The main thing in life that makes me proud is family: my children, my husband, my sister, my parents, my extended family and in-laws. I also love to see other people achieve their best, whether they are family, friends or students.

Personally, I get much joy and pride from my art, cooking a good meal for my family, writing a good blog post and solving a really hard cryptic crossword. As far as academic acheivement goes, unfortunately I suffer from “Imposter Syndrome” – I wish I could feel proud, but I am plagued by a constant suspicion that I am an imposter. Most vexing. Every now and again I get an idea where I think, yes, that really was a good one!

It’s interesting to consider what I would have put in this post if I had been writing it 10 years ago. At that time, I certainly would not have envisaged that I would be a wife and a mother of two. I suspect I would have listed academic achievements as the main personal achievements of which I was proud. I doubt I would have even contemplated the possibility that being a mother is my proudest achievement.

I have been thinking lately of how society undervalues parenting as an achievement. And, almost as if on cue, a furore has arisen in the Federal Senate after Greens senator Sarah Hanson-Young brought her two-year-old daughter Kora into the chamber. There is no suggestion that her daughter was distracting others or in some way impeding Hanson from doing her job. She was just sitting quietly on her mother’s lap. However, Senate President John Hogg ordered Kora out of the chamber because technically, she was a “stranger in the house”. Apparently babies are not strangers while they are breastfed, after the rules were changed when Victorian MP Kirstie Marshall was ordered out of the state Parliament for breastfeeding her daughter. But once they are weaned they technically become strangers. President Hogg has regretted the way in which the matter was handled, and welcomes a reassessment of the rules so that they are clearer.

Reactions were mixed. Some MPs supported Hanson-Young, whereas Barnaby Joyce suggested it was a stunt (hat tip: LP). The Age had a range of responses from readers and commentators. Andrew Bartlett’s opinion is worth reading on the issue.

Poor Hanson-Young said:

“I was upset by what happened. In fact I don’t think I’ve ever felt so humiliated in my life. … I understand that the president made a ruling based on the current rules. But as any mother knows, sometimes families don’t play by the rule book… I hope this allows us to have a discussion about how we balance these things and respect the work of working families regardless of whether it’s mothers or fathers…”

Given Hanson-Young’s evident distress, insinuations that the whole thing was a stunt are unpleasant.

Is this just an issue for mothers? No, it is not. Is the attitude towards mothering (and parenting generally) sexist, a function of our patriarchal society, which privileges non-parenting activities?

I’d suggest the reality is a little more complex than this. One only has to think of Betty Friedan’s The Feminist Mystique, which questions the notion that women only find fulfilment through childbearing and homemaking. Let me be clear: this is a good thing to question. Not all women want to have children, not all women who have children want to be homemakers.

However, this questioning of fulfilment via childbearing and homemaking has led some people to believe that a woman who does find fulfilment through childbearing and homemaking is somehow deluded. What is more, it has led to an environment where it’s difficult to say that you enjoy staying home with your children. And men who choose to stay home and look after their children suffer these kind of judgments even more acutely.

I’m sure I’ve written before of the conversation I had with a female boss after I gave birth to my daughter. She rang up to check when I was returning from maternity leave. My daughter was 3 months old at the time. I said that I wasn’t quite ready to come back to work, and that I had at least another 6 months at least up my sleeve. This woman said something to the effect that I should just put my daughter in care and come back to work, because “these are the sacrifices women have to make if they want to get ahead as a solicitor.” I handed in my resignation the next day.

Now, you might think – perhaps this woman didn’t have children? Perhaps she didn’t realise how hard it is to leave your child? Well, you would be wrong. She had two children under the age of 5. Why is it that women are sometimes their own worst enemies? This conversation really disappointed me, because, naively, I had thought this woman was an ally and a friend. My theory is that women like this try to get other women to follow their own choices because it vindicates their own choice. I suspect, somewhere inside, this woman might feel guilty that she doesn’t spend much time with her children, and seeing someone else choose differently makes her realise this. I genuinely don’t mind what this woman chooses to do. I don’t judge her, or try to bully her to make the same choices as me. So I’d appreciate it if women such as this would respect my choice.

Now, I genuinely enjoy my work and study. I would not want to go back to a world where the only options available to me were childbearing and homemaking. But the difficulty for me (as for so many parents out there) is getting a balance (as I’ve discussed before).

I don’t know quite how this post turned from a discussion of pride into a discussion of parenting, feminism and society. I suppose it was just the realisation that in my youth, I wouldn’t have expected that I would feel this way. Secretly and inwardly, I might even have sneered just a little at women who said they found fulfilment in this way. But to feel pride in one’s family is important and natural. That is why Hanson-Young felt humiliated when her daughter was ordered out of the chamber – because she is proud of her daughter, and proud of balancing the demands of work and family, but the public ejection of her child was a repudiation of that.

