Linnea Dunne's Blog

Why I’m running 5k a day in September for Women’s Aid

Why Women’s Aid? It should be easy to explain, but somehow it’s not.

It was an easy choice – absolutely – and there’s no shortage of reasons. But maybe that’s the thing. There are so many reasons, so where do you even start? How do you ever do it justice?

This isn’t personal for me. I’m not a victim of domestic abuse and I’ve somehow been extremely fortunate with the men I have known and been close to. I can’t point to one event or experience and say: This is why.

I could say, of course, that 90% of women killed in Ireland are killed by a man they know, or that Women’s Aid recorded over 40,000 cases of domestic abuse last year – but when pointing to one clear and simple fact like that to illustrate the injustice that Women’s Aid’s work combats, I can’t help but immediately feel that I’m failing to paint the full picture.

It’s not one statistic, and it’s not one story – it’s a structural, systemic, relentless oppression that’s so deeply ingrained in so much of society that we’ve almost become blind to it. And one fact presented alone could easily be mistaken as anecdotal.

For me to attempt to explain why there was never really any question about which charity I would fundraise for, I need to paint a fuller picture.

I need to tell you to go watch the Netflix drama series Maid, which is based on a woman’s real-life experience of domestic abuse and a society that let her down – a series that made me cry with rage so much, on multiple occasions, that I was unable to talk.

I need to mention the experience of writing a blog post about the mainstream media framing of the murder of Clodagh Hawe and her sons by her husband and their father – a post that went viral and resulted in countless friends, acquaintances and strangers writing to me in recognition, thanking me for putting the spotlight on a reality they were all too familiar with (whereby I realised how many people I knew who were familiar with it, who had presumably been familiar with it for a very long time without my knowledge).

I need to tell you about subsequently being invited to speak at Women’s Aid’s launch of the Behind Closed Doors report and take part in the SAFE Ireland Summit, where powerful, knowledgeable speakers helped me begin to contextualise that inherent, low-level but constant exasperation I’ve always felt simmering away somewhere deep in my gut – the one that flares and burns with every new case, every mention of another injustice, every assault and every woman killed.

I need to tell you to look, any day at all, at any news source or social media platform, where there are reports upon reports upon reports of women being attacked, controlled, raped, killed by their partners.

Last week alone, you could read about the death of Olympic athlete Rebecca Cheptegei, whose partner doused her in petrol and set fire to her, and about Gisèle Pélicot, whose husband drugged her and invited other men to come to their house and rape her (more than 50 of them did; not one of the others reported a thing).

I’m fundraising for Women’s Aid because of the relentless, brutal, structural injustice that expresses itself not only in the statistics of male violence against women and the number of women who are killed by a partner or ex-partner, but in sexual assault, in rape used as a weapon of war, in children suffering at the hands of someone who should have been their safe space.

I’m doing it because it’s everywhere, in all classes and cultures; because no matter if we close the gender pay gap and representation quotas are filled and there’s universal, free childcare and well-paid parental leave, this painful injustice remains a fundamental, ever-present threat. And as I write that, I realise that maybe I was wrong; of course this is personal for me.

I’m doing this because frankly, I’ve been feeling quite powerless in my politics recently – and, honestly, what else can I do?

This is one thing I can do. It’s basic and maybe not a huge deal to some, but it’s putting my feet where my heart is, for the lack of a better term. I can get the runners on, put one foot in front of the other, then do it again, and again, and again. It’s a show of commitment, if nothing else. And when the tiredness kicks in, I think of those headlines and use the rage.

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The beauty industry made me do it

It’s been six months and nine days since the last time I blogged, and the thing that sets me off is beauty.

I ask myself sometimes where it comes from, all this rage on tap. I do wonder – quite often, if I’m honest – if there’s something wrong with me for being so hopelessly unable to let it go, to accept the beauty industry for what it is, ignore it and jog on.

You be the judge. Let me open that tap, and you can tell me if I’m going mad.

I’m a big fan of Katie McCabe. I love her fearless attitude and the energy she brings to the pitch. I admire her versatility as a player and her physical as well as psychological strength. I love the fact that she gives my young sons a female football legend to look up to. So yes, I was delighted to see her on the cover of the latest issue of Irish Country Magazine.

And then I saw her arms. Or, rather: then I saw what was left of her arms after someone was done photoshopping them. Because, to Irish Country Magazine, the captain of the first Irish national women’s squad to make it to the World Cup is worthy of a place on their cover only once they make her smaller.

I don’t want to say “and she’s not even fat”, because so what if she was? I don’t want to say “she’s stunning just the way she is”, because why on earth would we make any of this about the way she looks?

