Motherhood as a retail trend...

Interesting article by Janina Stajic on the realities of Motherhood.

Pick a major American city, wander down one of its trendy shopping streets, and on any given block you will likely see a plethora of stores devoted to all things maternal. Most obvious are stores selling pregnancy clothes, with larger than life posters of gorgeous, very pregnant women in styles any self-respecting, non-pregnant New York fashionista would be scrambling to wear.

Next to them are the baby supply boutiques with everything you could possibly want to accessorize your new role as mother (and the life of your newborn). Strollers big enough to be in the SUV section at your local car dealership -- with prices to match -- are parked next to cribs fit for a princess. Mixed in for good measure are the educational toy stores, the cloth diapering stores, the organic cotton baby clothing stores, and the baby beauty product stores. All proof that motherhood has become a trend.

Now, often trends, particularly fashion trends, are quite fun. Who doesn't love experimenting with new colors (remember when red was the "new black?") and new styles such as huge purses, thigh-high boots and over-sized sunglasses? However, turning something as life-changing as motherhood into a trend is, at best, misleading and, at worst, totally irresponsible. Some women, drawn in by the trend, become completely disillusioned when they realize that motherhood isn't always as delightful as donning the latest offerings from the runways of Paris (or the cheap runway imitations).

This motherhood trend has been partially fueled by the seemingly endless supply of A- and B-list celebrities popping out their progeny left, right and center. It started with Demi Moore and her groundbreaking Vanity Fair cover. And now, stories of pregnant stars and celebrity mothers are as ubiquitous as stories about their disintegrating love lives.

These aspiring celebrity mothers look stunning during pregnancy (Britney Spears notwithstanding). And, one to two weeks after giving birth, they appear with their little ones looking as though they had just spent the past two weeks with a personal masseuse, instead of going through the most painful experience known to womankind and staying up all night with a newborn.

The other culprits in this breeding bonanza are the industries and businesses that have woven a misleading myth of motherhood into our popular culture. They are following in the prestigious footsteps of the hugely successful wedding industry, which realized they could make millions by creating and perpetuating the dream of a fairy tale wedding and perfect marriage -- a myth if ever there was one.

And now, in a bid to repeat this success, a new industry has been born: the motherhood industry. Set up solely to sell women a new myth, the myth of the problem- and pain-free motherhood, it focuses only on the very best experiences that motherhood offers: the wonder of being pregnant, the experience of nursing a child, of watching them sleeping in their crib, of reading them classics such as Goodnight Moon and of course, of taking glorious walks with your partner and your perfect little bundle of joy tucked inside that SUV-sized stroller.

The fact that pregnancy can be extremely uncomfortable (to say the least), that nursing can lead to cracked and bleeding nipples, that your baby might wake up every hour of the night for the first year, that Goodnight Moon loses some of its charm after the one hundredth reading, and that you will have to learn how to maneuver your huge stroller through a busy mall while clutching a screeching 2-year-old, are facts that the motherhood industry conveniently overlooks.

Indeed, the relentless, challenging, overwhelming, sometimes downright depressing parts of motherhood are entirely disregarded.

And what of those gorgeous looking celebrities who seem to make the transition to glamorous mother without effort? Well, most celebrity mothers probably have spent the first two weeks post partum with their masseuse (oh, and their newborn). Celebrities can also add personal baby shoppers, lactation consultants, personal baby nutritionists, nighttime doulas, daytime nannies, and post pregnancy fitness instructors to their already existing arsenal of cleaning ladies, personal assistants and chefs. Any new mother would do the same -- and look gorgeous doing it -- if she could afford to.

So, what happens to the average everyday woman who may have felt a little unsure about becoming a mother, but who gets drawn into the trend being perpetuated by popular culture? Who, in her desire to have the cool new "pregnancy look," the new cute baby look, and imitate the celebrity mothers, conveniently overlooks, forgets, and disregards the fact that, unlike some of her previous fashion foibles, this one is forever? She cannot simply put it into the Goodwill bag with the 80s hypercolor T-shirts and the side ponytails.

Many women, if the blogs and the media are correct, are surprised and disillusioned when they discover what being a mother is really all about. They fall for the motherhood trend, hook, line and pacifier, and are bewildered when the experience does not live up to their expectations.

An article published in a major Canadian newspaper interviewed several new mothers who seemed to be surprised to discover that motherhood can actually be extremely challenging and, wait for it -- boring. Many of them were desperate to find someone else to look after their children and return to their pre-baby lives.

And these mothers are not alone. The Internet is full of stories and blogs of women disillusioned with their motherhood experience, some so much so they have voiced regret at having children, a feeling that does not bode well for the future psychological health of their offspring.

