This is something that I have had floating around in my head for some
time. This idea that there are womyn who are more feminist than others
or that there is a right and wrong way to be a feminist. Something I
struggled with once and spent many hours thinking, reading and
discussing only to realise that again, it is all about having choices.
Not only is it about choices, us womyn don't take those choices away
from each other. We often feel that they have been taken from us but
usually other womyn are not responsible for this dis-empowerment.
Let me back up and clarify a little bit. For years I
have identified as a radical feminist. I have lots of friends (albeit
scattered around the country) who also identify as such. Early on in my
exploration of feminism and what it meant to me I found that lots of the
things that I felt were important to me, were hard to maintain outside
of my feminist community. A community that at that stage in my life was
far away from my day to day life as a single working mama to a baby boy.
I struggled with wanting to make certain statements, to wanting to live
and act in a way that reflected what I thought a radical feminist would
live and act like. My community never told me, for example that I must have
unshaven armpits or to be completely free from body image woes to be a
radical feminist but at some point I found myself thinking this way.
That these things along with lots of others, were prerequisites to being
a real feminist. As a result my 'proper staunch feminist' self was a
bit confused. I would make a point of eating as much as I wanted when
around others and spoke loudly about how I loved to eat, but inside I
was just as body conscious as most of us are, finding it hard to
appreciate and love my body for the way it looked. I wanted to be proud
of being all natural when it came to body hair but found myself wearing
long sleeved shirts when outside of my house or my feminist community. I
wanted to dress my son in all colours and encourage him to play with
all kinds of toys but still found myself dressing him on rather boyish
outfits most of the time.
I struggled with failing as a feminist and thought I just needed
to get tough, that the problem was with me. That I needed to just work
on being a 'proper staunch feminist'. Of course now I see how
ridiculous that is. Where is liberation and freedom if you just swap one
set of rules for another? My rules were self imposed and it took me a
while to realise that they didn't liberate me at all. They were
different enough from the way most people thought that I found myself
very conflicted over them. In my mind I believed in my rules 100% and I
didn't think it was okay to be a product of my environment, my
conditioning, my society. I had read the books, I wore the patches and I
knew better. So in my inexperience and naive understanding I took
myself out of one box and climbed in another (with great enthusiasm). I
am NOT saying that feminism is a box or that it is oppressive, just that
I got a bit confused about what REAL liberation is. What it really
means to free yourself and cut those puppet strings.
This journey may not relate directly to all the controversy around
the TIME magazine story
on attachment parenting but I wanted to share nonetheless. Whatever the expectations, the standards, the philosophy, the one thing that is constant to me is the right to choose for ourselves without having to defend those choices. We seem to be having this weird discussion about 'who is the real mama' and 'who really loves their kids' or 'who is overbearing and are sheltering their children too much'. Why are we pulling each other down this way? I
just wanted to remind us all (myself included) to take a step back and let each other be. We have
the choice to parent the way we feel is right for us and our families.
That choice belongs to no one but ourselves. Whether you are a committed
attachment parent or a
bottle-feeding-full-time-working-separate-bedroom-sleeping family or
somewhere in between (where I feel I fit) you have the right to
do it your way. We are not doing anyone any favours by telling each
other we are all doing it wrong.
I have said this before in a different context
but the message is the same. Let's all be gentle with each other, have
realistic expectations of ourselves and if you must have them in
others then keep em to yourself.
Like I said, where is our liberation if we swap one set of rules for another? Where is our freedom if we insist on reminding each other at every turn that we are not good enough?
