Milfs, also known as yummy mummies

This Saturday I went to a wedding (a blessing really since they were married months ago in Bolivia) with some friends while Ed stayed home with the children. I did need to take a long, stumbling run up at the whole putting nice clothes on thing (aaaaargh! why can't I wear pjs to a wedding anyway?) but once clothed, I had a wonderful time. Drinking, dancing, good friends, one of the bride's ex-boyfriends at our table who just invited that sort of semi-witty bantering abuse that sometimes flows from my mouth all too easily -- it was marvellous. After the dancing ended at 10 (at TEN? well, it is Pennsylvania), a few of us sat together, talking in that dreamy, aimless sort of way that is more about not going to bed than it is about starting anything else. We talked about the Prince of Wales wearing leeks and daffodils. We talked about shaved heads and what head nobbles you might find under your hair and whether you could do it with a lamp. We played with our finger puppets. We talked about wedding dresses and why you can't buy wine in Pennsylvania after 6 at night. We talked about Milfs.

That I had never heard the term might give you some idea of my current insulation from popular culture. A Milf, apparently, is a Mother I'd Like (to) Fuck. Mmm. The English girl among us offered that in Britain such a woman is known as a "yummy mummy."

This whole subject came up because I was there. I was the only mother in the room. I was also at least ten years older than anyone else in the room. Probably more. I could have babysat for most of them, including the amazingly talented and stunningly bald Dan Fishback, star of stage, stage and small alternative nightclubs and wonderful Jeff Barg who writes for Philadelphia Weekly. In fact, I could have given birth to some of them and not just in Utah. These are, in fact, pretty much my only non-mommy post-motherhood friends (if you can follow that) and I love them. The perfectly beautiful un-bride Kate told me how beautiful I was looking (which was very nice of her and made me feel much better about the hurricane trail of discarded clothes I had left at home and the fact that I had hemmed my trousers in the car on the way there). Others agreed with her (I really love these friends) and then someone said milf and someone said yummy mummy and I thought, ick.

This is exactly the sort of thing that brings out the split personality in me. Of course I want to be stunning, witty, lovable and fuckable so on the one hand, hooray, I'm so yummy. But really, I would like to be such things completely independent of the definition imposed by my reproductive category. I don't want to be a Milf. I want to be a Pilf.

Someone there said it's about the taboo, the inaccessibility of mothers that makes (some of) them attractive. Well, maybe. But it's not like people are lining up to have sex with me while I'm steaming carrots, negotiating with a mini Stalin who wants everything all his ALL MINE and wiping someone's bottom. If it's about the taboo, it's about everyone's strangely complex relationship with their own mother as sexual being. That we all twitch about this is inevitable. I'm just not comfortable being twitched about, rather than doing the twitching.

Part of the subjugation of women in society is about defining them by their sexual category: virgin, mother, whore, crone (no sex, sex once, too much sex, back to no sex). More and more there is a space between virgin and mother for women to be sexual without having to be labelled whores -- this is a very good thing. It hasn't seemed to carry over onto mothers however. We're pretty scary sexual territory. Clearly we've done it at least once (maybe only once). We might have even enjoyed it. In English medieval law, if a woman was raped but got pregnant, then it couldn't have been rape because she must have enjoyed it because you couldn't get pregnant unless you "enjOyed" it. But in general, we're now clearly off limits. We have been sown. Marked. Claimed. And no one really wants to think about his or her own mother doing the nasty. It seems so at odds with the role we want her to have in our lives -- selfless, safe, loving in a very non-invasive sort of way.

This seems a little thing but I think it has ramifications like the huge discomfort people (and the authorities) in the United States have about breastfeeding. Is it sexual? Is it natural? It's just kind of... oh get that breast out of here before it does something weird like ooze.

Anyway, today's point is simply this -- that when I had my first child I cried because I felt a little like I, me, the person, had died and been replaced by some insane, hormone riddled, leaking, bald mother-beast who couldn't string three words together without talking about poo. I felt like I had disappeared under my new role, that hereafter I would be always known as Mummy. I'm still fighting this a little. It's very easy to let the role define you. But I am still me and someday, when I have a bit more time, there will be a little bit more of me out there again.

I hope that then (actually I hope it now but I don't get out much) people will still want to flirt with me, will still think of me as attractive. I hope that age brings grace and a different beauty and sexiness and not just floor-sweeping breasts and arthritis. But I'd really really like it if people find me sexy without any reference to my offspring, and certainly not because of them.