Hopefully, the Hanson-Young incident will start a discussion of what we can do to make sure that parents can balance these things more easily.

Apparently it is not just celebs who want to get rid of their baby bodies straight away. I was reading a blog post in The Age on the “Yummy Mummy” phenomenon. Fortunately, pregnant women are now seen as attractive in their own right; but the expectation is that after childbirth, a woman should return to exactly how she was before she had children.

…[R]eports of “pregorexia” – striving to stay thin during pregnancy – remind us of the dark underbelly of these positive changes. And pregorexia is not the only alarming trend surrounding the yummy mummy phenomenon. “Mummy makeover” is the term used to denote the set of radical cosmetic surgical procedures that women increasingly undergo post-birth. Some mothers claim to find a mummy makeover liberating but both pregorexia and the mummy makeover aim to eradicate the maternal body.

Both of these trends demonstrate how the idealisation of youthfulness has crossed into the maternal realm – women are expected to appear skinny and toned whatever their age and whether they’ve had children or not. Ironically, this means that while there has been much “motherhype” of late, mothers continue to sit uneasily in the public eye. It seems that mothers are simultaneously celebrated and eradicated.

Pregorexia and mummy makeovers horrify me. Let’s get real with regard to women’s bodies. Very few women are perfect, and pregnancy and childbirth will have an impact on the bodies of the vast majority of mothers. Maybe some lucky women will spring back into shape straight away; but from conversations with friends, I suspect they are in a minority. We need to get away from these idealised and unrealistic notions of the female body; it makes normal women feel inadequate and unattractive.

But it’s not just the return of one’s body which is at issue. Having a child is a massive change to one’s life, and you can’t just continue on where you left off. I’ve written on this before. Last year, I was somewhat doubtful about the appointment of Cate Blanchett to the 2020 conference two weeks after the birth of her son.

In the last few days, the French Justice Minister, Rachida Dati has come under fire for returning to work five days after giving birth to her first child, daughter Zohra, primarily from feminists who argue that this kind of behaviour puts pressure on women and leads to unrealistic expectations from employers. I wonder whether Ms Dati will regret her decision later. I think it would be immensely difficult to go back to work so soon after having a caesarian section, particularly if she intends to breastfeed. I should also note that she is a single mother, and so presumably is without the support that a partner could provide in these circumstances.

I suppose motherhood means different things to different women. Although the vast majority of women have been supportive of my choices, a small minority have been critical of my choice to work part time, although as I pointed out, it was a financial necessity. Another small minority have been critical of the fact that I “only” went back to work on a part time basis. These critics make me wary of being too judgemental of the choices of others. It is hard enough juggling work, family and everything else, let alone being judged by others.

That being said, I do think that the expectation that any woman can be a supermum deserves to be shot down in flames. In the long run, you cannot do it all. If you decide to devote more energy and time to your career, you sacrifice your family life. If you decide to devote more energy and time to your family, you sacrifice your career. It’s as simple as that. There simply is not enough time to have a fulfilling career and family life. The plain truth is that the same equations apply to men, and that those men who devote their lives to their careers also sacrifice family life (or vice versa, as the case may be). All you can do is try to get the balance that is right for you. In my case, the balance is presently in favour of family life, but I’m also keeping a small modicum of career in the picture. I suspect the balance will tip more in the direction of career when the children are older, but my family will always be my priority.

So: reality check for all new mothers and mothers-to-be out there. Motherhood changes your body and your life in fundamental ways, and there is no way that either can go back to what it was before you were a mother. You can’t do it all and be it all. Nonetheless, I wouldn’t have it any other way.

When I was having my daughter, we had a trainee midwife attending us as one of her “case studies” for qualification. She had a sticker or something with the motto “Pregnancy is not an illness”. From this you could tell she was young, idealistic, totally delightful and had never had a child herself. I always wanted to add the punchline above, but I restrained myself. After all, I had no idea until I had become pregnant myself.

I have to say that I was gobsmacked by how unwell I felt when I was pregnant with my daughter. I had blithely expected that I would carry on life as usual, and work up until the day I had her, but it didn’t work out like that. I ended up leaving work early. I know some women who haven’t felt ill, and others who ended up having to be hospitalised because they were so sick, so it really does depend on the person.

