An Open Letter to a Celeb Sancto-Dad
Jamie Oliver has just announced that his wife, Jules, is pregnant with his fifth child. He’s also decided that, because he successfully managed to get Turkey Twizzlers banned from school canteens, encouraged the price of sugary drinks to go up and helped the poor make meals out of leftovers, he now has the right to tell mums what to do with their babies and their bodies. Bad move, Jamie… Really bad move.
Dear Jamie
Congratulations, I just heard that you have your fifth child on the way. I’m presuming that it’s your wife who is pregnant again, and not you? Only I also heard that you are starting a pro-breast feeding campaign and I’m confused. We all know you are a Messiah and you have the golden touch when it comes to speaking on behalf of ‘the common people’ so therefore I presumed that your God-like magic has this time enabled you to carry a baby and you are now perfectly equipped to speak on behalf of mothers.
Oh, the baby isn’t growing inside of YOU? Okay, then stand down for a minute and listen.
You seem like a nice bloke. I liked you from the start. You were cheeky and fun and one of us. You’ve been with Jules for years and you may even be the only ‘celeb dad’ to keep it in his pants long enough to make us women respect you. You genuinely seem to care about kids and you seem to be a great dad too. So far so good.
Mums like me loved that you attacked the government about bad quality, cheap school dinners because you were fighting for our kids – well done. And I liked the fact you were educating us about the dangers of sugar and getting food manufacturers to listen up, because you were caring about our kids again – well done. But now you’ve got personal, now you’re not fighting for the kids and alongside the mums, you are fighting against mums. You’re fighting against the many mothers that can’t or won’t breastfeed… and you’re driving our guilt-edged sword deeper into our insecure hearts. That’s not good. That makes you a cock.
I know you have lots of kids and a wife who looks like she loves being a mum so you probably think you know everything there is about carrying, birthing, feeding and raising a baby. Well you know nothing, Jamie. Because if you knew anything at all, then you’d know that if you want to truly help a mother you need to do two things: give her confidence in her own abilities and give her choice.
Let me explain to you how it is for some women (because I’m guessing you only have Jules as an example of motherhood, and she’s pretty exceptional at it).
We find out we’re pregnant and it’s scary. Exciting but scary, and the guilt starts… along with the good intentions. We Google until our fingers are numb and we know, before our child is nothing more than a speck with a heartbeat, what we should and shouldn’t eat; what we can and can’t do to help us reach that much coveted 40th week of pregnancy. We know that breastfeeding is best and we know that we should aim for a drug-free vaginal birth. We know what scans to get and we know what vitamins to take. We are mothers before anyone even notices our bumps, we already know what is best for our baby. Our bodies swell and our breasts tingle. We itch, we ache, our nipples leak and we may be sick, hospitalised, or even running marathons… but we still know what’s best for our baby.
Then we give birth. For some it’s easy, for some it’s a petrifying massacre, for some it nearly costs them their life. We do what we have to do to get through it, our four page birthing plan gets forgotten and the guilt begins again because we’ve begged for an epidural or we’ve had to accept an emergency C-section. We may not get the birth we wanted, but we still want to breastfeed because we know it’s the right thing to do.
Then the baby arrives. Maybe that baby latches on and it’s all plain sailing. Maybe it doesn’t. Maybe we spend ten hours in our hospital bed alone and scared, exhausted after giving birth, wondering why our baby is screaming, why the baby won’t drink. We have failed and we haven’t even started. Maybe the nurses have helped us and told us it takes time and we have to keep trying. We’ve gone home… our vaginas stinging and sore from the stitches, our knickers stained from all the blood we are still losing and our body shaking with pure exertion because after three days we still haven’t slept… but we’re still trying.
We are still trying to feed our baby the way mother nature intended for us to. But maybe we just can’t. The baby has cried all night and we’ve been crying all day, our partner can’t help, our body is not participating, the baby is losing weight and the health authorities keep telling us what is best for baby and to keep going. Best for baby. Best for baby. Baby is crying, mummy is crying, the formula is sitting there, daddy wants to help. But we do what’s best for baby. Until the doctor decides that our child needs to eat – there is no moral victory in a starving baby.
