Feminism and childcare

- I have everything I ever wanted in my life -- career, travel, lifestyle -- except a man and my own little family.
- Yes, but if you had a man and a child, you likely would have had to re-prioritise career, travel and lifestyle in order to accommodate your family.
- I don't think you need to sacrifice your life for your family.
- It's more about re-prioritising what's in your life. Your life is full, so when you add things into it, the rest needs to be...er...re-distributed.
- I don't buy it.
- Well, I would not live in Amsterdam anymore if it wasn't for my husband's commitments here. I would have given it two years then wrapped up the party and gone somewhere else where my career could effortlessly flourish and feel like an empowered professional again.
- But do you regret that?
- Definitely not! I get much more personal fulfillment out of my life with my husband and baby here than I got out of my life with my career elsewhere. But the blunt, feminist truth is that I have sacrificed my career, first for my husband's career, and now to care for my child.


I think above anything, the feminist and civil rights movements were meant to give people choices.

When I was a [overly-principled] teenager, I thought feminism was about women doing what men do, and not falling into gender stereotypes. I didn't want to be a nurse, teacher, or secretary when I grew up. And I would have viewed many of the things I now hold true in my early thirties as cop-outs.

But not doing what you really want because it's a gender stereotype also means you're letting gender stereotypes impact your decisions.

• Do you love caring for your child(ren) full-time, and can afford to live off of one salary? Be a fabulous stay-at-home mom / dad!
• Do you feel like a better mother if you're able to express yourself as a professional, as a woman, as well as as a mother? Go back to work and schedule lots of time for socialising!
• Do you need to escape your family life periodically and re-collect your inner drive? Travel alone!

I'm taking 6 months off of work, and then returning to work 3 days per week for at least a year. If I loved my job, I would work 4 days a week.

I live in a country where all parents have the right to reduce their work week by one day per child. Many men take "papa dag" and only work 4 days per week, and many women only work 3 days per week when they have children (but don't seem to go back to full-time when their children grow up!). I don't imagine we will ever live in another country that facilitates part-time work so seamlessly, and I really encourage my husband to also take advantage of this situation while it lasts.

And that's another thing I really hold true, which I didn't appreciate in my overly-principled years: my life occurs in chapters. How I define myself now is different than 5 years ago, and may be different 5 years from now. I'm very lucky to have gotten to experience the career-driven, jet-setter lifestyle for a long and important chapter of my life, and I fully intend to return to an emphasis on career in a few years. But I'm also happy I get to experience being a wife and mother settled in one place who doesn't think about work after 5PM. Having a job that doesn't consume you has it's benefits too!

And the more of these different lifestyles I get to experience, the less I seem to judge the decisions of others.

My [Dutch] first weeks with baby

"You must feed the baby every three hours, above all other needs"
"You must listen to the baby's rhythm"
"The baby needs to eat a lot, or it won't have the energy to wake up"
"Feedings should never go more than 45 minutes, even if the baby hasn't eaten very much"
"Don't use a bottle to supplement breastmilk"
"Your feedings are taking too long, you must use a bottle"
"The baby should lay against your body with its head aligned with its stomach horizontally when feeding"
"Always have the stomach below the head when feeding"

In The Netherlands, new parents are supported by:

• A maternity nurse, who spends 6-8 hours in your home with you for the first 8-10 days of your baby's life
• A midwife, who visits you at your home twice in the first week
• The consultation bureau, whose nurses and doctors monitor your child's development until it is 4 years old
• Your family doctor
• Hospital staff from the hospital where you gave birth, if applicable

Each of these trained medical professionals gives you advice, with absolute conviction. Each piece of advice conflicts with the advice of the other trained medical professionals.

Eventually we realised that caring for a newborn baby was a matter of blindly re-prioritising dozens of "essential" needs, and blindly judging the validity of conflicting medical advice.

The Internet
- Is Amy in labour?
- Yes! And I'm on call to google anything that the doctor says that sounds dodgy.

I don't know how people -- especially expats -- had babies before the internet. Most anglo expats have more faith in their own medical systems than the country where they live, and whenever any information comes into conflict with our intuition / upbringing, we google it.