But somehow, that’s exactly what Irish Country Magazine has done with this shoddy Photoshop job. And who were they doing it for? Was it for the men who can’t stand the idea of a strong woman – perhaps especially if she loves and shares her life with another woman? Was it for the girls who idolise her, who dream, thanks to her, of being a professional footballer when they grow up? Was it for the magazine’s core readership – women who, surely, admire others who build a great life doing what they love? Or was it just a cynical move to provoke trigger-happy bloggers because, as they say, no publicity is bad publicity?

Anyone with half an analytical brain cell will tell you it’s not for either of those groups and certainly not for me. Follow the money and see where it goes. This is all for the beauty brands and advertisers who profit off women’s insecurities. Not consciously, it’s not – but isn’t this how it’s always been done? And why would the people whose livelihoods depend on beauty advertisers – people who, by the way, are products of the very same society you and I are products of – want to rock the boat?

So back to my potential madness: Why can’t I just let it go, let them publish whatever they want and photoshop the shite out of whoever is up for it?

A few years ago, 60% of teen girls in Ireland were trying to lose weight. Last year, three in five said they struggle with body image issues as a result of social media, and back in 2018, a survey found that body image was the main source of bullying. Of the 247 people who were admitted to hospital due to anorexia or bulimia in 2020, 94% were girls. Did you know that anorexia has the highest death rate of all mental health disorders?

One of Ireland’s greatest female role models right now, who is not just epically strong but also making a very good living in part thanks to her strength, is smiling at us from every magazine shelf in the country, and Irish Country Magazine’s message to girls who want to be like her is that strong isn’t good enough, successful isn’t good enough, ambitious and hard-working isn’t good enough. You have to shrink yourself. Even at world-class athlete level, your body needs retouching to make it smaller, to make you shrink, to make you take up less space.

Imagine a media industry adhering to the medical motto of “first, do no harm”. What gets me is that it wouldn’t even be that hard.

So yes, I’m standing under a tree in the park getting shelter from a much-needed shower, blogging on my phone, and no, I don’t think I’m the one who’s going mad.

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Grief at a time of Advent

It is the first of Advent and a procession of light and song fills the room. I hold the hands of my babies, almost too old for this now, reluctant to sit still on the floor of a dark room for what seems like an odd sort of slightly underwhelming concert – but I insist. I know all the songs; I’ll never forget them. Not after years and years of rehearsals starting every August and continuing all the way through autumn leaves and dark afternoons, culminating in this very experience: me as a child, then a teenager, dressed in a white gown, clutching a candle (not too close to your face or you’ll faint), performing for parents, for nursing homes, for corporate functions to celebrate Lucia – the bearer of light. Every melancholic melody takes me back, each debated syncopation and ‘s’ held too long, and it’s strangely bittersweet – isn’t it?

There’s a new Advent countdown candle this year. Instead of the numbers one through 24, printed vertically across the candle are the names of the 24 women who were murdered in Sweden last year, most of them by men they knew.

It is the day before the second of Advent and a video call comes in from IKEA: What do you want? Oh, I want it all: the gingerbread biscuit dough, the glögg, the coffee, the gingerbread-flavoured Dumle, the pickled gherkins and the Christmas cola. I don’t even like fizzy drinks, but when you put it on the table it will all be right – a perfect Swedish Christmas, like the tradition says, like it always was, won’t it?

Someone mentions in passing the girl who was raped in a restaurant toilet for five hours straight and I don’t hear where the conversation goes next or what anyone really knows about this event because that image, the girl, five hours, it makes my bones hurt and I can’t hear anything anymore, but the ache fills every cell of my body until it all overflows and I can’t stop crying and my head hurts.

It is the second of Advent and Agnetha Fältskog is singing about Christmas mice with her daughter, who’s really too young to be singing on an album, but that’s how the perfectly Swedish Christmas is done right, and so I insist. It’s a tradition at this stage: this is what we listen to for the annual gingerbread baking session, and it’s a bit silly but I get to decide, because that’s what I did with her for the annual gingerbread baking session all throughout our childhood – and now they’re part of it, sort of, aren’t they?

It’s the second of Advent and today’s name on the candle is Dana.

It is the eve of the third of Advent and Lankum sing:

“When the young people dance
They do not dance forever
It is written in sand
With the softest of feathers
It is not writ in stone
Like the walls of the chapel
And soon it is gone
Like the soft winters at home”

I try to imagine her there, in the audience with us, and I realise that I can’t. I don’t know what her body feels like now, what her presence in 2022 would be. If she was there – if she were here – would we put our arms around each other, like we did the last time I saw her on the first of Advent 2006? I don’t know who she would be now. She doesn’t know who I’ve become.

