Sperm Donor Adventures: the second installment
(c) Melina Magdalena (2007)
By consulting my dictionary for accepted usage of words, I am not trying to deny anyone's realities. There is no doubt that the odd exception not only exists, but functions very well. This blog is my private indulgence. What I write here reflects my reality, my experience, my creation and my world.
In accepting the dictionary's offerings, I don't mean that the dictionary reflects anyone's reality. (Don't take the dictionary's word for it!) Language is alive and dynamic – we language users twist and transform the words we use, in order to suit our purposes and express our worlds. We are creators of language.
Furthermore, placing limits around what is acceptable to me does not mean I am placing the same restrictions on anyone else's life or reality. I further reserve the right to expand my boundaries or rein them in, as necessary.
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There’s a terrible irony in my quest to have another baby by finding a man who is willing to donate sperm for this purpose. Women who have sex with men fall pregnant accidentally more often than they fall pregnant having planned to do so! Having fallen pregnant, they deal with the consequences after the fact, rather than with intention. This is nothing new, and I don’t point this out in order to disparage women in this situation. After all, that’s how I got my first two children.
I heard this weekend a terrible tale of a heterosexual couple in contemporary compassionate Australia, who bore a second child in order to get the government's baby bonus. They then refused to feed the child, which almost perished from neglect and starvation. Alerted to the baby's plight, a social worker removed it along with its older sibling. The two have now been placed in the care of their grandparents. I know other members of this family, and have no reason to doubt the story’s validity.
This tale was told to me hot on the heels of my interest in a newspaper photograph, which depicted a welfare (single) mother and her five offspring sitting outside their home, having been evicted for accruing a (public housing) rental debt in the order of $10,000. Clearly, there’s more to this story than the fact that when the mother was in hospital to be treated for pregnancy complications with her fifth child, her children’s father moved into the home and failed to pay his portion of the rent that he owed, as an additional adult tenant.
This story was presented to me as another example of welfare cheats, and isn’t good that they get caught sometimes? The kinds of questions that were asked included
- Was that the father of all her children?
- Did he not live with them just so that she could get the pension?
- Why didn’t she get a job instead of depending on government support?
- Why did she have five children if she couldn’t afford to pay the rent?
Believe me – the pension is not all it’s cracked up to be! It’s a struggle to survive; a life of constant scraping the bottom of the barrel. Chronic financial stress is not a lazy or easygoing lifestyle choice.
I don’t know this woman’s story. I don’t know why she has five children, or who their father is. I think it was probably a good thing that the man moved in to look after the four that were motherless whilst she was in hospital.
I do know that men and women and children suffer under welfare and public housing regulations. I know of a father who is about to be homeless because he cannot afford the cost of renting a home for himself and his son anywhere in Adelaide these days. He’s sent the boy back to his mother, who already supports their daughter by working full-time. This mother won’t get any extra support for the son who is now also living with her, because he is over the age of eight.
Once upon a time, welfare families were those that depended on handouts in order to survive. When government welfare was extended to all mothers in the form of child endowment, it was partly in recognition of the struggles many women encountered when their spouses refused to contribute sufficiently towards housekeeping for her to clothe and feed their collective children.
This is not a new state of affairs. Some women have always chosen the route of leaving their husbands and going it alone, rather than despairing and bickering over the budget. This doesn’t make it fair on such mothers, that they have incurred sexually transmitted debt by dint of sleeping with men.
After long battles for justice, single mothers were granted additional welfare payments, when they did not get anything from the fathers of their children.
When this occurred, more women chose to turn their backs on the bitter battlegrounds of their marriages. The other side of the coin is what happened to the fathers of their children. There were several kinds of responses. Most common – those who turned their backs on their ex-wives and had little to do with their children; and those who became bitter in their own right because they perceived that women were now getting a better deal.
This generation of men has been succeeded by the fathers’ rights groups, who wage a vicious campaign against the rights of women and mothers. Why should they give money to the women who have stolen their children? Why do the Family Court judges rule in favour of the mothers, and neglect the rights of fathers? Why should they pay lawyers to represent them in the Family Court when they are just trying to defend their human rights?
Notably, the men’s movement never aimed to support fathers in acting upon their collective responsibilities as heads of households. There was no moral campaign to force fathers to change their spending habits, to do more housework, or even to help their children with their homework.
