Return of the Rings
That chapter of our lives was finally brought to a close with the passing of the same-sex marriage act in July. Sue and I had taken our rings off when the judge said we didn’t have a marriage, because we didn’t want to pretend that we did if it wasn’t legal. The legislation came into force last week – and new marriages can take place from 29 March – and we escaped to the pub in the country on Wednesday night. One minute after midnight we popped a bottle of champagne and put our rings back on. It was quite lovely. It was a moment that was both personally important but also important for us as activists. In my lifetime homosexuality had been defined as an illness and it no longer is. Marriage was really the last bastion of inequality in the law for gay people in this country.
Equal At Last
I teach sociology at York University, and my students, along with friends and family, have been supportive and congratulatory. My students have been coming in with their essays saying, ‘Ooh, you’re going to be married this week.’ Many of the students are from other countries and some are lesbian and gay. For some of them there is huge discrimination. We’ve had some very kind emails from students saying, ‘Thank you for doing this.’ We’ve had practically no opposition this time. The whole of my personal life and academic career has been shaped by the inequality to which I have been subject because I am a lesbian and have always been out as a lesbian. Now that my marriage to Sue is legally recognised, I can get on with my life and simply be an ordinary equal citizen along with everyone else.
All My Daughters
My daughter Nell makes wonderful sculptures, and she and I delight in colour, shape and construction, expressing joy through clay and paint. Only one daughter, Tess, had children. But many lesbians have children too, and many heterosexual women don’t. So the question I was constantly being asked – ‘Don’t I want more grandchildren?’ – was irrelevant.
I focused on childbirth, took the ‘personal’ and made it ‘political’, challenging accepted norms and practices around birth in much the same way that Celia and other feminist daughters did about women’s relationships with men personally, politically and legally, and as my mother did in opposing male power that promoted violence and war.
It is exciting to work with my daughters, to share ideals, have my mind stretched by their insights, their searching questions, research and protest in a culture that, like others around the world, where individuals are slotted into place with assumptions about social class, gender, race and education. Polly led the way with her work for Rape Crisis.
Celia and Jenny have explored birth and have gone on to examine the other great life transition – death, making Advance Decisions and having rights in that part of the journey of life that none of us can escape. Understanding how culture shapes the major transitions in life, and similarities between patterns of birth and dying, impels us to think how we can make informed decisions about experiences when we may not be able to voice our concerns because we do not have full capacity. This is not only informed decisions, either, but informed refusals. After Polly’s dreadful car crash she was was subject to a series of interventions to save her life, severely brain-damaged with no choice about whether or not this happened. This led to Jenny and Celia’s study and a campaign for making legally effective Advanced Decisions, so that each of us can state ahead of time how we must be treated.
In an online resource dedicated to Polly and inspired by her work Jenny and Celia recorded the experience of 65 people whose loved ones were in a vegetative or minimally conscious state. Topics included hope, care, treatment, making decisions, impact on family and reflections.94
Jenny is a Professor of Media Studies at Cardiff University, and raises a lot of money for research.
They have also curated what they called a ‘Death Festival’ but which they renamed ‘Before I Die’ because of objections from some of those who might attend. It is about powers of attorney, organ donation, and other decisions to make before death.
Jenny and Celia write academic articles and seek to influence policy and public debate about how treatment decisions are taken on behalf of those who have lost the ability to decide for themselves.
This is something which is also important to us as a family. Jenny went to court to apply to become a welfare deputy for Polly – to ensure someone could represent her more effectively in day-to-day decisions about her care and Tess is utterly committed to practical issues relating to and helping Polly who is now fully conscious, but severely brain injured, and needs round the clock care in a neurological centre.
Vegetarian Hurdles
I became a vegetarian when I was nine years old and decided I did not want to cause unnecessary suffering to any living creatures. I announced that in future I would eat eggs and cheese, but not meat and fish. It was difficult for my mother, who hated fussing about meals and disliked cooking. So she relied on feeding me canned baked beans, with cheese when rations allowed it, and green vegetables and eggs when the chickens from the farm around the corner were laying and there were some spare. Father was a great cook in his family’s Scottish tradition, but the dishes were limited. He made very good porridge and scrumptious potato scones.
Self Image In Pregnancy
In the 70s there was not much discussion about nutrition in pregnancy. You were supposed to have a ‘good’ diet, and that was it. Teaching at NCT headquarters and in my house just outside Oxford, I encountered stars, celebs and women famous for their achievements.
One of the most glamorous who came to me when she was expecting her baby was a model whose pregnancy clothes were gorgeous, created especially for her by a top designer. The other women in the group were goggle-eyed! Her image was so important that she was determined to stay as slim as possible and dieted strictly. She ate almost exclusively ‘health foods’ that were rich in vitamins and minerals, but was in fact starving herself. This worried her mother, who rang me.
The model’s partner, a well-known fashion photographer, was anxious about the setting into which she was introducing her baby. The bedroom, she told me, was dramatic, dark, with isolated pools of light – not the kind of cuddly, soft pastel setting which most expectant mothers plan as a nest for their babies. I told her it sounded different, but was OK.