A pandemic happens and the impossible is suddenly possible. Systems we’ve always been told are untouchable, run flawlessly by the invisible hand of the market, are touched and controlled and stopped. People’s freedoms are restricted, just like that – not without a fight, but it happens. For a period of time, the world stops. Offices close. Schools close. Pubs close. Even sport, games, matches grind to a halt. (What’s going on behind closed doors, we know now, never stopped – an invisible hand of another kind, but equally untouchable.) And now we’re back, the magical market doing its thing, because you can’t just stop life, stop businesses and capitalism from doing their thing just because women die, can you? Five hours.

It is the third of Advent and she’s been gone for 16 years. Every year, it hits me by surprise, the grief, but now it all suddenly makes sense. Approaching the tenth anniversary of her death, I wrote:

“That’s the funny thing about emigrating: as you move away from those you love, escape the things that annoy you, and run away from all that which you can’t quite put your finger on but which gets under your skin, you also leave behind all the places and smells and memories that would otherwise remind you of your past. Along with the chance to reinvent yourself comes a life without all those people who know who you were at 15. At the same time, grief goes into hibernation and you never know when it might strike.”

Now I know when it strikes. It strikes when the smells and the memories come out of hibernation. It strikes when, through melancholic melodies and tireless choir traditions, you travel back in time to when she was alive, and you’re reminded that she only exists in past tense. It strikes when you buy all the things for the perfect Christmas and it hits you that something’s always missing. It strikes when you share the memory of her with her nephews, because your memories are all they’ll ever get. You can joke all you want about emigrants pathetically insisting on attempting to recreate a past that no longer exists. But it’s when I relive that past that the hole shaped like her is suddenly so painfully gaping and obvious.

He sends me a screen grab of a tweet: Grief often reveals itself as rage.

We booked a first-class flight to Sweden on the 12th of December 2006 – first-class, because that’s all that’s left when you book your flights the same day that you travel – and the first thing I heard when I woke up the following morning on a mattress on the floor of my parents’ sitting room and it dawned on me why I was there, was the sound of Sankta Lucia coming from the TV as the nation woke to celebrate an Italian saint.

Advent
noun /ˈædvent/
A coming into place, view, or being; arrival.
The fact of an event happening, an invention being made, or a person arriving.

This is what it is, grief at a time of Advent: rising and swelling at the most wonderful time of the year; the anniversary of the loss of my sister just a few days before the serene celebration of Lucia, the bearer of light; the darkest of days during the darkest of times in the northern hemisphere, as we light the stars and the fairy lights and I light a candle for you, baking like we did, singing like we did, at the most wonderful, aching time of the year.

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On International Men’s Day, won’t someone think of the fathers?

It’s been a hard year. Healthcare staff have been under immense pressure. Businesses have struggled. Many have lost loved ones, some without the chance to say goodbye. Lonely people have been lonelier and vulnerable people more vulnerable. Anxiety levels are through the roof – but worst affected by increased stress caused by the pandemic are fathers in their 30s, according to a study by Aviva Life and Pensions that was published on Tuesday.

Some will look at the survey results and worry about the plight of these poor men. Personally, I’m a little surprised that we need a survey to conclude that increased parenting responsibilities tend to add to your stress levels, and that unpaid house and caring work on top of a paid job does indeed take its toll. All over Ireland, there are mothers who could tell you that.

My husband and I struggled, too, with the home-schooling, the limitations and overall pressures of that first lockdown and six months of two primary-school age children at home. In the greater scheme of things we were luckier than many, but it was hard – probably one of the hardest things we’ve been through as a couple in years. And yet, I couldn’t help but wonder about all the research from my native Sweden, which has shown that couples are more equal and share the unpaid work more fairly after fathers spend a few months at home on parental leave. Maybe, amid all the awfulness of 2020, this would be an accidental but very welcome knock-on effect? It’s that age-old thing of not being able to unsee something once you’ve seen it. Once you’ve had a potty-training toddler on the toilet the moment you realise that you’re out of loo roll, you won’t forget to make a mental note the next time it’s close to running out.

Parents in Sweden are entitled to a total of 480 days, or 16 months, of parental leave paid at around 80% of their salary, and each parent has an exclusive right to 90 of those days. Anecdotally, friends of mine have acknowledged the difference it’s made to their relationships when their male partners have taken at least a few months of paternity leave: not only have the shared parental responsibilities become less of a burden and cause for arguments between them, but other household chores have subsequently been shared more equally as well. “It’s like he sees things now that he never saw before,” one friend told me. “I guess when I was always there, he never got a chance to really notice all these things. Now he’s got his own systems and his own ways of doing things at home.”