According to what is best for baby, we’ve failed. We’re a shit mum because our baby doesn’t want our milk. Our body has let us down. Our baby has rejected us. We’re useless.
Don’t be naive, Jamie. Mothers around the world know that breast is best. That’s a fact, but that doesn’t mean it has to be the only sociably accepted way to feed a baby. Nobody wants to spend a fortune on formula milk when breast milk is free. No woman keeps their boobs under wraps because they just can’t be arsed to breastfeed or they don’t care about their child.
That woman giving a bottle to her baby on the park bench? The one that you are telling us should be publicly breastfeeding and not poisoning her newborn with powdered milk?
She adopted that baby last week, she has no breast milk.
Or she had a mastectomy last year, she has no breasts.
Perhaps the baby was born premature and was too small to breast feed; and the mother was too ill to pump and her milk dried up.
Maybe she takes medication that keeps her from committing suicide on a daily basis and reasons that bottle feeding her baby is better than killing herself.
Perhaps the milk in the bottle is breast milk.
What if she was raped and abused since she was seven years old and can’t let anything, anyone, touch her breasts?
Or she tried and tried and tried to breastfeed until her nipples cracked and baby was drinking her blood and the world caved in and she was told she was starving her child as there was still too little milk and everyone was screaming ‘just give him a fucking bottle‘?
Maybe she’s a single mum and had to go back to work and needed someone else to feed her baby (does Jules need to go back to work, Jamie? Or does she have the time, the money and the luxury of giving herself 100% to her baby?). What if this woman cried for weeks about giving up breastfeeding, savouring every last feed until she had to pluck her screaming baby away from her milky breasts and go back to work so that there was food on the table?
Maybe she’s combination feeding – that’s a viable option too you know – and that baby gets breast every morning and evening because it’s not practical in the day.
Or maybe she just doesn’t want to do it. Because it’s not right for her life, for the baby’s life or for her circumstances. Because she lives in a country where she has the right to choose.
Jamie, it’s none of your, or anyone’s, bloody business how a woman chooses to feed her baby.
So your campaign isn’t actually supporting breastfeeding mothers, it’s giving mums that need another option feel like failures. You are passing judgement on women at a time when they are at their most vulnerable. When they are tearful with sleep deprivation, wracked with guilt, desperate to prove to the world that they are good mums, whose bodies and minds haven’t yet recovered from the onslaught that is pregnancy, birth and living with a newborn.
Well let me tell you some other facts, because it’s not often men and fathers are judged or made to feel guilty:
-It’s a fact that fathers who work away a lot and don’t see their children every day will have a worse relationship with their kids than stay-at-home fathers. Are you at home every weekend and every bed time, Jamie? No, you are out there saving the world. Does that make you a shit Dad? No it doesn’t.
-It’s a fact that giving your child a daft name will encourage bullying and lower their self esteem. Do you know many human rights lawyers or neurosurgeons called Buddy Bear? No. Does that make you and your wife bad parents? No.
-It’s a fact that being a celebrity parent heightens the risk of your children being hounded by the press when they are older. They are more likely to get addicted to drink and drugs from a young age, in fact celebrity children have a higher risk of mental health issues, depression and suicide than other young adults. Will that happen to your kids? I doubt it. You are good parents.
Well so are we.
Mothers love their children, whether they bottle feed or breastfeed. Whether they put their kids in a sling or a pushchair. Whether they spend all day creating three course organic meals or take them to the nearest cafe.
Your new campaign isn’t going to help anyone. It’s sanctimonious, it’s divisive and it’s cruel. More than that it’s dangerous and it’s going to undo all of your hard work and the great PR that you have cultivated for your brand over the last twenty years.
So one word of advice, Jamie. One that applies to every man that has never given birth, or anyone that has an opinion about the choices a mother makes for her kids. Concentrate on your own family and leave people to do what the fuck they want to do. We have a brain, we can make our own decisions and we are doing our best.
Because we love our children too.
