A tide is turning

Every other day it seems some new scandal of sexual harassment comes out. It’s interesting. Or tiring. Or dull. Or scary. It depends on your perspective.

Most people agree that the serious sexual offenders who have used women’s sexuality against them, manipulated them, blackmailed them with jobs for favours, should be discredited. They shouldn’t get away with it (although it disconcerts me that people are being sentenced without a trial).

Then there’s #MeToo – with women across the world using social media to demonstrate the prevalence of sexual harassment. Some call it standing up for ourselves, others call it whingeing.

A lot of men, and maybe some women are confused by this. I can see why. Do men feel that women are looking for any excuse to take them down? Is this a chance to get at men? Are we blowing things out of proportion? 

Maybe there will be the odd false accusation – isn’t there with everything? But I think the truth of it is that there is and always has been a horrible culture of treating women and their bodies as objects. It’s something that every woman experiences to a greater or lesser extent. And now we are at one of those rare moments in history where we rise up and shout that it’s not fair, that it shouldn’t be like this.

I once knew someone who admitted to occasionally copping a feel in the odd nightclub crowd. And then someone else did it to his girlfriend. That put a different perspective on it, and he stopped. The problem? He hadn’t thought it through. It simply hadn’t occurred to him how his actions affected the person, and how he would feel if someone did the same to the women he was close to.

Legs by dsasso, via Flickr Creative Commons

Having your bum pinched isn’t as significant as other forms of sexual assault. It’s a long way from rape. I mean, it’s really not that bad. You feel a sense of indignation for about ten minutes and then you move on, because you don’t know who it was and your bum has basically recovered from the affront. Where it’s scary is not in the action itself, but when it’s used as manipulation, to imply that you’re getting a job because you’re pretty, or worse, that more is expected of you. Or a dress code that says you have to wear black underwear and stilettos to do this job. It’s a sign of a culture where men see women as objects for their delight and delectation, not as people like them.

If people feel confused and threatened by the turning tide, is it that they don’t understand how widespread and unpleasant sexual harassment is? Do they understand that their wives and daughters have experienced it? Do they think it doesn’t matter?

I'm delighted that there is now a chance my daughter could grow up in a culture in which no one thinks it’s their right to touch her body without her consent, to see her as an object. I want what she does with her body to be her decision, not somebody else’s right.

But this is a dramatic culture change in the way that women are perceived, both by ourselves and each other. It was never going to be an easy transition. Maybe the current vogue for harassment stories will be just a tiny chip in the iceberg of inequality. But, just maybe, it is helping us get to a place of greater freedom and respect for ourselves and our bodies. 

Shutting Children's Centres

When you've just had a baby the world can be a scary, lonely place. You have the most responsibility you've ever had in your life, with the least experience. 

For new mums with the most supportive husbands in the world, they are often still faced with nine hours a day, five days a week of being alone with a baby. Having somewhere you can go, for just half an hour a week is a godsend. So I am sad to hear that one of those lifelines where I live is to close: Warwickshire is closing its Children's Centres.

Children's Centres are small organisations that run a whole range of services to help parents with young children in their local areas. They were set up to 'improve outcomes for young children'. From breastfeeding support to first aid courses, to play sessions for babies and toddlers, and helping parents get back into work, they offer a huge range of services to their communities.

My Children's Centre and me

My new infant and I went to courses on infant first aid, introducing solid food and some play sessions. We also went to baby massage, which sounds like the most bourgeois of pastimes. But actually, when you've never had a baby before sometimes a bit of help on how to touch your baby is helpful. Personally, my baby wasn't really into it - she liked watching the other babies getting massages but didn't really want to be messed with. But for less opinionated infants, massage can help sleep, help their digestion, improve circulation and ease teething pain. It's a great tool to equip their parents to look after them.

Photo by Katherine via Flickr Creative Commons

The best thing my children's centre did for me was counselling. I was struggling to come to terms with the end of my marriage, being single and being a lone parent. It was a tough time and post-natal depression was pretty inevitable. On maternity pay with no second income, I didn't have the money to pay for counselling. But the Children's Centre ran a scheme of offering a set number of counselling sessions to people who they assessed as needing it. My counsellor was really wonderful. And it made a huge difference to me to have window of time every week when I stopped being weighed down by my situation and preoccupied by my baby and could talk through my feelings about the situation head-on with someone who was detached from me and my life. She made me better able to cope with everything that was happening, and as a result I was a better mum, which is what children's centres were set up to do.

Having a baby is wonderful, amazing and exciting, but it can also be an isolating and lonely experience, particularly if you don't know other people in your position. Other things are available, outside children's centres, but a lot of those are paid activities which are less available to single parents or families on lower incomes. Sessions run at children's centres were generally free.

Losing children's centres

It's not just about taking away massage classes for yummy mummies. It's about providing a community hub for parents and young children, giving them services they will benefit from, providing information they need about the kinds of issues that affect young families, and bringing them into contact with each other.

Without Children's Centres, routine queries about babies' wellbeing will be pushed back to the NHS, which will not be without cost. Parents have lost a major avenue to help them become better parents, by assisting with the all-important feeding issues, and monitoring infant weight gain. I don't know, but suspect that the staff working at Children's Centres are adept at spotting children who might have issues and therefore needed a bit of support. Are these children more like to fall through the cracks now?