A report from last year, looking at all the Nordic countries, reveals as much: fathers enjoy far closer relationships with their children after extended parental leave and even feel like better fathers, and the relationship between the parents is improved and becomes more equal. But there’s more. The mothers’ careers see big benefits, including higher earnings. Their physical health improves, as does their mental wellbeing, and domestic violence becomes less prevalent. Interestingly, research has shown that the time when a couple first become parents is a good indication of how equal their relationship will be in the future; an equal share of parental leave in the first year of parenthood paves way for an equal future as partners and parents.

Things are different here in Ireland, not just in terms of policy, but culturally too. I’m not here to say that the Swedish model is perfect, nor that we should be copying it. It might be worth considering the lessons from the Nordics, though – and asking ourselves what that survey says about the reality of parenting in Ireland. It doesn’t take a genius to figure out why fathers who are suddenly confined to their homes for months, along with their children, are suddenly experiencing unprecedented spikes in stress levels. Working from home while home-schooling, parenting and coping with the uncertainties of a global pandemic is stressful; it was stressful for almost everyone. But there’s a reason why it was more of a shock to the system for some than it was for others – possibly the same as the reason why our elected politicians (77.5% of whom are men) thought that it would be possible in the first place, simply assuming that parental responsibilities would magically sort themselves while we sit on Zoom meetings ignoring our children. Something tells me that they won’t rush into that kind of non-solution again. It’s that age-old thing of not being able to unsee something once you’ve seen it. There they are, in plain sight: the house chores and the responsibilities of running a home and raising a family. This International Men’s Day, I hope we can vow never to unsee them.

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On how you can’t win as a feminist in a capitalist patriarchy – or, the right to choose not to play ball

I remember very clearly the first time a friend of mine, a self-professed feminist, mentioned in passing that she uses Botox. At first, I was just really surprised. Soon enough, I realised that I felt disappointed. Worse, I felt deceived. I’d thought we had an unspoken agreement, a feminist pact not to engage with the bullshit inventions of patriarchy. But she mentioned it with such poise that I quickly realised she knew something I didn’t, that I was the one being naïve. What was this slippery slope I’d missed? Were we going for labiaplasty next?

I have internal battles about shaving. I know that I’m modelling a lot of things for my sons, and if I shave my armpits, that’ll be what’s normal to them. Then I cut myself some slack, knowing that this, too, is a conversation starter. They too will face all sorts of external pressures, and talking about the things people do and why they do them is probably not a bad thing. I justify wearing make-up, if far from every day, but I’ve vowed not to discuss my weight or talk about body fat as a bad thing. I draw lines in sometimes arbitrary places, justifying them to myself as I go, knowing that perfection is a goal that would break me but that, as a feminist, I have to try.

My body, my choice. It’s a pertinent slogan, utterly non-negotiable. And yet, like I’ve argued before, choice is a funny word. I’m not alone in that shower, removing body hair; I’m enveloped by every single message I’ve ever been fed by the patriarchal capitalist world that raised me. I’m self-aware and self-critical. I know that, deep down, I wish I wouldn’t feel the need to – but I only have the energy for a certain amount of rebellion, a certain number of battles. Not all of them. Not this one. Not today.

Can you use Botox and call yourself a feminist? It’s a ridiculous question, of course. I’ve yet to meet a feminist whose every action is a feminist one, and I’d hate to live in a world where we set the bar that high for each other. We’re already scrutinised by patriarchy itself and put under immense pressure to conform to beauty norms, and then judged for trying too hard and called shallow when we care. Injecting a neurotoxic protein into your face is not a feminist thing to do – but a lot of feminists do it. Their body, their choice.

On the other hand, minimising the issue by framing it as one about choice alone is both naïve and counter-productive. We make choices about scalpels and needles because we’re forced into corners. Some are left in those corners without the means to choose. Others can afford to buy their way out but are left worse off than before, already paid less than their male equivalents before they even begin to splash out on beauty treatments to stay in the game. And those who come after us start younger and younger, playing catch-up in a culture where refusing to play ball comes at a huge cost.

The takeaway? I don’t believe in shame as a catalyst for change, but I think we need to dare to consider the connection between the individual and the structural. The question isn’t whether you can have Botox and call yourself a feminist. The question is how we can break the cycle – because if we don’t, more and more of us will feel the need to play along, inadvertently perpetuating the beauty norms that got us here in the first place.

