OPINION:Good on the matrons of south Co Dublin in choosing to have big families, and good luck to Peaches Geldof in this strange adult world, writes ANTHEA McTEIRNAN
‘A TRUE OMG moment everyone – Peaches Geldof is going to be responsible for another human being, as she has revealed she is pregnant.”
A truly significant moment everyone – from US news blog the Huffington Post.
Hold the (virtual) front page – a 22-year-old woman is having a baby.
Good on you, Peaches. Strike while the iron is hot and the eggs are popping. After all, what is the problem with a well-educated young woman with an up-for-it partner and a supportive extended family having a baby?
"We've just bought a beautiful three-bed Victorian house in London," Peaches told the Sunday Mirror. "I've spent the whole of today trying to sort getting a mortgage – it's such adult territory! I can't wait to start decorating it and I'm obsessed with buying vintage sofas off eBay for £200. I'm just a really happy girl."
Look, I’ll admit the vintage sofa thing is annoying when a mattress on an industrial wooden pallett was the extent of my soft furnishings at the age of 22. But Peaches is only trying to prove to all the doubting Huffingtons she’s taking the mothering thing seriously.
She’s 22. She’s got a bit of cash. It will be good. Peaches and baby father Tom Cohen are going to love it.
Admittedly, the "British party girl" (copyright: New York Post) has not been top of my Christmas card list since she became an underwear model for Miss Ultimo. Did Peaches need either the cash or the exposure? But none of my knee-jerk Peaches prejudices have anything to do with thinking that becoming a mum at 23 is weird.
Becoming a mum at 23 is actually pretty biologically optimal. Becoming a mum at 39, like Arianna Huffington did, is, OMG, not.
Last week, writing in this newspaper, journalist and author Victoria White managed to raise quite a few of my hackles with her erudite description of yummy mummies in an affluent Dublin suburb.
“She is a tall, slim, gorgeous 40-something. Career? She’s done that. She spent her 20s and much of her 30s building a successful business but now she’s stepped back from it for a while. To have babies. She’s doing motherhood on her own terms, the way retired male chief executives do golf.”
White lit the blue touch paper and hopefully stood well back from her depiction of beautiful, wealthy, straight-haired, leggy ladies shouting their fecundity to the redbrick rooftops by pushing Bugaboos laden with their offspring through streets heaving with delicatessens. The sparks definitely flew.
White cautioned the more uncharitable of us from thinking uncharitable thoughts about our better-dressed sisters. They are part of a phenomenon that deserves the charity of consideration, she said.
Like Arianna, these women have put their shoulders to the corporate wheel as they moved from class prefect to head girl to student union rep to busy executive. Job done. Ladder climbed. House in Ranelagh. They have also helped to make the older Irish mother the most productive in the EU.But as White points out, these women are the lucky ones. Fertility decreases with age. It’s a choice some women may never get to make.
Peaches is making it, though. Some of us do. We have access to contraception and even to abortion (turn right at Dún Laoghaire) and have no problem with either. But, sometimes, only a baby will do.
It may be time to let young women know it’s not so bad having a baby in your early 20s. (If you want to, that is!) It’s hard work, sure. Your sofa might be a mattress on an industrial pallet. You will wrestle with sceptical employers, tricky childcare situations and abject fatigue.
You will endeavour to make sure your kids see the personal is political and mum and dad are trying their hardest to share everything, and you will all grow up together.
They will see you study, work anti-social hours, drop off on the couch, burn the tea and have “heated debates”, but they will also see you trying to get into a better situation. It’s not a bad lesson to learn.
It is not so bad having a baby when you are still crawling out of your own childhood. My own childish pregnancy craving for those 10 cent toffee lollies might have scared the people at the Huffington Post. After all I was about to be "responsible for another human being", but it wasn't so bad.
Unlike White, I totally buy what the feminists of the 1970s were trying to do for me. Women such as poet and feminist Adrienne Rich were quite careful to differentiate between opposing a systemic patriarchal need to keep woman barefoot, pregnant and holding the baby, and women’s actual experience of mothering. Rich was clear that motherhood does not equal oppression. And it doesn’t. Motherhood’s the fun part. It’s just a shame so many women have to wait so long to find out.
Also, it is just plain unfair to say feminists didn’t notice women love being mothers, or that their main motivation in the fight to control their fertility was to “progress in their careers”. Actually, the gift brilliant women such as Mary Robinson were trying to give us in the 1970s was the basic human right to have control over our own bodies. Their primary motivation was not to get women into the workplace and get them a company car.
And though I am told some women do now have company cars, no woman on this island has control over her own body. (If you have any spare time on your hands, Mary . . . )
Good on the matrons of south Co Dublin, for having the economic right to choose to have big families. It’s not open to everyone. And good luck to Peaches Geldof and little Peaches as they grow up together.
“It’s such strange, adult territory,” Peaches said last week. She wasn’t talking about becoming a mum, she was talking about buying a house. Now, at 22, that is weird.