The worst of it is that the really sick period (5 weeks to 14 weeks for me) is when you aren’t supposed to tell anyone. So you can’t explain to anyone why you’re turning green at the sight of a cup of coffee, or you have a sudden insane desire for Pink Lady apples all the time. (Mmm, that yummy pink crunch!)

Any expectation that your life will go back to normal straight after having a baby is also misguided, in my opinion. I’ve heard of a barrister struggling to Court to make an appearance one and a half days after giving birth, which just seems insane to me. In fact, from the way it was reported to me, it was like a competition: “X came back 2 days after she’d had hers, but can you believe it, Y beat her and turned up 1 and a half days after she’d had her baby!” Seems like a pretty stupid kind of competition to me.

Anyway, I’ve been thinking about the reports that Cate Blanchett is to take part in the 2020 summit two weeks after her third baby is due. That seems like insanity to me. The only way in which she could possibly manage it is to palm the child off to someone else for most of the time. And even then, she’ll still be feeling a little sore and sorry for herself. If she’s trying to breastfeed, she might need the baby brought in and out of the summit. Or I guess she could take the child to the summit, but it’s very difficult to concentrate on work-related matters when you’ve got a beautiful newborn there demanding your attention. At least, that’s my experience. And I wouldn’t have it any other way: this new person has come into your life and you want to get to know them.

Cate might miss out on her new child for nothing anyway: this 2020 summit sounds like a bit of a furphy to me. A case of letting people talk, and then just going on as normal afterwards. It reminds me of Charles II’s strategy with Parliament – he got them to fight and talk amongst themselves, while he got on with ruling the country. Mind you, Parliament had an equally dismissive idea of him: “Give him a whore and a side of beef and he’ll be happy.” Lovely.

So, despite thinking of myself as a feminist, I’m just not sure about Cate’s appointment to 2020. She’s a great actress and all that, but her attendance so shortly after the predicted birth of her child gives a message to women that, yes, you can just get back to things straight after having your baby. This might be the case if you have a phalanx of nannies and other support people, but for most normal people, the process of having a child is an exhausting and all-engrossing one which does affect your capacity to work. Even if you’re not unwell and tired during the pregnancy itself, you are likely to be sore and tired after the birth (whether natural or caesarian). And babies are made so that they cause us to focus a lot of attention on them when they are born. And you know what? That’s natural.

According to BBC News, Dr Izzat Atiya of Al-Hazar University in Cairo issued a fatwa as follows:

He said that if a woman fed a male colleague “directly from her breast” at least five times, they would establish a family bond and thus be allowed to be alone together at work.

“Breast feeding an adult puts an end to the problem of the private meeting, and does not ban marriage,” he ruled.

“A woman at work can take off the veil or reveal her hair in front of someone whom she breastfed.”

Apparently, according to sharia law, breastfeeding at infancy establishes a familial relationship between a woman and child even if there is no biological relationship. Dr Atiya sought to extend that principle to adults in order to get around the problem of segregation in the workplace.

Well, I’m glad he was thinking of creative solutions to  segregation in the workplace… That’s a good start to providing equal opportunity for women in the workplace in Islamic countries. But no, no, no, ugh! Allowing a colleague to drink from your breast seems a million, billion, trillion times worse than allowing him to see you with your hair uncovered.

I’m glad to say that this ruling has sparked outrage throughout Egypt and the Muslim world. It has been retracted as defamatory to Islam.

There was uproar! 25% of the women who contacted the magazine complained because they found the image offensive. Some said it made them feel sick. One woman had to rip off the cover so her husband didn’t see it, another had to immediately turn the magazine face-down.

How ridiculous! Did these women feel sick when they looked down in the shower and saw their own breasts? How did they cope with breastfeeding their own children? Did they have to have their eyes shut while feeding their child? Or did they just immediately put their child on the bottle? I wonder about their husbands, as well, if they believe their husbands cannot cope with a picture of a breastfeeding baby.

It’s just a perfectly natural part of life. News for that 25%: we are MAMMALS. Being mammals, human mothers feed their young with milk which comes from nipples. Babies don’t think naked breasts are disgusting. They think they’re pretty nice.

I breastfeed my daughter, and I do so in public. I am pleased to say that I have never had any adverse comments. On the contrary: a few people have come up to say how gorgeous it is to see a happy baby having a nice feed. Of course, I am reasonably discreet – when my daughter allows this – she has a habit of pulling off the breast and rolling over to smile at everyone happily mid-feed. I think she’s trying to let everyone know how much she loves her milk! Obviously, Australians are more sensible than Americans in this regard.

However, if someone ever challenges me, I am going to ask them to explain to my crying baby why she can’t have her milk. I don’t think she’ll find their arguments convincing.