Mommie Dearest
Parental neglect at its most extreme is rightly recognised as a hideous dereliction of duty, something that appears to go against the grain of what is supposed to be an instinctive gut reaction to care and nurture one’s offspring. Even those of us who don’t have (and have never wanted) children find it difficult to fathom how any parent can countenance cruelty on the scale we’ve all read about in high-profile cases over the years.
Neglect is defined (in one randomly chosen dictionary, at least) as ‘to ignore or disregard’, and the gruesome catalogues of neglect the media routinely reports in terms of the parent/child relationship have included numerous such cases where this one definition has sufficed – those where infants have been left to stew in their own shit, locked in dark rooms or strapped into high-chairs. This kind of neglect can also be classed as abuse, and the conclusion reached is that the parent cares so little for their child that they practically pretend it doesn’t actually exist. But abuse can take on other forms, ones where the child is very much attended to, above and beyond the line drawn by any decent parent with half-an-ounce of genuine love and compassion. You know all-too well what I’m talking about. Then again, what of the parent whose affection for their offspring doesn’t cross that line, but walks it like an inebriated acrobat taking an ill-advised trot along the tightrope?
Anyone over a certain age will recall Ronnie Corbett’s sitcom ‘Sorry’, wherein the diminutive comic actor remained a home-boy, dominated by a fearsome mother who had failed to recognise her son had bypassed puberty several decades before. A funny concept, yes; but in the hands of another writer, one who wasn’t necessarily penning a mainstream family series, it could have taken on a tragic, sinister aspect. There was certainly an undercurrent of that aspect twenty years before, in ‘Steptoe and Son’; but in ‘Sorry’, it was absent. It wasn’t that kind of sitcom. Without wishing to overanalyse what was, after all, a lightweight pre-watershed show, I think the mother character to Ronnie Corbett’s Timothy (played by Barbara Lott as a scary hybrid of Margaret Thatcher and Queen Victoria) was evidently a lonely old woman whose sense of self was utterly wrapped-up in her son. Nothing – or nobody – had come along in her life who exhibited the same emotional dependency on her as her son had once exhibited. The tragedy for both mother and son was that the apron strings had never been severed because of this.
Several generations of women, particularly those emanating from a social demographic where they weren’t required to work for a living, were defined completely as wife and mother. But while hubby could be a peripheral figure in her life – out of the house by eight, not back until six (and possibly one whose secretary took notes with her knickers round her ankles) – most of her love would be given over to her children. Their importance in her life would be elevated to a level that placed them upon such a lofty pedestal that once a son reached the stage of his life where a potential bride would be invited home for tea served in the best china, the poor girl would be deemed not good enough. The mother knew she was poised to be supplanted in her boy’s affections by a younger model and the loss of this position could come as a devastating (if belated) severance of the umbilical cord that had been her life-support system since his birth. His emotional dependence on her had been the one element of her existence that had given her life purpose. Without it, what was there but a vacuum?
Excessive coverage of career women smashing the glass ceiling whilst they also raise a family, multi-tasking to the nth degree, could suggest the old-school mother whose world revolves around her children no longer exists. She does, but her obsessive and ultimately selfish need to keep her children close and trapped in an infantile mental playpen to vindicate her omnipotence is merely manifested differently in the twenty-first century. It takes the shape of what the otherwise terminally annoying Mylene Klass referred to in a moment of unexpected inspiration as ‘The Breastapo’.
The fanatical, borderline-fascist advocates of breastfeeding constitute an unnecessary and unfair pressure group that young mothers are vulnerable to within western society, especially here and across the Atlantic. The sight of a babe-in-arms being bottle-fed, as the majority of us most likely were, is now viewed as heinous an act as sticking a fag in its mouth. Endless articles in women’s magazines or the constant whipping out of an overinflated tit on daytime TV sends out a powerful signal to the first-time mummy that there are rules and regulations in place that she disregards at her peril, even if – as is sometimes the case – she finds the breastfeeding process painful. Bottled milk will result in her precious angel growing up to become a serial killer at best or a paedophile at worst. Only mother’s milk will give the child the pure and healthy nourishment it requires, and to deny it the maternal elixir is tantamount to child abuse.
The perfectly understandable awkwardness some men – and women – feel when a Breastapo mother marches into a public place and arrogantly assumes there’s something seriously wrong with anyone who experiences any uncomfortable moments at the sight of a naked knocker was recently highlighted by the ‘incident’ at Claridge’s. Some mothers who have absorbed this propaganda have acquired an addiction to the lip at the nipple that is akin to a constant craving for narcotics. Whereas previous generations of middle-class mothers had at least allowed their children to progress beyond the nappy stage and had maintained a mental as opposed to a physical grip on them, this new breed cannot even do that.
Once a child can eat solids, breastfeeding has reached the end of its cycle and should rightly cease. Mothers that continue to breastfeed their children when they are at school are playing a dangerous game that many might see as a form of neglect itself, not one that would commonly be acknowledged as neglect of the kind that grabs headlines, but one that betrays a similar lack of thought or consideration for the child. For one thing, the breast is sexualised quite early in a child’s life, especially for boys. Page 3, top-shelf magazines, saucy seaside postcards – all present the breast as the erotic object of desire that, once certified as such, remains so for life. A mother who invites a boy to wrap his lips around her breast when it has already dawned upon him that a soft, juicy Bristol can provoke to a rapid swelling in the pants is strolling blindly into an incestuous, narcissistic netherworld of Oedipal proportions. And if she refuses to accept this truism, she as may as well have kept the boy chained to a bed and languishing in his own crap for all the good she is doing him.
