What a mumsy arse you have

Check this out. Then read on. (I took out the implanted video because Blogger was having a hissy this morning.)

Oh ha ha hee hee, very funny. My old pimply mother ass is shaking its flabby booty so hard I can hardly pick my stupid high rise jeans out of the crack.

This is a Saturday Night Live sketch and I suppose therefore I ought to have a very broad (like my bottom) sense of humor about it. It is funny, but the attitude towards mothers that underlies it bugs me.

See, it pokes fun at exactly that stereotype -- mother as former woman -- that provokes a whole counterculture of hipmomhood that is equally repressive. So what if some women who are mothers wear stupid jeans? So what if some women don't? While mothers might be slightly more guilty of the unwashed ponytail look, that's from fracking necessity, bozos. It's not a fashion choice. Pre, post, mid or past giving birth, we are all different; we are all valuable and we are all unique. LL Bean would go out of business if there weren't women (like my maiden aunt) who positively LOVE their jeans to come up to their armpits.

Part of what the ad makes fun of is not just that mothers lack style, but that mothers' bodies are different and less attractive that the bodies of women who have not given birth. Well, yes, they are different. Growing human beings takes its toll on our muscles, our tendons, our skin -- indeed, our very skeletal structure changes. These are not things that all of us can successfully hide. That we seek to hide them in order to be attractive reinforces the idea that a mother's body is not attractive -- read, sexually desirable. To some extent, that might be true. As a species we might very well be programmed to respond sexually to young, fertile humans. Those of us who have already done our bit to perpetuate the species are (so goes one theory) marked by our reproductive status. Spread the genes around! Impregnate someone fresh!

I'd like to think that I am still attractive, but I do not look the same as I did. And my low rise jeans struggle to contain that flappy bit of stretched stomach skin that marks how enormous I got. My bras have to be slightly more industrial strength lest my breasts catch in my fly. My clothes are often selected more for function than brute cuteness and I can't tell you how many pairs of trousers I've worn through at the knees in the last six years.

I still struggle myself with wanting to be hip, wonderful and interesting. I hate and resent that sometimes I get shelved simply because I am a mother, that people think my interests will be limited, my conversation dull and my butt flabby. On the other hand, I don't think that I am likely to ever wear a bikini again -- and I am not about to hold that up as a goal of motherhood.

What I want is to come to a place of respect for my body and what it can do and what it has done, rather than simply for how it looks. I would love my mother body to inspire respect and love and even desire. But how my jeans fit is not a mark of how sexy I am. To find that out, you'd have to take them off. And all jeans look the same crumpled up on the floor.

NaNoWriMo thought for the day: Somewhere on the NaNoWriMo site there's a bit that says that participants are freed from housework for the month of November and that someone else has to cook the meals. That ain't gonna happen, and not because Ed's not a good guy but because he's in his own version of NaNoWriMo which is WriBloDisNo (Write the Bloody Dissertation Now). He's also away interviewing somewhere and while I'm rather too happy to give myself cereal for supper every night, I'm not up to surviving the guilt of doing that to the children. So in fact, this is rather good -- this is what being a writer would be like. Life doesn't stop. Dishes need doing and so does the laundry. And still, there must be time to write.