Comments from these mothers include such thoughts as “children are mind-numbingly boring,” and “looking after children makes women depressed” to the slightly more disturbing: “I was an attractive, fulfilled career woman before these kids. Now I’m an overly-exhausted wreck who misses her job and sees very little of her husband,” and the even more disturbing: “It is no secret to my children that I consider myself to be carrying out a prison sentence and I'm counting the days 'til I am free."


And little real support is available to help them cope with their disillusionment. There are, of course, endless parenting advice books, all promising to put the reader on the fast track toward their fantasy motherhood experience. Most of these books have overtly misleading titles such as The Happiest Baby on the Block or The No-Cry Sleep Solution. The fact these books often end up gathering dust in the back of a cupboard before your child has reached his or her first birthday, suggests just how effective they are.

And let's not forget the thousands of products that promise to transform your life with baby into everything you thought it could be. The fact is that no products or books are going to give you the motherhood you imagined when you bought the fashionable pregnancy clothes, the gorgeous crib and the fancy stroller. And the reason? This motherhood does not exist. There will be moments that live up to the image fueling the motherhood trend, but they will always be offset by moments that seem to come straight out of a Stephen King novel.

So what to do? Well, a good place to start would be to stop treating motherhood as the new black. Perhaps those considering having kids, should be allowed to dream about their new pregnancy wardrobe and wander through the baby stores imagining how darling their little one will look in the fuzzy pink baby Ugg's playing in the new princess sandbox. And then, they should be asked to spend 48 hours at home doing some repetitive mind numbing task like data entry, with only a couple of minutes per day to either eat, grab a shower, or get dressed. During the first night they will be woken every three hours, but still required to function the next day, performing their mind-numbing task and again with only a few precious minutes to themselves (if that). The second night they will be kept up, with only a few hours here and there to sleep while various wet sticky, smelly substances are thrown at them, in a bid to demonstrate what it might be like to look after a sick baby.

By providing potential mothers with this balanced perspective, they will be able to make a more informed decision. Instead of falling for the motherhood trend and only later discovering it is not all it's advertised to be (suffering through endless hours of disillusionment and boredom, until finally hiring a nanny and running screaming from the house), women will come into their new role much more aware, much more prepared and much more able to deal with the challenges and joys of being a mother.

Even the stores and the culture promoting the motherhood trend will benefit from offering a more balanced view. An increase in the number of satisfied mothers will, in turn, produce more satisfied, grounded children. This will help to ensure fewer children get involved in gangs, drugs and shooting sprees and instead become functioning members of society, with lots of money to spend on things such as beautiful but unnecessary mother and baby products.

A fantasy? Perhaps. But no more so than the myth of motherhood now being perpetuated. This is not to suggest no one should ever again have children because it is so awful. It is simply trying to point out what should be obvious; you can't base your decision on having a baby on the same criteria you would use to buy the latest iPod or the cute little outfit you tried on at Sak's yesterday.

Which brings us back to the question: to procreate or not to procreate? Well, if you think you want to have a baby, you will need to look into the idea much more deeply. Start by talking to other women about their experiences with motherhood and reading about it. A wealth of information on motherhood is available on the Internet and in bookstores. A few to try include BellaOnline, a compendium of articles on whether or not to become a mom, and books such as Do I Want to Be A Mom? A Woman's Guide to the Decision of a Lifetime by Suzan Eram and Maybe Baby: 28 Writers Tell the Truth About Skepticism, Infertility, Baby Lust, Childlessness, Ambivalence, and How They Made the Biggest Decision of Their Lives by Lori Leibovich.

If you still can’t decide, try to clear your mind and look at both sides of the equation. Let yourself by pulled into the dream for a moment (we all know that fantasy roll playing is a very good thing). Imagine yourself wearing, and looking gorgeous in, the funky new pregnancy fashions. Gaze at the stroller in front of you, and envision you and your partner strolling along with latte's in hand while your perfect baby, dressed in the latest Robeez and GAP Baby outfit, coos at the birds. Then, before you find yourself dragging your partner home to get on with procreating, pause. Shift this vision to the darker side, and now picture you and your partner practically running, with a screaming baby in your arms, in a desperate attempt to get home, as the latte you ordered congeals in the bottom of the stroller. Then imagine doing this after having only slept for two hours the night before.

If both these images are ones you think you can handle, then talk some more, think some more and nudge your partner toward the bedroom. If not, then perhaps take your hard-earned money, buy yourself a sexy, non-pregnancy top, a bottle of wine, and lead your partner to the bedroom -- or whatever location is most convenient -- birth control and all.