Ultimately, it boils down to this: I don’t want the right to choose whether or not to inject Botox into my face. I don’t want to have to choose either to spend money and time on beauty rituals and treatments in order to just about scrape in as good enough, or to blatantly refuse to conform and end up an outcast. For as long as that’s the choice we’re given, we’re not all in this together.  

—

***This post follows on from a Bits of Me podcast episode, in which I spoke to Gillian Roddie of @evidentiallyyou about body image, ageing and Botox. You can listen here!***

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A waste of space of a man – on mammy memes and narratives of fatherhood

“Women are being edged out of the workforce,” says an article on The Lily that was doing the rounds at the beginning of the summer. In it, Aimee Rae Hannaford, a co-founder and chief executive of a Silicon Valley tech company, explains why she decided to dissolve the company and live off savings when the schools closed as a result of the pandemic, despite the fact that her son’s father was already on a career break at the time. “I can’t do it,” her husband had said. “I can’t watch him for this long.”

First, I rolled my eyes at this useless waste of space of a man. Then, I imagined the voices of Swedish feminists, asking who on earth would ever stay in a relationship with a guy like this, before going off to print T-shirts saying: DUMP YOUR BOYFRIEND. And then, I could hear Irish feminists step in: there are plenty of men like this out there, they’d argue, and they don’t exactly come with big, fat warning signs – so stop putting the blame and responsibility on the women who end up having kids with them; put the responsibility back where it belongs.

They live in different worlds, of course, the Swedish and Irish feminists. It’s not all that easy to walk away from a relationship in Ireland when you have kids, with childcare costs being what they are and most of the school system built on the assumption that there’s a parent at home on at least a part-time basis. Sweden is the country, after all, where there was talk of parents being paid 70-80% of their wages in the eventuality that the schools would be closed in response to the pandemic, which in the end they weren’t. Then again, recent research has suggested that Swedish mothers are working the equivalent of 2.5 full-time jobs – so maybe it’s not the gender equal bliss it’s painted out to be, and maybe those DUMP YOUR BOYFRIEND T-shirts aren’t selling so well.

Around the same time as the circulation of said The Lily article, Erica Djossa shared a meme on Instagram with the headline “The invisible load of motherhood: Working from home during Covid”, featuring 12 illustrations of the different kinds of challenging situations so many of us have suddenly found ourselves in. Like added stress as a result of reduced capacity. Like constantly switching roles throughout the day. Like managing your children’s distance learning and meeting their emotional needs. And the thing went viral, as relatable memes do, and I sat there feeling… well, almost as confused as I did when reading Hannaford’s story.

I am but anecdotal evidence. I don’t expect memes to revolve around me, nor do I think that feminism works like that: that’s not my experience, so it isn’t real. I know, I KNOW. And yet, it has to be said: in the first month of lockdown, 100% of the home-schooling in this house was done by my partner, the father of my children; he does the majority of the bedtime routines at the moment, and that constant switching of roles throughout the day has been a far greater problem for him than it has for me. And I know that there are plenty of men out there like Aimee Rae Hannaford’s husband, plenty of useless fathers who leave their partners burning the candle at both ends, spreading themselves so thin they’re only just about still there; I know this, and I get that, to their thinly spread partners, this meme is about motherhood.

Technically speaking, though, none of the 12 things listed relate specifically to motherhood. It’s called parenting. Unless we’re willing to resort to the same kind of rhetoric that calls fathers being with their children babysitting, this is parenting. Anna Whitehouse, a.k.a. Mother Pukka, summarised the same points pretty well: “The majority of men don’t just spunk and leave. Even if not living with their partner, they’re dads, parents and they aren’t ‘babysitting’, they’re raising their spaghetti hoop-encrusted child, too. It’s hard for everyone.”

So can a mother not vent anymore, is that what I’m saying? Are we not allowed to name the reality of the unfair division of emotional labour and more, which there’s plenty of research to back up? Hell, is it not our responsibility as feminists to name it, to visibilise it, to point at all this unpaid work we’re doing and the reality of what it’s doing to our mental as well as physical health, not to mention our careers and pensions?

Of course we can, and of course we should. Maybe we need more of it. And while I wish that more mothers would take this meme and stick it on the fridge and talk to their partners about it, I recognise and respect that the mother who ended up with a waste of space of a man and is now at breaking point is not going to be having that conversation with him, nor is he going to listen – and she, more than anyone, needs to be allowed to vent.

