because I am being unreasonable. Ha - there are no excuses, so anyone at the receiving end may have to take me seriously. Turns out it's empowering this being unreasonable with no excuse thing. So now it's your turn to get over it.