Momification

Mom takes a break in Chicago

I'm sure the last thing Michelle Obama needs is my sympathy. But, hey, she's got it anyway. The reason? Her vilification in some corners of the press for her recent "momification". Old school feminists are aghast that someone as intelligent and successful as Michelle Obama could deign to swap a highly lucrative job for the (unpaid) post of First Mom. They bemoan the loss of her "independent identity" and fret about the example it sets modern women the world over. Not for them a life where the biggest strategic decision is where to school your kids. (The prestigious Sidwell Friends, if you're wondering.) 

Yet, others believe that in ditching her $300,000-a-year job as vice-president at the University of Chicago Medical Centre to become a stay-at-home Mom, Michelle is just exercising her right to choose: choice being the ultimate victory of the women's movement after all. 

I'm battling with a similar choice myself just now. The Independent is (once again) seeking volunteers to take redundancy. Is this a gifthorse I shouldn't overlook or would unemployment be a waste of years of graft and a pretty decent education? I'm in an agony of indecision. Although I'd like to look to Michelle for inspiration, my problem is that while she will have law firms falling over themselves to make her partner in four or even eight years' time, I'll be lucky if newspapers still even exist by then. Maybe I should just stay put and shut up. Although who then, would look after Louis? The Independent's impending move from the Isle of Dogs (just down the road) to High Street Kensington isn't helping much either. I hardly think Associated Newspapers will have a creche. As someone pointed out, the Mail doesn't even like women wearing trousers let alone Mums coming to work. Answers on a postcard, please.

Black Friday

Thanksgiving may be billed as the biggest day of the year for Americans. But it turns out that the turkey eating fest is actually a sideshow to November's main event: Black Friday. That's the day the holiday shopping season kicks off. (Apart from in Chicago, where it begins the day after the Christmas parade along the Magnificent Mile, pictured above.) 

Unlike in the UK, retailers here don't pretend they intend to wait until after Christmas to slash their prices. Maybe it's because there is no Boxing Day in the US and hence no Boxing Day sales, or maybe it's because America just likes to do things differently. Either way, shoppers are sharpening their elbows for what are expected to be record bargains given the collapse in retail sales. Some stores are offering up to 75 per cent off. 

But even that might not be enough for some families. With finances so tight this year, something has to give when it comes to Christmas shopping. Recent sales figures suggest that something is the time honoured festive tradition of Moms doing a little cheeky shopping on the side for themselves while playing Santa. Women's clothing sales nosedived last month, forcing retailers from Barneys to Benetton into some savage discounting. A New York Times piece this week said Moms were holding back and digging clothes out from the back of their wardrobes just so they could afford their children's wishlists. 

Nobody tell Louis! As it happens, just before reading that story, I'd decided that my need for a new pair of jeans that actually fit should take precedence over his Christmas presents. After all, surely a kid has to be able to write before he can tell Father Christmas what he'd like? I could have taken back the jeans (and the cardigan) I bought but frankly Louis's needs have already topped mine for the last 18 months and I figured it was time to fight back. A little. While I still can. As for DC's Black Friday, we'll be testing out the Georgetown sales tomorrow with Charlie, who jets in tonight for a couple of days. You never know, if Louis's very lucky maybe she'll buy him a Christmas present.  

(Anti) Stroller Stress

               A cheery Louis in his (forward-facing) buggy

Hear that? No, not the sirens of a(nother) passing cavalcade, but the sound of smug parents patting themselves on the back for splashing out on the baby buggy equivalent of a Maserati. If slightly more eco-friendly. 

How so? All those dollars (or pounds) spent on one of the ubiquitous Bugaboos or Martian-like Stokkes you see around  have just been vindicated by a new study suggesting that babies left to eyeball the pavement in strollers that face away from their Moms risk being stunted developmentally. The theory goes that babies who face their Moms benefit from her constant waffling as she marches them along the pavement in her own version of pramaerobics. All her chit chat means they are more likely to talk, laugh and interact as a result. And they're less stressed than their forward-facing peers too. Apparently. 

What I want to know, though, is what happens when just being in the buggy - Mom facing or not - stresses out your baby? My own extremely unscientific study of two (that's Louis and his friend Soph) suggests that babies are much happier in their (much cheaper) baby slings than their state-of-the-art strollers. They certainly get plenty of chit chat when carried around at chin level. The only danger there is they get too much: one baby book I read warned that babies could start to tune you out if you talked TOO much to them! On that basis, Louis probably stopped listening to me at least three months ago....