But still, I can’t get escape the feeling that the labels matter. If, when we vent, we make parenting synonymous with mothering, we’re doing everyone – not least mothers – a huge disservice. Because the thing is, if we want to change the reality of that The Lily article, we need to change the idea of what fatherhood looks like. If we want to change the fact that women are walking away from their jobs in droves because it just makes no financial sense for their higher-earning partners to quit, we need to change the notion of ‘woman’ meaning mother meaning maternity leave and sick days while ‘man’ means none of those things, ever. And if we keep labelling all the things that relate to children’s needs as motherhood, that shift just ain’t gonna happen.

And do you know what else isn’t going to happen unless we stop this stereotyping nonsense? Mothers aren’t going to stop feeling that guilt, and they’re not going to stop prioritising everyone else’s work while their own work accumulates. I’m so tired of that image of the naturally selfless, self-erasing mother in the periphery that I think I might explode – but then, sorry, that wouldn’t be very motherly of me, would it? Memes like this aren’t just relieving fathers of the duties (and joys!) of parenthood; they’re perpetuating the notion of mothers as altogether self-effacing and naturally, ceaselessly caring for everyone but themselves.

Want to see another mammy meme that made me want to scream? This one:

Just stop it. Stop telling mothers to ‘just keep going’. Stop making motherhood a competition in self-destruction. This is not what motherhood was meant to be, this relentless keeping going, putting up with stuff and burning out, and it’s certainly not what I want to teach my sons that they should expect of women.

I’m hoping that the way we are with our two sons, the conversations we’re having with them and the choices we’ve made, will make them into sensitive, caring, responsible fathers if they ever end up having kids. But I can’t help but wonder what they’d feel if they saw these memes. I wonder about the fathers-to-be who grew up with useless, absent dads and are looking to break the cycle, what’ll they take from memes like these and the many hundreds if not thousands like them. I wonder if it would kill us, in the mammy groups, if we edited the headlines of the memes to talk about ‘the invisible load of parenthood’ instead. And in the groups that have consciously labelled themselves for ‘parents’ as opposed to ‘mothers’, if we talked about all these things we do without immediately and explicitly excluding fathers from the conversation, would the guesstimated 1.3% of members in there who are in fact dads perhaps feel a tiny bit less out of place as they try to do all these things they’ve been raised to view as women’s work? Might they even add their daddy friends to the parenting groups?

I think we can do both. I think we can name the inequalities, point to the statistics and complain about the injustice of it all and still label parenting for what it is, so that there’s no doubt in anyone’s mind: this thing is for all of us, for mothers as well as fathers. If you have a kid and you’re not trying to meet their emotional needs, you’re doing it wrong, and you’re the waste of space. That doesn’t mean that those of us who are already doing it should stop, or that we should suffer in silence – but it means that we need to leave that door wide open.

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Thoughts on sharing birth stories

I’ve seen a good few comments recently about how it’s great that we can talk more openly about our birthing experiences, but how we need to make sure to also emphasise that it isn’t always like this, that some people give birth in the dreamiest of ways and ‘bounce back’ in no time.

That’s true of course, and I get why the caveat is so often added – and yet I’m uncomfortable with the way in which it’s often framed.

Why?

Because we’re not the problem. I know most of the time, that’s not what’s implied, but hear me out. The stories we share of birth trauma, obstetric violence and difficult recoveries are real, and those of us who want to talk about our experiences must be allowed to do so without being made to feel as though the expectations of every future birthing person are our responsibility.

Approximately half of all those who give birth will develop pelvic organ prolapse. About 18% of those giving birth vaginally do serious damage to the anal sphincter. Incontinence is very common. The reality is that if a person fears birth and the various things that could possibly go wrong, the way to reassure her is not to silence those who have gone before her and pretend that she’s imagining the risks and it’s all in her head. That’s gaslighting. The way to reassure her is to make sure that the necessary support and care and services are there for her, should she need them. We’re not the problem – the persistently lacking funding, research, resources and care are.

There’s a tendency in many contexts to only really be receptive to the stories of those who’ve had difficult experiences and come out the other end – stories with happy endings. We’re not all that comfortable with brokenness, and we’re not very good at holding discomfort. But if we only share our experiences once we’ve healed and figured it all out, when we can breathe a sigh of relief and aren’t forced to scrutinise the health care system in general and maternity system in particular, then nothing’s ever going to change.

We need the discomfort, because that’s what’ll trigger action. We need to listen to those willing to speak out about their experiences – not in spite of what it might do to those hoping to give birth in the future, but because of how it might help them get the care they deserve.

There’s always a caveat, of course. Mine isn’t about those who choose to share their stories, but about those who don’t. Many of those of us who were part of the campaign to repeal the eighth amendment to the Irish constitution know that speaking out can be powerful and cathartic, but that it can also come at a high price and have a retraumatising effect.

