Columnist Naomi Lakritz of the Calgary Herald focuses on women in this column, but the reality is, we can’t have it all and no one, male or female, is entitled to everything he or she wants. Or put differently, you can have it all, just not at the same time. Most unfortunately, we live in a culture where people expect a lot. We can reasonably accommodate families, but there remain some places where babies don’t belong. Like Parliament, for votes, as Naomi points out:
Ladies, the world isn’t going to hand itself to you on a silver platter. It may offer you some things and may make some concessions to your status as mothers, but you’ve got to rise to meet the world halfway. You’ve got to do the rest. And you’ve got to understand and respect the idea that there are some places where babies simply don’t belong. Parliament is one of those places.
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Yup, the answer to everything is a nanny or daycare. There’s no chance the mother might actually not want to be separated from her baby, is there?
Is having a baby just a nice hobby some women like to indulge, or is it a significant enterprise that requires the mother to put that other human being first and to organize her life around its needs? Which means there are going to be some things that a mother with a baby can’t do. But I’m pretty sure there are a lot less of those than society seems to think.
I don’t know about Parliament, but babies can go a lot more places than modern society is willing to let them go. When my daughter was a baby, I breastfed her when I was getting communion from the Bishop during a Mass, and I’m one of those obedient-to-the-pope-and-magisterium Catholics. No rebellion or scandal either offered or taken. So yeah, I bet it’s even been done in front of the Queen before – maybe not in modern days, but certainly in the past, unless poor mothers just never came before the Queen.
Before bottle-feeding began to approach the safety of breastfeeding, keeping moms with the infants was a matter of life or death for the babies of women who didn’t have wet-nurses. So wherever mothers went, you made provision to keep the babies with them or the babies died.
In the bad old days, some places wouldn’t let women in government, so they solved the problem of babies in Parliament / Congress / Court that way. Now they solve the problem by letting women in as long as they don’t take care of their own babies. Which isn’t anything new – it’s the old tried-and-true method used by royalty for millenia.
I’m not sure exactly how much we’ve gained. I can’t think of hardly anything that women haven’t been allowed to do at some times and places in the past, as long as they either didn’t have children or didn’t take care of their own children.
Guess that’s a long way of saying that saying that a woman wanting to be with her baby is neither whining nor trivial, and we should question a society that thinks it is – that it’s just a matter of arranging to have a place for the hand-off. If the parliament can’t accommodate mothers with babies, then maybe mothers with babies shouldn’t be in parliament. And maybe that’s okay.