Hailey Bieber, Evie Pig & Books With Orange Covers
The British media has lost it's ever loving mind, I've re-organised my bookshelf, and I'm choosing books for my holiday. What have YOU been reading?
Welcome to “What Are You Reading?” – a section of Baby Brain in which I answer the question "what are you reading?" (Duh.)
Please note: If I mention ‘Poppet,’ ‘Pickle,’ or ‘Peach,’ those are my children. They are 5, 4 and 1. Those are not their real names. You can read more about our lives together on the main feed ♡
Annoyed by how motherhood is devalued and/or erased in traditional media, I shared an article in January that included the following excerpt:
… her overriding message being: “This woman could have done something great with her life, instead she had children.”
It’s a common message in women’s media. I first picked up on it after Poppet was born. We were in a supermarket, and he’d just fallen to sleep as I perused the porridge and the Reisens. He was good like that, Poppet, he’d give up the ghost and put himself to bed whenever he noticed he was tired, and on this day it happened to coincide with my being in close proximity of a supermarket cafe. Hotfooting straight to the magazine aisle, I picked up a copy of a well known women’s magazine. I bought a cup of tea. I sat down and read an article about women doing it all, only to find that the only mention of motherhood within said piece referenced one woman regretting having children, and another stating that she could “do so much more than pop out babies.”
Vogue published an issue years later with Naomi Campbell on the cover with her newborn. I was excited, but the article said next to nothing. Last year, Suki Waterhouse graced the cover of that same magazine with her own newborn, and an article entitled ‘Baby Love.’ I parted with six english pounds only to read an article that revelled almost entirely in Waterhouse’s decision to go immediately back to work. A valid choice, one I won’t question, but honestly, where was the birth chat? Where was the raw reality of new motherhood? Where was the conversation about (because this is Vogue I’m talking about) the difficulty of dressing a bleeding, swollen and leaking postpartum body? I shut the issue feeling angry, and it has languished on my coffee table since. Now that I’ve ranted about it, it can go where it belongs – in the bin.
I haven’t bought a magazine since. Last month, Hailey Bieber was interviewed for Vogue US, and I was delighted to learn that she had discussed motherhood in a genuine, visceral way:
“Giving birth was the hardest thing I’ve ever done,” she says, despite having spent nine months diligently prepping. Breathing exercises, acupuncture, yoga, pelvic-floor therapy, workouts, walking, weight training: “I was on that shit. I was doing everything. I felt stronger physically than I ever had before.” But the spontaneous labor she hoped for didn’t happen. She began leaking amniotic fluid at 39 weeks and was induced… It was 18 hours from start to finish, mercifully shorter than the estimated 24, and then there he was, all seven-something pounds of him: Jack Blues Bieber, the glorious baby boy she’d dreamed of, whose spirit she’d felt for months.
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The word that comes up the most during our conversations is strong. She feels that strength, now that she’s a mother. “There’s an ease that comes with it, a confidence,” she says. “You really start to give less of a fuck about so many things. You’re just like, I don’t have the time, actually. I don’t have the energy.”
The whole thing is worth reading, if you have the time. It’s great to see a celebrity mother talking (in a mainstream publication, especially) about being a mother, rather than about how she lost weight after becoming a mother.
As for the fact I found this article after it went viral thanks to her husband’s negging, well, we shall not discuss that. I will not give that boy-child the time. And neither should she.
(Girl, run.)