This post is not, therefore, to say that talking is better or that anyone who’s had a particularly bad experience has a responsibility to share it – not at all. It’s to say that, when someone does, we all have a responsibility not to interject with caveats but to listen. Health care practitioners and legislators, more so than the rest of us, owe us that much.

This post was first shared on the Bits of Me podcast Instagram page.

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Bits of Me – a podcast about women’s health

Bits of Me is my new podcast about women’s bodies, all the things we should know about them, and all the stories behind them. We’ll be talking about bulging bits, hormonal hell-rides, collapsed vaginas, painful sex, birthing choices, shame, and everything in between.

The podcast is available on all major platforms, including Spotify, Stitcher, iTunes and Apple Podcasts. If you like the sound of it, please subscribe, and if you know anyone who needs to know about it, do tell them! You can follow the podcast on @bitsofme_podcast on Instagram or @bitsofme_pod on Twitter to stay in touch and keep up to date on any news.

Do you have a story to tell about your experience of childbirth, bleeding, pain, hormones, or another aspect of living in a woman’s body? You can contact me on info [at] linneadunne [dot] com, or through my personal or podcast Instagram account.

The post Bits of Me – a podcast about women’s health appeared first on LINNEA DUNNE.

Bits of Me: trailer

It’s out! This is the trailer for Bits of Me, the podcast about women’s bodies, all the things we should know about them, and all the stories behind them. Bits of Me is available on all major platforms, including Spotify, Stitcher, iTunes and Apple Podcasts. If you like the sound of it, please subscribe, and if you know anyone who needs to know about it, do tell them! You can follow the podcast’s very own Instagram account on @bitsofme_podcast to stay in touch and keep up to date on any news.

Do you have a story to tell about your experience of childbirth, bleeding, pain, hormones, or another aspect of living in a woman’s body? You can contact me on info [at] linneadunne [dot] com, or through my personal or podcast Instagram account.

The first episode will be out soon!

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Be grateful and stop moaning – or, why we need to talk about home-schooling

You know the professor whose kids gatecrashed his BBC interview, causing him to panic repeatedly, resulting in the whole thing going viral? Well there’s a spin-off version that shows what would’ve happened if the professor were a woman and a mother. You guessed it: she’s grand. She comforts, feeds and entertains her young children without for a second letting her focus slip or losing her train of thought – because mammies are brilliant at multi-tasking. Hilarious, eh? Dads are clueless and mothers are superheroes. Except I don’t find it hilarious; I find it infuriating.

I guess it’s hit a nerve during lockdown more than it would’ve before. The reality of video calls featuring home-schooling intervals, meltdown backdrops, accidental coffee spillage and the repeated need for cuddles and snacks is just that bit closer to home right now. But as thousands of households all over the country are grappling with this new normal, the narrative of maternal super powers isn’t helping. Let me tell you, I feel nothing like a superhero. I feel exhausted and sad and insufficient a lot of the time.

Last week, journalist Jennifer O’Connell wrote a piece arguing for staggered school openings before the summer holidays. (We could laugh at the notion of any such thing as ‘summer holidays’ at all at a time of social distancing and months-long school closures, but that’s for another post.) On Twitter and elsewhere, words like ‘eugenics’ and ‘mass murder’ were thrown around, because naturally, unless you’re willing to live under strict lockdown for a few years, until this thing has fully gone away or we’ve found a sustainable vaccination solution, that’s clearly what you’re advocating for. 

Having been mostly off Twitter for a long time until recently, I made the mistake of adding to the stream of voices suggesting that it’s not all that black and white and maybe she’s not in fact a psychopath, whereby a kind troll quickly checked my bio to make the connection with my Swedish roots, concluding that it’s unsurprising that I’m up for Nazi-style extinction strategies like those in place in my heartless home country. Most interesting, though, was the growing, confident choir of those pointing out that parents these days don’t think before they procreate, and they just want the schools to open because they hate spending time with their children. Case closed.

I committed a social media faux pas and deleted my tweets, not because I changed my mind but because trolls are annoying at the best of times, and during life under lockdown they can make a woman lose her shit. But no matter what strategy you believe in, the reality of home-schooling while working full-time is an impossible equation. You have to work until midnight and manage on extremely limited sleep, broken by strange nightmares and anxious children, and keep answering 2,987 questions an hour as your children figure out what the coronavirus is and whether famous people are always good at things and whether bumble bees like dog poo. You have to show which way to start to write a lower-case d and help pare pencils while you’re in the middle of creating yet another spreadsheet, and then you have to make snacks, endless snacks, after which you have to try to write while the Body Brothers are singing in the background. Then you have to try for the fourteenth time to add a new entry to a task on a buggy school app that needs refreshing every few minutes, while your children’s attention spans wither away and you accept, reluctantly but realistically, that you’re not going to get through anywhere near half the school work this week either. And when your kids can’t sleep at night because everything’s strange and they are human too, you have to be patient and try not to think about the emails you have to deal with before you call it a day, because children can sense anything, everything, and if you’re stressed and thinking about work they simply won’t go to sleep, ever.

