Tag Archives: parenting

babies, toddlers, child development…

Penelope Trunk unpacks a difficult issue

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Penelope Trunk didn’t mean to do us a favour.
She may be a famous social network expert (over 20,000 follow her Twitter feed, me included), known for the combination of business and personal tweets she makes, but it’s one tweet combining the two that has caused controvery both in the USA and here in the UK too.
Last week she tweeted: “I’m in a board meeting. Having a miscarriage. Thank goodness, because there’s a fucked-up three-week hoop-jump to have an abortion in Wisconsin.”

There’s been a rush to judge her, and she’s now written a “Comment is Free” article for the Guardian explaining that she’s not a monster.  She already has children, hadn’t intended to be pregnant, was at great risk of having an unhealthy baby, her partner doesn’t believe in abortion and frankly pregnancy and miscarriage screws with your emotions.  She didn’t mean to trivialise miscarriage or indeed abortion.
I’m witholding my judgement on all that.  I think the wording of the tweet came across as callous, but miscarriage messes you up a bit – I guess she deserves the benefit of the doubt.  She certainly doesn’t deserve the death threats.

What she’s managed to do, without really intending to, is to bring the intensely personal grief of miscarriage into the public domain.

Because a miscarriage is intensely personal.  And because it’s personal and tragic, you’re not “meant” to talk about it.
And most of the time you just have to get on with it.  One Evening Standard columnist talks about the choice between passing it off as flu or strapping yourself into a giant pad and heading off for that meeting anyway – as if having to ignore the little tragedy is a price women just have to pay for the chance of being in the workplace.  I tried it – you are not necesarily going to be able to do this and act normally!

And all the while the extent of your loss is obvious to you – the dull stomach ache, the parody of a normal period, stuff that I barely want to recall let alone write about.
Your body responds to being pregnant- for anyone that hasn’t had it it’s rather unpleasantly like the worst PMT you’ve ever had: heightened sense of smell, weight gain, really uncomfortable breasts.
And you can get all that even if you miscarry, continue to have all that even when losing what could have been your baby.
Actually the weight gain is a complete pig of a reminder.  You can’t help but think about Catherine of Aragon, first wife of Henry VIII who is known to have had a number of miscarriages.  And she became bloated and unhappy and Ann Boleyn managed to tempt her husband away from her. I hate the way miscarriage can make your mind work.

And the grief.
It’s the grief that’s hard to explain. What are you actually grieving for?
And that’s where the abortion point comes back into play.  It would be quite hard to explain to people who only really think of a six or seven week old embryo as just a ball of cells that your mourning a life that didn’t get to happen.
You’re grieving for what might have been, upset that all the excitement, the future planning that you’ve done explicitly or subconsciously has just come to an end.
I’m not sure whether medical staff still refer to miscarriage as spontanteous abortion, but some of the older literature does and it seems to assume that comfort can be draw from the fact that it occurs usually because there was something wrong with the developing embryo.  For what it’s worth, no it doesn’t make you feel much better.
Your hormones have also got all geared up for pregnancy and the shock of their readjustment leaves you on the verge of tears a lot of the time.

Then there’s the guilt.
It feels like everyday there’s a new new story about something terrible that you could do to your unborn child that would result in loss or permanent disability.  And when the miscarriage starts you wonder – what if I hadn’t carried that box? What if I hadn’t had that glass of wine/ piece of blue cheese/ dodgy prawn/ slightly undercooked bacon?  What if I’d managed to lose the weight? What if I’d taken the exercise a bit easier, or done a bit more?
What if I’d managed to be less stressed?
So again that conspires against anyone talking about it.

I’ve not really experienced the relief that Penelope Trunk describes, but then she’s over 40 which brings greater medical risk, and already has the number of children she wants.  And although the language she used to express her private thoughts was what really shocked (convention has it that every child should be wanted, miscarriage a tragic loss not something to be celebrated) it is legitimate to feel like that.

Family planning is still a modern phenomemon – in our want-get society of instant gratification we forget that this stuff is not easy.
Even in my grandparents’ generation not every child was expected to live to adulthood, and having ten children was not just about a lack of contraception but an acknowledgement that not every pregnancy  would result in a child and not every child would make it through childhood.  The whole process of conception, pregnancy and raising small children is a real reminder that while we might try to live ordered lives there’s a wild, uncontrollably biological side to our lives and we have to accept and live with the consequences of what happens to us.

At my age and when you have a child of toddler age, you and the other mums you know are likely to be trying for a second child (possibly third if real gluttons for punishment – the quantity of work per child is not simply twice as much but apparently much more even though you know more what you are doing). And, if you get talking about it, you discover just how many people you know that have had a miscarriage.

Penelope Trunk says “it’s part of being a woman”.  I think I know what she means.

Shared sleeping – scare stories and scary stuff

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There’s been a lot on the news today about how parents are “ignoring the warnings” about co-sleeping with babies, and that co-sleeping has found to be a factor in almost half of cot deaths. 

I should at this point declare an interest – there’s been a cot death in my family and I’ve seen the impact it’s had on everyone, even one decade on.

There’s a lot of conflicting advice on this – physical closeness to the baby when it’s happy and relaxed is thought to help stimulate a mother’s milk production and being able to breastfeed is thought to be clearly best (although perhaps why is not quite as clear cut as had been made out by some of the more militant campaigners).

But the argument put forward by those that co-sleep – that parents and children have co-slept successfully for millions of years – doesn’t quite carry the weight they think it does.  It was once pointed out that there is no word, no equivalent of widow/widower or orphan, for parents that lose a child becoause none of us can contemplate something so awful.  This is true – and false.  Until the late 20th century, losing a child was a common experience, heartrending, awful, but common.  My own grandmother was one of ten, but only six made it to adulthood.  We have absolutely no proof that co-sleeping was or was not a factor as records of that sort of thing were not kept.  But it is reasonable to assume that if it’s a factor now, it may well have been then.