Perhaps I should have taken this as an opportunity to explore pregnancy and motherhood in terms of artistic expression. What is in the eyes of the beholder? What images are being projected? I failed to do that. Her baby was born prematurely and needed special care. And there were some worrying weeks in which it was not known whether she would survive. That baby is now a well-known photographer herself.
I learned from this experience. Pregnancy is also about the presentation of self. It can be very difficult for a woman whose self-esteem depends on the way she looks. With women and couples I explore feelings about the pregnant body – positive as well as negative emotions, and this always leads to lively, in-depth discussion.
Vegetarian Pregnancy
I enjoyed four vegetarian pregnancies (one with twins) and had easy, happy births. In spite of the warnings often given to women that vegetarian food may not provide essential vitamins and minerals in pregnancy, there seems to be no single ideal diet for pregnancy – and vegetarians don’t have to eat special foods or take vitamin and mineral supplements unless their nutrition misses out on vital elements. Inuit women eat fish and whale blubber in pregnancy, African women millet and vegetables, Indian women rice, curry and ghee and Japanese women raw fish and tofu. Though their diets are very different, they all live on whole, fresh food which their bodies can make use of to build the cells of new life.
In spite of warnings that vegetarians are at risk of malnutrition from insufficient protein, vitamin B12, iron and calcium, a vegetarian diet can either be very good or very bad.
In the 70s a study was done of the nutrition of pregnant women and breastfeeding mothers on The Farm in Tennessee, a spiritual community whose members were vegan (but nowadays many ar
e lacto-vegetarian). It is where the world famous midwife, my friend Ina May Gaskin, demonstrates her skills to visiting midwives from many countries, and where she wrote the book Spiritual Midwifery. That research revealed that women were found low in vitamin B12 and many were anaemic, so they were advised to fortify the soya milk they drank every day with vitamin B12 and to take supplementary iron and calcium. Another study compared mothers and children at The Farm with the general American population and revealed that The Farm women put on more weight during pregnancy, very few had pre-term babies, and only one woman out of 143 developed pre-eclampsia (a disease in which blood pressure is raised, fluid is retained under the skin, a woman puts on a lot of weight and the placenta is at risk of malfunction). Their babies weighed as much or more at birth and grew as well or faster than children generally. In fact, in each additional year that a woman had been a vegan, her baby’s birth weight went up by 42 grams. The researchers concluded that a diet without animal protein is fine for pregnancy.
A cheese and egg-eating vegetarian, I enjoy my meals. Uwe eats fish and meat and chews away at dead bodies with relish, and frequent lip smacking comments about how good it is. It can put me off my food.
Sticking to being a vegetarian with good humour is not simple. On holiday in Normandy a distinguished chef, to whom we had travelled some distance, felt insulted by me asking if there was anything vegetarian on the menu, refused to serve either me or Uwe and turned us both off the premises.
In Taroudant, Morocco, we had a gorgeous holiday, but it was hard for me to get anything to eat except tossed salad. At one meal a concerned stranger at the next table intervened and tried to negotiate on my behalf. He sent a message to the chef and went into the kitchen to show him what he could do. But to no avail. It was Antonio Carluccio – one of the most exciting cooks of the age!
It has got easier over the years, but restaurateurs may still try to coax me to eat fish, ‘or try a few thin slices of ham’, and I often have to share a board of which only one ingredient is vegetarian.
In supermarkets it is important to read the small print, which is often minute for those whose sight is deteriorating, to detect animal gelatin, whey products, flavourings and other ingredients.
In delicatessens, assistants who may have just left school are inadequately supervised, do not know the ingredients, and often cannot find out from the kitchen, haven’t a clue about what is in anything, or how to find an alternative, and go off poking along the shelves. So it’s better to be safe than sorry.
The horse meat scandal triggered alarm about what is hidden in our food. It was a symptom of a larger challenge. Restaurants, cafeterias, supermarkets and delicatessens should be aware of what is in the food they offer and from where it comes, avoid discrimination against those with specific food wishes, whether this is based on health needs or stems from religion, social culture or personal conviction, and get their act together.
Vegetarian Gourmet
In TV programmes about culinary competition cooks and chefs refer to family recipes and childhood memories. They present ‘my Mum’s recipe’, ‘what I learned from my Nana’, ‘Godmother’ or ‘Grandpa’ and with trembling hands, gasps, moans, wows – sometimes weeping and often with ecstasy – offer dishes inherited from beloved relatives.
Nothing could be further from my own experience. Mother hated cooking, despised it, and didn’t want me ‘wasting time and energy’ on what she saw as a trivial activity imposed on women. She said sternly, ‘We eat to live. We shouldn’t live to eat.’ She thought a daughter ought to be doing other things – not be trapped in the kitchen. So I never learnt to cook.
Some time during the 80s I worked out that I must have cooked 11,648 meals since I got married, and that does not take into account gooey delights for babies, toddlers’ specials or the party where 60 people mill about chewing and slurping. For much of the time each meal was for seven people – all vegetarian except for a carnivorous husband.