Tagged as: motherhood

is a freelance writer, mother and community activist. She teaches pre/post natal yoga and is the chair of the Nanaimo Mother & Baby Society.

unease

On the arrival of a new life in my life, I feel a sense of death approaching, am not sure why. My uncle has been very sick, I just heard my grandmother fainted and has suffered injuries from her fall. I guess the new arrival brings change, joy at her arrival, coupled with an immense sadness at what’s happening around me. A sense of destruction, of Kali cutting through darkness, and the search through that, obfuscation of the light. Of relationships shattered, of bonds broken of anger run rampant. Of insecurities brimming to the surface, of past securities disappearing. A sense of responsibility looming, to love and support a new life. She comes with her own Karma but it is my responsibility to support her and give her everything that I can for her to follow her own pre ordained path in life. At the same time prepare for the passing of an older generation that has given me, us so much love, wisdom and joy by there luminous presences.

The terrible bomb blasts aboard the Samjhauta Express add to this feeling of unease. What a world to bring a child into right now. With innocent people dying in Iraq, Afghanistan, Palestine, India and Pakistan.

change in civics text books by NCERT in India

Anjali Puri has an interesting article on the 12th grade Civics text books published by N.C.E.R.T.

I remember studying it and getting extremely bored with its perspective and lack of opinion on any matter, in its attempt to sound neutral and objective. But things seem to have changed for the better. This welcome change is quite a departure from Murli Manohar Joshi’s attempt to change the history text books to provide a more positive Hindu slant to Indian history.

What are the following doing in a school textbook? 1) A picture of blank editorial space to protest the censorship of newspapers; 2) extracts from the Shah Commission's report on the Turkman Gate atrocities and the custodial death of a student called Rajan; and 3) a statement that the centralisation of powers within the Congress party made it impossible to check the slide into authoritarianism during the Emergency. Find out by reading the new Class 12 textbook on Indian politics since Independence.

What do Ayesha, a bright Baghdadi schoolgirl who lost her leg to a missile, South African Jabu, whose father is pushing him into an MBA programme, and Andrei, a Russian immigrant in Australia who defies his mother by wearing blue jeans to church, have in common? Answer: they are all affected by US hegemony.
These Class 12 books go much further, by drawing teenagers who are or will soon be voters, into the maelstrom of contemporary Indian politics and the politics of the post-Cold War world.

They will be the first schoolchildren to engage critically with epochal post-Independence events, such as the linguistic reorganisation of states, the wars with China and Pakistan, the Emergency, the Punjab and Kashmir crises, the anti-Sikh riots of 1984, the rise of OBCs in Indian politics, the Ayodhya dispute, coalition politics and the Gujarat riots.

my little darlin

Amitav Ghosh relocating to India

Times Of India has an interesting article on Amitav Ghosh winning the Padma Shri, along with Khushwant Singh and Ravi Dayal.

Ghosh's life too is at an ephiphanous point. After being a Bengali in Brooklyn for many years, like Piyali, he's now leaving the US to return home, to shuttle between familial Kolkata and his new Goa residence. The Padma Shri, he feels, couldn't have come at a better time.

happiness

The way to happiness:
Keep your heart free from hate, your mind free from worry.
Live simply, expect little, give much.
Scatter sunshine.
Forget self, think of others.
Try this for a week
and you will be surprised.

~ Norman Vincent Peale

Fair and Lovely

Salon has an article by Andrew Leonard about fair and lovely cream and it's use among poor Indian women.

Race, poverty and skin-whitener
You've got to wonder what the atmosphere is like when Aneel Karnani and C.K. Prahalad rub shoulders in the hallways at the University of Michigan's Ross School of Business. The two professors have similar backgrounds: They both graduated from campuses of the Indian Institute of Management (Karnani from Calcutta, Prahalad from Ahmedabad); they both have Ph.D.s from Harvard dating back to the 1970s; and they both are very interested in the economic lives of the poor.

But that's also where they differ, and in the world of academe, the rhetoric is getting a bit pointed.

C.K. Prahalad is famous in development circles as an evangelist for a concept known as the "bottom of the pyramid." The "BoP" represents the billions of poor people living on the planet whose buying power is, says Prahalad, a terrific, and stunningly underexploited, business opportunity. A good summary of his views can be found in an article he co-wrote with Allen Hammond in 2004 for Foreign Policy, "Selling to the Poor." He's also written a book on the subject, "The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid: Eradicating Poverty Through Profits," and if you are willing to wade through a generous dose of hype, you can visit a somewhat overenthusiastic Web site devoted to his life works.

In August, his Michigan colleague, Aneel Karnani, blasted the BoP concept in a paper titled "Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid: A Mirage," calling it "at best a harmless illusion and potentially a dangerous delusion." The gist of his critique: Not only isn't the market as big as Prahalad claims it is, but the very act of encouraging poor people to consume products that they don't need may actually make them worse off. Instead of trying to get them to buy more stuff, argues Karnani, we should be striving to find ways to help them produce more, so we can buy from them.