• Does she seriously need to be woken up every 3 hours? And for how long?
• How do you use a baby wrap / sling?
• How long before we can use a soother?
• How long does expressed breastmilk last? Formula?
• How to sooth cramps?
• When is sex safe again?
• Why doesn't colic exist in The Netherlands? And how long does colic last?
• When does this start becoming rewarding?

We quickly learnt, however, that Google does not simplify the whole conflicting-baby-advice issue.

Doing the math

Our Dutch maternity care nurses kept us on a busy Dutch schedule for our baby's first days. We were instructed to feed the baby every 3 hours, calculated from the beginning of the feed.

Every three hours = 8 X 3 hour cycles per 24 hour period
A feeding takes a minimum of 45 minutes, and up to 1.5 hours
Burping, soothing, and putting baby back to sleep takes a minimum of 15 minutes, and up to 1.5 hours
The baby should sleep a minimum of 16 hours a day = 16 / 8 cycles per day = baby needs to sleep 2 hours per cycle
Waking baby enough to feed takes a minimum of 15 minutes, and up to 45 minutes

[Horrible realisation]: If baby takes more than 45 minutes to feed, and more than 15 minutes to wake up + put back to sleep, baby cannot have minimum 16 hours of sleep per day! And each time baby gets less than 2 hours of sleep in an interval, baby is impossible to wake up for next feeding, perpetuating the cycle!

What was happening is the wake-feed-burp/cramps-fall-asleep cycle was generally taking 2-2.5 hours, giving baby a mere 30 minutes to an hour of sleep per cycle. Which was completely contrary to her natural rythm which meant we were constantly battling with her.

Battling to wake her up.
Battling to feed in under 45 minutes, but not so quickly that it aggravated her cramps and/or burping.
Battling to put her to sleep.

With both the maternity nurse and the midwife in the room we demanded that they make a decision for us. What is a priority: feeding every three hours vs. feeding the baby fully at each feeding vs. letting the baby sleep uninterrupted? We never really got an answer except "follow the baby's natural rythms...but make sure you wake her often enough to feed".

Feeling good
While I was on my mandatory 4-weeks-before-due-date maternity leave, my biggest job was to feel good. Sure, I had lots of little projects -- knitting a baby blanket, completing my Dutch exams, enjoying the sun, riding my bike daily -- but my primary responsibility was to feel good. In fact, my midwife repeated several times in one visit "You must take more naps!"

If I felt tired, I should cancel my plans and take a nap. If I had lots of energy, I should go out on my bike. Don't feel like cooking? Don't!

After birth, I was much more in need of care, and while I did have 3 people to help me, I was the sole food source for a little creature who needs to eat every 3 hours. And it often takes 2 just to feed her. Even though my best-husband-in-the-world (yours is too!) was doing literally everything else -- changing diapers, soothing cramps, bath time, waking her up, putting her to sleep, feeding me -- it was really a struggle to keep up with feeding her and recovering me.

- How's motherhood?
- So far I mostly lay, bleeding and feeding.

I really under-appreciated the damage to one's body that labour causes. I think we're all so focused on the labour itself and, most importantly, meeting the little "familiar stranger" (borrowed from my friend Sara) we've spent the last 9 months dreaming about, that we don't imagine how mom's going to feel after birth.

Given that we only really had 30 minutes - 2 hours maximum every cycle to wash everything, feed ourselves, wash ourselves, and sleep, the only way to survive was to cut corners. And the pressure to sleep on cue, eat on cue and pee on cue resulted in me loosing more sleep, eating less, and being too lost to remember to drink water.

Six weeks
The one consistency that seemed to pop up across medical advice, Google, and frantic phone calls to our families was that everything seems to come together at six weeks.

Baby starts to smile around 6 weeks
Sleep patterns emerge around 6 weeks
Mom's pelvis is healed around 6 weeks
Baby's cramps ease around 6 weeks
Mom stops bleeding around 6 weeks

It doesn't seem imaginable, but here we are at six weeks (which feels like forever) beginning sleep training with a smiling, cramp-less baby!