Of course there was willing assistance: five pairs of eager little hands helping to knead and bake bread. Bread-making is much more fun as a communal activity, even if a fair quantity gets trodden in the coconut matting. Drop scones on my grandmother’s Scottish griddle were quick and easy and there was the excitement of watching the bubbles come up and deftly flipping them over. And brushing the griddle with a flour-dipped feather to see if it was hot enough to flop on potato scones.
My basic educational principle was that my five daughters should learn how to do domestic tasks when they were very young, so they didn’t have to think about them later when they had important things to do. We had a dreaded rota system which never worked and was the cause of constant quarrels. The first choice on the rota went to the first one up in the morning. In the early hours, my time for writing, I often tripped over a drowsy child sleeping outside our bedroom door, determined to be first.
Three-year-olds can be quite good at stacking the dishwasher. It is a far more sophisticated educational apparatus than all those shapes that are supposed to slot into each other at nursery school, even if the china does get chipped. The girls did not share my principles though and as they got older, acted as if they were a squad of slave labour.
I went in for ‘good nutrition’ in a big way, wholemeal everything, kelp in the soup, wheatgerm thick on the muesli – which was proper Bircher-Benner style with lots of apples. This was interspersed, however, with phases of scrambled eggs, baked beans, and rice puddings straight out of a can, when time refused to be squeezed any further.
But I’m glad I don’t have to make three meals a day any more. It’s not just the cooking but the whole business of preparing food, clearing away, washing pans, planning ahead, making lists, checking what’s in the fridge and the cupboards and the freezer, the trek through the supermarket and the limbo of waiting to get through check-out and then heaving the stuff into the boot of the car and heaving it out again. A repetitive, exhausting kind of servitude in which women are trapped day in day out, because that’s what mothers are supposed to do. (Men help when they can, of course.)
In traditional cultures women did not question this role, but they were not alone with such tasks. They did them in the company of other women. I’ve seen Caribbean women enjoying tedious things like shelling nuts or coffee beans, or stirring food in a big pot over the fire, while they talk, exchange news and laugh together, shooing away the chickens, nursing the babies and sharing out the chores. Compared to that, most women in the West are isolated from each other, each on her own treadmill.
Someone once told me that the Chinese symbol for war depicts two women in a kitchen (which, though funny, turns out not to be true). And it depends whether you believe it is your kitchen, your territory which is being invaded by an alien (and there are women who feel like that) or whether you think of it as a place for communal shared activity. The idea of a woman owning a kitchen is ludicrous in our society. It is more appropriate to a Greek village. But woman as queen of the kitchen is a convenient fiction by which men can ensure that they are fed regularly and looked after with minimal effort on their part.
Politics apart, I enjoy cooking with one or several daughters talking all the time, and ‘oohing’ and ‘aahing’ over the results. And I like best cooking festive food – not the usual festive dishes, though, but ones which remind me of special places and those kinds of gustatory experiences which come completely unexpected for any vegetarian on holiday who is anticipating yet another dreary mushroom risotto, omelette, vinegary mixed salad or boiled vegetables minus sauce and herbs.
There was the time, for example, when we discovered morilles, the convoluted black fungi which, I think, taste better than truffles. We were driving south from Strasbourg, where we were living then, and found a hotel in the little town of Arbois, nestling in the Jura, all twinkling lights, old oak beams and menus with mushrooms galore! Morilles remained a rare luxury until I was lecturing in Finland, when I found that the Finns enjoy them like any other mushroom and import
dried morilles in vast quantities from Eastern Europe. Since then, the president of the Finnish midwives thrusts a box at me whenever we meet. They are gorgeous in an oniony, spicy cream sauce, either with toast or stuffed inside vol-au-vents. A touch of lemon juice and Madeira added at the last minute draws out their splendid flavour.
One year we were sailing with the children in the South of France and, arriving at the old harbour of Antibes, decided to eat out. We climbed the steps leading to the centre and came on a scene of bustling conviviality. Everyone was eating in the open at long tables which filled the square. We found a space and I told the waiter that the girls and I ate no meat or fish. Instead of the horror with which this information is often greeted, our waiter said that we must have soup. Well, soup and bread would fill our stomachs but it wasn’t very exciting. And then he came up bearing huge white tureens and I tasted for the first time pistou soup. It was marvellous! It was unforgettable: mingled onions, courgettes, tomatoes, green beans and the magic of pistou sauce – ground pine kernels, garlic, Parmesan cheese and loads of fresh basil.
Lecturing at a conference of Italian obstetricians in Bologna, a doctor who had invited me out to dinner said rather ominously, on hearing that I was vegetarian, ‘I shall take you to the place of goats. It is an inn up in the mountains.’ He explained. ‘They are friends of mine and I will order in advance a menu for you based on goat milk and cheese.’ That was how I got to taste for the first time the pungent flavour of grilled goat’s cheese.
Claude Giraud in Narbonne was one of the few chefs in Languedoc to have earned a Michelin star. Every year, with good warning, he produced a special menu for me. One dish was stuffed courgette flowers – baby courgettes with the blossom still attached, transformed into cheesy parcels. Delicious! But you have to grow your own courgettes or have a friendly nursery gardener nearby.
A Passion for Birth Page 42