No, the men’s movement complains incessantly about women’s rights, and the disparity of attention awarded to the plight and rights of women, when compared with the attention given to men. Where children are concerned, the men’s movement seeks only to control, regulate and quantify the amount of time that a father should be spending with his offspring.
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These days, Johnny Howard has turned every Australian family into a welfare family. New names, new regulations and new obligations have been imposed upon people who receive child endowment and sole parent pensions. The sole aim of this is to systematically control and regulate Australian families. Provision of the baby bonus is another tool in the package. Behind the scenes are quite sinister objectives
– to punish women who do not bear their children in the correct heterosexual, coupled arrangement and
– to provide less and less income support for families in need
We are told that Australian women are not bearing enough children. Australians are living longer and there are not enough younger Australians to take care of the older Australians. What that means of course, is that Anglo-Celtic or other European Australian women are not having enough children, while other groups (particularly the newest waves of migrants and refugees) are having too many children. So Australian women (if they are of European origins) should have at least three children – one for the mother, one for the father, and one for the country.
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… back to the drawing board ...
It's a curious habit of this era perhaps, to transform nouns into verbs. Maybe it's something that has happened and will continue to happen for time immemorial? But I've definitely noticed a prevalence of this practice in Australia's bureaucratic jargon.
Maybe it's done in the "right" spirit, in order to open up new possibilities for living in the world, and to reflect our changing realities, but it often feels like something being foisted upon us, by grim, determined bureaucrats who believe they know what's best for us, and are intent on delivering that medicine whether we need it or not.
Maybe having initiated such grammatical transformations, the people who make up our society will limp along and eventually catch up with the game?
… for example …
Father
and
Mother
and
Baby
are all people/ nouns/ things/ subjects/ objects
‘to baby’ means to deal with something in the same way that one would treat a baby
‘to mother’ means to behave like a mother
‘to father’ means to contribute the sperm that fertilises an egg which grows into a baby
It may be that these bald meanings have been expanded and transformed. Certainly, in this day and age we consider that there is a little more to fathering than contributing the sperm. However, the remnant of the patriarchal property laws that tell us a wife and children are but chattel to be distributed as per the man’s wishes, mean that when a woman is pregnant, the child she is carrying is invariably referred to as the child of the man whose sperm fertilised her egg.
Even celebrity mothers with their own fortunes and means to raise their children present a problem when it’s not clear which man was responsible for fathering her child. It’s the convention to state that “so and so is pregnant by X”, and that “the baby she is carrying is X’s”.
Imagine if ‘to mother’ meant mainly ‘to contribute the egg which is fertilised by the sperm which grows into a baby? It just doesn’t sound quite right, does it!
But no – fathers are problems in contemporary Australia. No one quite knows their purpose, or what they’re supposed to be doing.
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People jump up and down about those fathers who evade their fiscal responsibilities and fail to pay child support to the mothers of their children.
Women complain that they have to mother their male partners just as much as their children.
Most of us are nowhere near sufficiently liberated to view housekeeping separately from child rearing. The lioness’ share of both falls firmly on the women’s shoulders.
We hear a lot about the plight of fathers who want to spend more time with their children, and about fathers whose rights to be fathers are curtailed because of the selfishness of the mothers who refuse them access to their children.
We hear a lot about the mothers who juggle multiple jobs and a myriad of roles in order to raise their children as well as having lives of their own.
There’s little doubt that mothers are keeping their end of the bargain. We are right to complain of the disparity between the fulfilment of our rights and responsibilities when compared with the fulfilment of the responsibilities and rights of the fathers of our children.
And so the bureaucrats have given us a new word to play with while we try to figure out what we should be doing about fathers: “to parent”.
Personally, I don’t find “parenting” particularly appealing or engaging, although I have become accustomed to using the word. It’s a whitewashed, bland piece of terminology that seeks to remove the blood sweat and tears that are part of the journey of raising a child.
“Parenting” is more of a mechanical process, than a human vocation. It has little to do with family, and dovetails perfectly with the discourse that seeks to control our fertility, and to cause us to procreate only within the strictures of what is declared to be normal in Australian society.
In the past 17 years I have availed myself of training in how to be a parent. In this sense, I use the discourse comfortably. However, when I think about my identity, I still see myself primarily as a mother, raher than as a parent.