Road to the White House

                     Louis outside the Smithsonian "Castle"

Amid the excitement of Barack Obama's election as the next president, I managed to miss one poignant coincidence: America voted for its first black leader on the 40th anniversary of the assassination of its greatest black leader to date, Dr Martin Luther King Jr. That quirk of timing was underlined at a moving exhibition we chanced upon this week about the civil rights movement that ultimately set Obama on his path to the White House. 

In the depths of one of the lesser known Smithsonian institutions, the International Museum, is a photo exhibition called Road to Freedom, graphically charting a struggle for equality that started with Abraham Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation in 1863 and ended with the passage of the Civil Rights Act in 1968, the last of the three great legislative milestones of the 1960s civil rights movement. It's hard, today, to imagine a world where Louis's grandparents couldn't have gone to school with our great friend Nikki's, Mum; or where I couldn't have sat on a bus with my news editor, Peter, let alone sat next to him at work. But that was the reality of life just one generation ago. 

The photos told the story of the largely peaceful battle for basic human rights in graphic and tear-jerking detail. Among the most memorable was one showing a motel owner in Florida, a state that just voted for Obama, pouring chemicals into a swimming pool to try and get rid of the blacks protesting their right to be there. Another depicted the hatred etched on the faces of a white female mob taunting Elizabeth Eckford, who made history by becoming the the first black student to integrate a major southern high school in Little Rock, Arkansas. Then there were the many shots of a young Jesse Jackson, who would survive to become a veteran of the civil rights movement; little wonder he shed so many tears during Obama's acceptance speech in Grant Park on 4 November. 

The exhibition was the perfect preamble to another Louis and I visited yesterday at the City Museum about the 1968 race riots in DC. Again, how amazing to think that just one generation ago a city - America's capital - was ripped apart by black versus white antipathy sparked by Dr King's assassination and yet in two months exactly a black man will be sworn in as president. I'm not sure Louis quite appreciates the tumultuous events going on around him, but it's nice to think that one day he will.

Sling Envy

Louis in the Ergo

Tommy, Lila and Louis in various Ergos; Alex and Esther in the Mobys

                                      Sophie in the Bjorn

Back home, if you fancy carrying your baby around town instead of pushing it in a buggy, your hands-free options are pretty limited. There's basically the Baby Bjorn or the Baby Bjorn. A few daring souls might try the Kari-Me, metres and metres of stretchy material that supposedly wraps around the body to create a kangaroo-esque pouch for your prized cargo, but are unlikely to make it further than the corner shop before dashing home, scared of their baby plopping out on the pavement. 

But in America, land of opportunity, the baby "wearing" options are a different story. I had only to go to my first nursing group at the local breastfeeding centre to have the entire gamut of baby slings paraded before my jetlagged eyes. There was the Moby, the Maya Wrap, the Mei Tai, the Peanut Shell, the Hotsling, the Ergo and, yes, the Bjorn. Then there was the circular discussion over the merits of one baby carrier over another. One particular group of Moms would have the same conversation each time they met about the evils of the Bjorn versus the Moby. Or was it the Ergo versus the Maya Wrap? I forget.

Baby carrying over here even has its own Mom 'n' Pop philosophy: "attachment parenting", which says that babies who are "worn" non-stop feel more secure and loved than other babies and are happier and cry less as a result. And which sleep-deprived new Mum wouldn't buy into that? 

Me for one. Yup, when it comes to obsessing about carrying babies, I am, I readily confess, as guilty as the next Mom. I might have been hopelessly disorganised before Louis's birth, but the one thing I knew I wanted was the Ergo, in part because a friend had recommended it and in part because I was desperate to avoid the ubiquity of the Bjorn. Pre-birth, I read and re-read my Babygami book (a present from G'ma P), which was full of different ways to concoct your own baby sling from the nearest tablecloth or pashmina. John's sister sent me a Peanut Shell from California and I even walked to Borough Market (and back) nine days after my C-section, to borrow a Kari-Me from a friend just so I'd have all my sling bases covered. And yes, I also had, and used - and even liked - the Bjorn. 

So when an online storm broke out here this week about a painkiller maker mocking Moms for wearing their babies as fashion accessories and doing untold damage to their backs in the process, I felt the Momosphere pain. The ads, for Motrin, claimed women "put up with the pain [of baby wearing] because it totally makes me look like an official Mom". The ads, which aired during International Babywearing Week, have now been pulled. Meanwhile, I've "worn" Louis round DC for the past three days straight. Does my back hurt? You bet, but five months into Momhood and I've, like, totally learned that there's literally no gain without pain. And in this case avoiding Louis's mid-afternoon stroller squawks by toting him around town has to be worth it.