The Mother Industry that has taken hold of the western world’s young women over the past decade or so via celebrities promoting it in the same way that they endorse products has led to the sowing of seeds that are already being reaped to the detriment of society. Young men who cannot boil an egg, change a plug or wash their socks because mum did it all for them might not literally be drinking milk from their mother’s breast anymore, but in one sense, they still are.
Petunia Winegum
Oh, and on a lighter (better-late-than-never) note…
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June 1, 2015 at 9:37 am -
Not required to work for a living? Whatever happened to a woman’s work is never done?
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June 1, 2015 at 9:48 am -
You do like your “telly”, PW. Do you have a column as a critic somewhere?
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June 1, 2015 at 10:54 am -
This breast feeding carry on is part of the current minority group movements of bossing around the rest of us who are not Part of their culture. Many of these bossy, shrieky groups are in it for a lifetime, due to gender issues, partner choice issues or tortuous religious reasons. The busty ones are there temporarily as lactating mothers. Sometimes the baby is the arbiter of prolonged feeding. It does its nut in if you do not feed it with its be all and end all in life. Older kids feeding are more embarrassing to onlookers, as the boobs have become toys to fiddle with.Who knows what kicks sexual and otherwise mum gets from these childish behaviours? It is a subject rarely touched on, to be interpreted as a kind of abuse by some disgusted onlookers. As the New Puritanism gains momentum, who knows where these prolonged displays of mammary defiance may lead. Social worker visit maybe? However, the next baby, if there is one, may hate the breast. Mum goes through hell trying to get the little so and so to feed. Including a breast abscess, one of the most painful conditions known to woman. If prolonged breast feeding is on the up and up, which I doubt, it is more another kind of reverse feminism to be an aggressive baby feeder. To go and feed in a bridal shop is the latest in this whacky campaign. Copy cat after the bakers shop slogan incident perhaps?
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June 1, 2015 at 11:42 am -
As an ex-schoolboy who used to salivate in the library over National Geographic magazine and its frequent photo-spreads of nubile topless native girls, with breasts often in a gravity-defying, hence presumably virginal, state, I am firmly in the camp that admires the sight of an unclothed bosom on almost any woman. (I draw the line at the morbidly obese, if you don’t mind.)
Having, er, got that off my chest, I have to say that militant breastfeeding must be one of the most absurd development in recent times. The act should be part of a mother’s bonding with her baby, usually done calmly in a peaceful, quiet place (refer to countless mediaeval paintings depicting the subject in art galleries across the land). To weaponise breastfeeding into an act of street protest debases the whole thing, and further reinforces the utterly mindless and selfish “me, me, me” image of its proponents.
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June 1, 2015 at 12:24 pm -
Well yes, Roderick, but these same images of breast feeding were, at the same time, very public, hanging, as they usually did, in chapels or churchs, and being supposedly objects of religious contemplation. In real life I think rich women didn’t breast feed and everyone else did, and this in a world where privacy was at a premium.
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June 1, 2015 at 11:56 am -
Well, for once Petunia and most Guardian correspondents are as one. Over there, there is a constant moan from youngish women that they are being pressurised by this bossy breastapo and (shame, shame), made to feel inadequate if they don’t breast feed. Oddly, I have read very few articles which suggest that women who choose not to breastfeed are evil bitches: well, none, actually.
When you drill down a bit you find that this dreadful oppression usually consists of a bit of mild encouragement to try breastfeeding and the maternity nurse handing out a few leaflets. How very dare they! Btw, this seems to have been exactly the same half a century ago when I was born: my mother says she breast fed for six months and most of her friends had a go too. Those who couldn’t/didn’t want to, seem not to have developed a complex which I think probably indicates that they hadn’t been working on their sense of entitlement hard enough.
Other nations are also available and the scandinavians seem to manage combining a sex life and a bit of breast feeding without all this fuss, which makes me think that there is something a bit anglo saxon about this breast fetishism – both among mothers who breast feed for years and years, and among those who fixate on the breast entirely as a sex object.
Usually on those threads someone comes along comparing breast feeding to defecation or urination………we are an odd lot.
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June 1, 2015 at 12:18 pm -
This came up on ‘Conservative Woman’ some months ago, and my take on it was that to be sent off to the Ladies’ Lavatory to do it was in most cases foul and wrong, but I suspect that the Ladies in Claridges is not only larger, better decorated and brighter than my own home but probably cleaner too! The woman in question was offered a large napkin to cover her ‘modesty’ and for me it is a given that one might breastfeed discretely in a corner of the room, and not prominently in the middle.
Not breastfeeding a baby does not seem as foul an offence as leaving it on a doorstep. or leaving it alone while you bugger off with chums for dinner – perhaps on a scale of 100, about 0.1 or less. I imagine that all the children filmed with flies roaming over their emaciated little faces in Oxfam adverts were breastfed – don’t you?
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June 1, 2015 at 1:54 pm -
I’m totally against parents being told to do something they don’t want. That said, breastfeeding seems to me to be the natural thing to do. It is rather typical of our society that mothers could be persuaded to go out and buy a product when they have perfectly good milk themselves. In fact, better milk because the mother’s own milk passes on the immunities she has built up herself.
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June 1, 2015 at 2:39 pm -
Breast or bottle? Not much choice in my mother’s day. She and her working-class generation, who had to make every penny count, would never have dreamed of paying for formula milk if they were able to breastfeed.
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