Mary Kenny“The health issues of mothers should, of course, always be addressed. That’s a medical point, and should not be lost on the health providers. Fix it!”, writes Mary Kenny
We didn’t learn a lot about the Old Testament in my schooldays, but we were acquainted with the Book of Genesis, in which Eve is told, after the Fall, “in sorrow shalt thou bring forth children”. I think we got the message that becoming a mother was no picnic. Besides, we’d hear snatches of conversation among the older women who would sit around the fire and swap blow-by-blow accounts of their labours in childbirth.
Pain relief greatly advanced over the course of my life – and incidentally, the pioneering of pain relief in childbirth was almost all done by men – and by the time my generation came to be mothers, we could be pleasantly surprised by the procedure, which (for many of us) was painful but bearable, and amazingly productive: there is no feeling comparable to pushing a baby into the world.
The sorrows often came later, with worry, concern, and distress about the problems our offspring encountered.
But now we have a report which reflects that many Irishwomen still suffer too much over birthing issues. The MAMMI study (Maternal Health and Maternal Morbidity in Ireland) says that mothers are not frequently asked enough about their own health during the birthing process: too many women suffer from post-natal pelvic problems that don’t seem to be addressed, and too many women feel that no one tells them how painful and difficult becoming a mother can be. There is also much focus on the singer Adele, who has spoken about post-natal depression, and a handful of new books about motherhood being miserable and regrettable.
The health issues of mothers should, of course, always be addressed. That’s a medical point, and should not be lost on the health providers. Fix it!
But books like Sarah Fischer’s “The Mother Bliss Lie: Regretting Motherhood” evidently indicate something else: that motherhood has been overly represented as a Disneyfied, pink-and-pastel lifestyle choice, and equal to fatherhood. This, says Fischer, is the big lie. Men don’t go through the same physical problems.
Perhaps a dose of the Old Testament gave us a more realistic warning that motherhood would involve suffering. And that surprise, surprise, in the birthing experience, men and women are indeed different.
Marriage and the monarchy
An interesting report has emerged claiming that as a young woman Princess Anne, Queen Elizabeth’s daughter, was very much in love with Andrew Parker Bowles. But since he was a Roman Catholic, she couldn’t marry him. And thus it came about that Parker Bowles married Camilla Shand, instead of HRH Anne.
As we know, after a divorce Camilla Parker Bowles subsequently married Anne’s brother, Charles, Prince of Wales, and is now the Duchess of Cornwall. And if nature takes its normal course, Camilla will eventually succeed to the title of queen consort.
If the rules hadn’t prohibited Catholics from marrying directly into the British royal family, Andrew Parker Bowles might have married Anne, and Camilla might have married Charles first time around.
There is still a constituency in Britain which remains loyal to Princess Diana, and does not quite accept Camilla, or forgive Charles for the adultery to which he openly admitted. However, “judge not that ye be not judged” comes to mind.
Camilla’s character has one noted trait. According to Gyles Brandreth, a royal biographer, she is hopelessly untidy. “Her bedroom looked like a bomb hit it,” he said of her younger days. Camilla “has this inability to hang anything up on a hanger. She also has “an aversion to cleaning fluids” and “the state of the bathroom” when she leaves it is something else.
Sounds just like my home life!
Election buzz-words
As voting day arrived for the American presidential election, I heard someone say: “I don’t want Donald Trump to win, but I do want to give The Brahmins a big shock.”
“The Brahmins,” I gather, is the buzz-word for the elites, the poshies, the liberal plutocrats who seem to run everything. It’s taken, not from the Indian ‘Brahmin’ high caste, but from their American equivalents ‘the Boston Brahmins’ – those WASPS who once ruled New England.
By the time this appears in print, we shall know whether the latter-day Brahmins have had a big shock – or even a medium one?