Prahalad answered this blast in muted tones, in a five-page response posted to the NextBillion.Net Web site (which is part of the World Resources Institute, an organization for which Prahalad serves on the board of directors). He ended his self-defense with a polite coda: "This is a longer letter than I usually write. Because of the high regard I have for you I have taken the time to give a detailed and diligent response. Hope it helps." But this week, Karnani released a new working paper, "Doing Well by Doing Good Case Study: Fair and Lovely Whitening Cream, an exhaustive look at one of the products that Prahalad has previously named as an example of something that can be successfully sold to the very poorest sectors of society, for both profit and social benefit. Fair and Lovely is manufactured by the Anglo-Dutch conglomerate Unilever, and marketed in India by a Unilever subsidiary, Hindustan Lever Limited.

In "Selling to the Poor," Prahalad and Hammond declare:


Beyond such benefits as higher standards of living and greater purchasing power, poor consumers find real value in dignity and choice. In part, lack of choice is what being poor is all about. In India, a young woman working as a sweeper outdoors in the hot sun recently expressed pride in being able to use a fashion product -- Fair and Lovely cream, which is part sun screen, part moisturizer, and part skin-lightener -- because, she says, her hard labor will take less of a toll on her skin than it did on her parents'. She has a choice and feels empowered because of an affordable consumer product formulated for her needs."


In "Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid: A Mirage," Karnani scoffed at the notion that a skin-whitening cream could be considered socially positive, noting that such creams have been widely pilloried for playing into sexist and racist stereotyping.


This is no empowerment! At best, it is an illusion; at worst, it serves to entrench her disempowerment. Women's movements in countries from India to Malaysia to Egypt obviously do not agree with Hammond and Prahalad, and have campaigned against these products. The way to truly empower this woman is to make her less poor, financially independent, and better educated; we need social and cultural changes that eliminate the prejudices that are the cause of her deprivations.


In his response, Prahalad dismissed the criticism: "I know that you think 'Fair and Lovely' is a bad idea. This is an ideological stance."

This must have annoyed Karnani, because his newest paper is a comprehensive study of how Fair and Lovely has been marketed in India. (Thanks to NextBillion.Net for the link.) Fair and Lovely is a skin cream whose "special patented formulation" supposedly "safely and gently controls the dispersion of melanin in the skin without the use of harmful chemicals frequently found in other skin lightening products" and that is "proven to deliver one to three shades of change," according to Hindustan Lever Limited (HLL).

Karnani establishes with little room for disputation that Unilever and HLL have been playing on racial sensitivities to market Fair and Lovely to poor women in India and elsewhere in Asia. The television and magazine advertisements he describes would not last a nanosecond in Western markets, if any advertising director was suicidal enough to run them. They show depressed dark-skinned women getting progressively more light-skinned, and in the process, getting good jobs, landing boyfriends and achieving happiness. In India, two egregiously racist advertisements were forced off the air after a lengthy controversy.

Prahalad is fond of stating that corporations can "do well by doing good" -- that by marketing to the poor they can make money and achieve a socially responsible goal. And if you go to HLL's home page you will see, up front and center, that "HLL believes that to succeed requires the highest standards of corporate behavior towards our employees, consumers and the societies and world in which we live." Karnani makes a convincing case that Unilever and HLL are not living up to their own self-avowed standards.


Fair and Lovely is clearly doing well; it is a very profitable and high growth brand for Unilever in many countries, especially in India. The company is not breaking any laws; millions of women voluntarily buy the product and seem to be loyal customers. However, it is, at least, debatable whether it is doing good. It is unlikely Unilever is fulfilling some "positive social goal" and might even be working to the detriment of a larger social objective. This paper does not mean to demonize Unilever. But, there is no reason to canonize Unilever either.


One can reasonably ask whether focusing on one product to the exclusion of all others is an effective rebuttal to Prahalad's larger theses on whether the poor represent an underserved market and whether companies can both "do well and do good." That is a huge and complex subject, and both men agree that such examples as Mohammad Yunus and the Grameen Bank show that there are indeed socially beneficial ways to provide services, for profit, to the poor.

But there's one thing that doesn't get mentioned in either of Karnani's papers or Prahalad's rebuttal, and it's an odd omission. Prahalad serves on the Board of Directors of HLL. Karnani's thorough-going attack on the skin cream has to be read, in part, as a direct attack on Prahalad personally, for condoning, at some level, a marketing campaign based on pushing the message that happiness, beauty and success are dependent on having skin that is light, instead of dark.

I know what cold winter days are like in Ann Arbor. I'll bet it can get even colder in the faculty lounge at the Ross School of Business.

UPDATE: I spelled Aneel Karnani's last name wrong in the original post. Ithas been corrected.

-- Andrew Leonard