I cannot say that we have never co-slept with my son.  He’s a toddler now, and often ended up in our bed.  Sometimes it’s the only way to get any of you a night’s sleep.
But mindful of the loss our family had experienced, we were so careful throughout the first six months of his life.  Despite his colic, despite the evidence from the hospital that he would only sleep if in physical contact with me, we perservered and he slept in a crib then a cot, feet to foot-of-the-bed, with a dummy.  I fought to stay awake in nightfeeds, always going downstairs to sit upright then returning him to his cot, me to my bed.  It appears the co-sleeping death figures include falling asleep on sofas.

And in the first six months we never co-slept.  It’s just not worth the risk.
We also never let him in if we’d had a drink, and kept him in a grobag on top of our covers – we’re very lucky to have a wide bed.

Would we co-sleep if there’s a next one?  Again, certainly not in the first 6 months and ideally not in the first year.  But sometimes it’s the only way to get some rest.

So making it illegal would be too much of an overreaction.  And the police investigations after a cot death are harrowing. But parents need to know about the risks, and make responsible choices.  Even if they are tired.

Getting competitive… getting in to the European Commission

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Berlaymont building - European Commission headquarters

Who’d want to work in the EU institutions? 
Thousands, apparently, including me. 
It’s not easy to describe the job of a European Commission official, but in reality the actual work is not so different to the work of the civil service in any of the EU Member States.  And the pay, the tax rates and final salary pension – despite the recent reforms – are pretty attractive too.

So how exactly to you whittle down thousands of applicants to the couple of hundred you need to fill the vacancies that are available in the EU instututions?  Until recently the answer was essentially this: set a multiple choice quiz on EU related issues, and a numeracy test.  Put all prospective candidates through this in their second language (preferably English, French or German), then get them to write essays against the clock on EU-inspired subjects which, despite all the research and practice would not actually be marked unless the candidate passed the multiple choice and numeracy parts of the test sufficiently well…  there were further rounds with interviews etc, but as I didn’t reach them that aspect’s a bit less familiar to me.
Julien Frisch had a very interesting post over at http://julienfrisch.blogspot.com/2009/08/epso-criticised-by-european-court-of.html on the criticism of the European Personnel and Selection Office (EPSO – interesting to note that the Commission uses “personnel” long after other adminstrations have swtched over to “human resources”) by the Court of Auditors.  It’s worth reading, even if this post is a couple of weeks old now, not least because ESPO officials have actually joined in the debate below.
It is clear now that future methods of staff recruitment will be via Assessment Centres, a process familiar to many job applicants.  And the new approach is aimed at ensuring that it’s not just a way of identifying those with the time to study EU trivia (e.g. those still in educational environments).  Instead, the approach is supposed to allow demonstration of skills that would be required when doing the job.

So, with a decade of relevant experience, relatively good French (some remaining Spanish – and I’d have to improve at that in order to get a promotion within the Commission once in) and having entered my career for the purpose of gaining the skills to do this, am I actually going to enter the next concours?
I’ve been taking some time on my holiday to think about this.  Basically we’d be happy about a move to Brussels and I want to sit the concours.

But there’s a but.

I’m working part-time in the office and full-time as a mother.  While the UK Civil Service is actually pretty good about recognising the contribution that I can make, it’s not actually as easy as I’d hoped because face-time in the office does still count for something, especially as you get more senior. 
So I’m not sure the Commission would want me. 
Unless they’ve changed the rules that were in place when I did my stage that as Directives (e.g. those covering maternity rights) are addressed to the Member States so they don’t actually have to be exemplary in terms of employment law when it comes to part-time and flexible working?  They must’ve done – I gather there may even be some jobsharers now, but no one’s yet been able to point me to where within the Commission they work (and at what level).  
And with many highly qualified candidates attempting to find themselves the ideal post by appealing to the relevant DGs, who’d take on someone that only wanted to work part-time?  Several of the people I knew that passed the last concours have given up on trying to find a post – in other words they went through all of the stages I mentioned above, officially “got the ticket” but still have not got a job at the end of it.
Could I really put myself and my family through the extra stress of preparing for the different stages of the concours? And the extra stress of trying to get a job as a part-time employee?

The other thing is that, with 10 years experience, I’m not terribly keen on starting at the bottom again (moving from middle management to policy administration without a team).  Now, if there was to be a Head of Unit concours in the near future I can imagine that that would really be of interest…  So unlike my normal work-self, I’m feeling a bit indecisive.

There are probably people out there thinking that I’ve no right to expect to be employed as a part-timer.  That by having chosen to have a child and – let’s be honest about this- the likelihood that I’ll want to have another at some point, I somehow forfeit the right to be pursuing a professional career too.  Especially when you read some of the comments that are attracted by articles on this sort of subject on the Daily Mail’s website or even Comment is Free at the Guardian’s site. 
My brain hasn’t switched off.  I’m no less good at the decision-making or subject analysis or line management aspects of my job than I was before I had a child.  
What I can’t do any more is work more than my official conditioned hours, unless there’s a real emergency and/or I’ve had a chance to arange alternative childcare. 
My childcare is timelimited.  Even if it wasn’t, there’s a tiny little person who loves me and is dependent on me, and would not understand if he suddenly couldn’t see his mum.  
But the thing is, should there be an expectation that you’ll work more than conditioned hours on anything other than a rare occasion?

May be I’d better go and try to find the latest version of the Staff Regulations, and then think about it some more.  I’ve got a few months to find out…