It doesn't affect me. I had my baby. She did well and I haven't been near a Children's Centre since I went back to work. But my local centres made a big difference to me and I'm shocked that new parents will no longer have this.

Changing trains

My journey as a single parent is coming to an end. Just short of four years ago my daughter came into the world, and times they are a changin.... 

Like any parent, the first bit was a blur. I was frightened, confused and sad at the situation I found myself in, as well as besotted by the tiny monkey-like creature that stared up at me with big blue eyes.

In a few days' time we’re starting a whole new chapter in our lives – we’re moving in with Prince Charming. Love is in the air, there are boxes everywhere. I’m thinking about the future, and the past.

My single parent journey

It’s hard for people without kids to understand what life is really like with children (I didn’t have a clue). And it’s equally hard for two-parent families to understand what it’s like being on your own. For a long time I dreaded weekends. The weekdays were hard work, but come the weekends I was pretty much alone. My friends needed some family time together, hanging out as a three or four, they didn’t want an extra adult and child hanging about. Gradually the dread faded, and I had more things to do at the weekends, and started to enjoy the time with the two of us. But I’m not sad that it’s not like that anymore. I’m glad that we, too, get to hang out as a family of three at weekends. And if we choose to go somewhere I won’t feel like a lonely adult with a child. And if my daughter gets overtired, I don’t have to deal with the problems alone, or shoulder her weight to carry her back by myself.

One of my greatest fears (there are a few) is, or was, loneliness. And I have faced up to it. Maybe not the enveloping loneliness of a desert island. But I’ve experienced what it’s like to stay home every night alone. At first I invited people over at every opportunity, to avoid the silence. But gradually, without even noticing, I became used to it. I’m a sociable creature, so long periods of time alone will never suit me.

I came to terms with the most awful heartbreak. And I came to terms with being single, to the point that I can confidently say it’s really not that bad. Loss is awful. Loneliness can be terrible. But singledom is actually OK. It really does give you a chance to sit back and work out who you are and what you want, without the outside influence of another person. I wouldn’t say it’s better than being with someone (for me). I am definitely happier having someone to share my life with. But I found that I could be content without that.

Since I have been single I have learnt to be a mother. I bought a flat, decorated (with lots of help from my amazing friends and a baby who learned to love watching mummy stripping wallpaper) and furnished it, and filled it with owls and books and purple things. I’ve taken my girl on trains, planes, buses and cars, across Europe and up and down the UK. I’ve made a circle of ‘mum friends’ – the most wonderful, beautiful, caring women you could hope to meet, who can talk about everything from lipstick to politics (when we’re not discussing our children). We’ve had a lot of fun, just the two of us, and I’m sure we’ll have a lot more.

My daughter and I became a team of two in a way that, I think, is unique to single parents. The two of us are more portable than my friends/ families of three or four. So we’re adept at packing up our stuff and jumping in the car. With a sleeping bag and a cuddly lion, my daughter will sleep anywhere. She was a little bit sick on a train recently, and together we dealt with it so discretely that even the people sitting opposite us might not have seen what happened. The team of two is going to become a team of three (sometimes), but I hope we don’t lose that sense of teamwork. I’m sure there will be plenty more adventures for us as a twosome.

Single parent solidarity

During my stint as a single parent, I’ve seen several friends with kids become single. And I’ve learnt that there’s no one who isn’t the single parent type, because there is no type. You can be a single parent because you chose it, and never had a partner in the first place, or relationship break-up for all kinds of reasons, or of course death of a partner. You might have been with your ex for two months or 20 years. Maybe you haven't seen him for dust, or maybe he sleeps on your sofa two nights a week. You might be living on benefits or have no qualifications, or you can be affluent and high-flying. You can be fluent in four languages, or have never left the country. Often the only things single parents have in common are their singleness and their children. But there is a solidarity between single parents – a gentleness and supportiveness with each other, an understanding that we are doing something difficult and important, and quite how hard it can sometimes be. 

I learnt that you can and should rely on other people, but at some level you need to be ready to rely on yourself alone, because they can take the rug from under you. Like my friend says, sometimes you have to put on your ‘big girl pants’ and just deal with it.

Sharing parenting 

In a way I’ll always be a single parent – as the resident parent, the buck stops with me and I’m the one that ultimately makes all the decisions. I can ask for opinions and advice, and talk things through, but it always comes down to me and what I think is for the best. This still feels ridiculous – I still feel like the least experienced or knowledgeable person involved.

Shared parenting doesn’t come naturally to me. I learnt to do this thing alone and I expected to continue it alone. But having someone to back me up when my little monster skips over the boundaries, someone who will take turns to get up in the night, and emerging from a bedtime battle to find dinner cooked for me makes a huge difference. And I am very excited that if I run out of milk in the evening, I can go to the shop and get some. Definitely milk. Not wine or chocolate.

I’m excited about this next chapter in mine and my daughter’s lives. It feels like we’re becoming a real family, although of course we’ve always been a family, and it has been real. And if a ‘normal’ family is mum-dad-kids we’ll never be normal, because Prince Charming isn’t her dad, a fact she very carefully points out to any passers-by who might make that assumption: “He is not my daddy. My daddy lives in ___. He is Mummy’s friend.”

Apparently "love lifts you up where you belong", but there's nothing like a three-year-old to bring you back down to earth with a bump.