Then, you have to cheer for childcare workers on the back of the government announcement of the new wage subsidy top-up scheme, because you agree that their job is one of the most important jobs in the world; and then you have to do the childcare, with no pay and in no time at all, while acknowledging and feeling urgently grateful for your own privilege, which is genuinely very real indeed. And the memes in your feed that said ‘Reach out – don’t suffer in silence!’ for World Mental Health Day only six months ago have been replaced by ‘Safe at home, not stuck at home’ and endless gratitude practices, because actually, unless you’re in intensive care or your parent is dying or you’re about to lose your home, soldiering on and suffering in silence would be preferable, thank you very much. 

We’re at the end of week seven, and in our family, we’ve sort of found a groove, not because we’ve figured it out and are past the shock, but much thanks to the fact that one of my biggest clients from the past few years has gone out of business. Like most parents, I love being with my kids when I’m not actually meant to be doing something else and don’t have to prove to someone at a laptop with a shaky internet connection many miles away that I’m indeed still working and not in fact taking the piss just because a kid is having a concert in the background and another is on the toilet shouting for help to reach the loo roll. I really enjoy chatting to them about the SPHE curriculum strand of citizenship, and I love perfecting my goalie skills as I pretend to be Lindahl, the Swedish women’s national football squad’s goalkeeper, in an attempt to give them a tiny but important piece of Sweden as our Easter trip is cancelled. But that’s the thing: in this perfectly impossible mess, I’ve lost a huge chunk of work – and I’m the lucky one. 

My children are lucky, too, even though we’re never going to get through all the school work. There’s no getting away from the fact that the government doesn’t have a plan for the kids who are safer in school than at home, nor for those who were lagging behind before all this started and whose parents are simply unable to even begin to decipher the templates and curriculum notes teachers send them. Moreover, our elected representatives (I’m genuinely too tired to take the debate about the dubiousness of the word ‘elected’ in that context since the General Election we can all only just remember even though it was less than three months ago) also appear to be relying on some form of parenting wizardry, gifted, as if by an invisible hand, to parents the moment their children are born. Enter multi-tasking superhero mammy! She doesn’t need money or time to be everything a child needs at all times, even when she’s working an intense eight hours a day. Handy. And here’s me thinking I’m lucky; maybe I’m just flawed and stupid and a terrible mother and if I was only good enough I would’ve been able to do it all, work and teach and play and care and feed, for six months straight without losing focus or burning out.

It’s not, of course, working parents who are the greatest victims of this crisis. From healthcare workers to single parents and those immuno-compromised and scared shitless that they might catch this thing, there are endless people bearing the brunt of both financial and anxiety-related fears right now in a way that many parents like myself can’t even imagine. But this soldiering on we’ve become so keen on, this insistence that you’re not allowed to complain as long as you can still breathe, where will that get us? How can we build a sustainable, if temporary, new normal if we insist that our gratitude must silence us? I don’t accept that this is the best we can do. I won’t accept that the government gets to bang on about the importance of the childcare sector that’s been in freefall for years, and then send the kids home for months on end with no plan and no support. I refuse to pretend that it’s good enough. 

I can pause my social life and survive without hugging my friends. I can cancel my trip to Sweden and miss out on seeing my parents, cancel my gym membership and stop going to the playground. It’s hard, but needs must. But children’s lives can’t be paused. Their development continues one way or another, and it needs guidance and hand-holding; their bodies need movement and fresh air, and their need for love, attention and closeness is constant. As Philippa Perry says, it’s impossible for children to understand being with someone in a physical space and them not being available. What will six months of normalising that do to a child? What will six months of being forced to do that to a child do to a parent? 

Here’s a funny one. Have you read the Irish Constitution? There’s a widely debated article in there about the work within the home “without which the common good cannot be achieved”. Talk about us all being in this together – we’re bringing the kids home, caring for them and teaching them at home, all for the common good. Article 41.2 states that “mothers should not be obliged by economic necessity to engage in labour to the neglect of their duties in the home”. It may be sexist, but at least, for those of us lacking super powers, it’s there in black and white. Perhaps we’ll all leave our jobs and let Leo foot the bill. I’m not saying I’m in favour; I’m just saying this ain’t good enough. 

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