An honest account of motherly anger? About time.

Film-maker Julia Black, a BAFTA and Grierson nominated independent documentary maker, is making a film about motherly anger. As a mother of two, she is interested in shifting the taboo that surrounds a mother's anger towards her child or children and wishes to research into how many mothers, like her, have been shocked by the level of anger they experience.

Please take a few minutes to fill in this online questionnaire. All answers are entirely anonymous and cannot be traced to your e-mail address.

www.survey.ingenious2.co.uk

I did it, and it can be done in ten minutes or so. There's also room for the more loquacious of us to comment at the end which was nice (for me anyway!).

I love this sentence...

...from an old essay:

Deleuze and Guattari state that “The problem of philosophy is to acquire a consistency without losing the infinite into which thought plunges.” (p 42). It is the conceptual persona that drinks from the infinite and vomits possibilities onto the philosopher's page. They are the explorers, the provocateurs and engineers of thought, the part of the philosopher that ventures into the new, awake while the remainder wallows in dogma anaesthetic. This aspect of the creative process is a necessary part of thought and thus for Deleuze and Guattari's philosophical ontology, indispensable.

...and I can't help wondering where all of my conceptual personae have got to :(

In support of Ken McLeod's complaint against the AVN

Better late than never I guess...

To whom it may concern,

I write to support Ken McLeod's complaint against the Australian Vaccination Network. I found AVN after a rather heated discussion with friends about vaccination and was so appalled at the misinformation on the AVN's website that I wrote two lengthy blog posts calling them out on their errors.

http://emervents.blogspot.com/2009/05/thinking-about-vaccines-thinking-of.html

http://emervents.blogspot.com/2009/06/critique-of-avns-10-reasons-to-think.html

I have two degrees, one of them in science, and sometimes I use my advantages (education and access to university resources) to call out organisations who would seek to sway the public with, if I'm kind, mistakes and outdated information.

In summary, the AVN use information that is often outdated, cherry picked, or just plain erroneous, and I think that it is of grave concern that well meaning parents might use their information as a basis for an important decision regarding their children's health.

Please keep in mind that these are blog posts, the tone is meant to be conversational and sometimes acrimonious (I get grumpy when tired). Nonetheless, the second one especially should give a clear indication of the kinds of untruths the AVN are happy to have parents believe. I am not happy about it at all. Hence this letter of support for Ken McLeod's complaint.

Brief birth language...

Quite often when an unusual birth story hits the news you'll read about the hero civilian (or other non-medico) delivering the baby as though the mother was so much chopped liver. Nice to see a news article getting the labour the right way around for once!

What do I want?

Good food, good drink, to be warm in winter and not too hot in summer, to have moral, well-rounded and content children, to have a small circle of good friends who get my jokes, a devoted partner who can make me laugh even in my blackest moods, a vegetable garden and to figure out what makes humans, well, human. I want to have all this while living in an equitable society.

I’ve very nearly got them all. Australia is slowly getting there. I haven’t planted anything this year but planning to be raring to go for autumn and the 3yo is slowly getting the all important “Do unto others” maxim. It’s the penultimate one that’s going to be the corker. What makes humans human? What are humans anyway? What are we? WHO are we? What on earth are we for? and most importantly (for me anyway), how do we work?

I’ve done a science degree majoring in biological molecules, I’ve explored the world of plants, microbes, insects, reptiles and mammals and it still amazes me that something as complex as an ant could emerge from an exquisitely organised cluster of molecules let alone a thinking, feeling, acting human being capable of immense wonders, dire atrocities and love that makes my heart flip every time I encounter it.

When I crumble homemade compost through my fingers I wonder: how can we be made from essentially the same stuff as this? It is naught but luck that some of the carrots in our house turned into compost and some into human via hungry kiddie tummies. No wonder people invented a divine creator (apologies to those who don’t think the creator was an invention) - something to stop the wondering that could drive most men mad. Fortunately for me I’m not most men (I don’t envy them their genitalia to be honest and seriously, if there is a creator, I think they’ve got some explaining to do in that area) but the question is driving me mad. Not because I don’t like the wonder, but because (despite my husbands Herculean efforts) I get to spend so little time devoted to it.

Parents simply don’t get to swim in entrancing questions the way people can when they do not have caring commitments. And when the question is one of human consciousness, there’s a great deal of swimming needs to be done. So what do I want? I don’t want a Nanny, I like my children most of the time and they need their parent around. Maybe I’d like an extra 72 hours a week just for me. Yep, that’s what I want. A little speedy time capsule so I could nab an extra 72 hours while the others slept. I might age a little faster than my husband, I might use some of those extra hours for sleeping, who knows? The point is they would be just for me. Some guilt-free hours just for me, that’s what I really want.

How to approach women in public 101

One day, a long long time ago, in a galaxy far far away when I worked in science.... a bunch of girls and one bloke were sitting in the tea room talking about self defence. We talked about the general differences between men and women, strength, centre of gravity, and vulnerable body bits. Each contributed something: knowing when to run, how to fight when cornered, what to yell (FIRE!) and how to defend yourself with a pencil or a set of keys.

The one bloke listened with his mouth agape, "You girls have REALLY thought about this haven't you?"

Well, yes, we have. Because we have to, because every strange bloke we meet might be a strange assaulter. Men are generally so much stronger than women it's almost obscene, we have to think about our safety all the time. That's life.

This excellent post, Schrodinger's Rapist, sums up why we girls might treat really nice men like they're lepers if they approach us in public. It's a beautiful job, reasonable and non-hackle-raising. Essential reading for any bloke still looking for Ms Right.