EXPANDING CONSENT: PART I. Chapter One: My story
EXPANDING CONSENT: PART I. Chapter One: My story
I'm sharing my book on Substack, free to read.
The Introduction is here, and you can find all the chapters, as I release them, under BOOK:Expanding Consent on my homepage.
(Some news: I’ll be recording my chapters, kinda like an audiobook, for my paid subscribers. If you prefer to listen, stay tuned!!)
PART I.
CONSENT IS THE ANTIDOTE
Chapter One: My story
Take me back to 2011
When Phoebe was born, I was 30. I had no experience with children other than having two younger siblings, and looking back I don’t think I was particularly kind or respectful to them growing up. I had tried my hand at babysitting and it wasn’t for me. Perhaps if asked, I may even have told you I didn’t love children, I wasn’t that good with them.
And so, it was no surprise to anyone that I was entirely underprepared for my first child. Sitting in that hospital bed after my emergency C-section, I felt diminished, overwhelmed, terrified.
I felt less like a revolutionary and more like an actress who thought they were playing one character and then realized they were supposed to be playing quite another one, and didn’t know any of their new lines.
And here my baby was, so perfect in every way. She struggled through a not-so-happy birth and the first night she lay naked on my bare chest. Every time she whimpered I jiggled her a little, and she fell back asleep. I tried to sleep too, in between worrying that what I was doing was okay, and feeling awestruck by the whole human my body had made.
The night of her birth, she didn’t feed at all. She was naked on my skin, a thin blanket over us both. I had no idea I was supposed to be nursing her. Don’t ask me how I didn’t know – I genuinely didn’t. No nurse approached me to check that she was drinking her milk in one way or another. When I look back at that memory I well up with sadness for my baby, and compassion for the person I was. So utterly lost; overwhelmed by a birth that had gone differently to the one I’d envisioned; paralysed about what to do next.
There is also shame and anger. Shame for not realising what my baby needed the most in that moment. Shame that I didn’t know that the first hour or so after birth is a crucial time for nursing, that I had wanted to nurse her and I was supposed to be doing it!
I felt anger at the midwives and doctors around me who didn’t think to show a new mother how to latch her baby to her breast, even though I had said multiple times, and written clearly in my birth plan, that that is what I wanted.
And now with hindsight, I’m livid about the way I had been told this was MY day to manage how I wanted: not because I don’t believe we deserve autonomy as birthing people and mothers, but because we are always, always a part of something bigger than ourselves. And it makes me ragey to think that we are told we can do it alone, with minimal help; we can break cycles alone, we can have the birth we desire if only we try hard enough, we can raise our children alone and do everything OUR way, separate and isolated from our families, communities, heritage and culture.
I had read all the birth books but nothing, no book or person or entity, could have prepared me for the reality of having a little human there with me, needing me so badly, trusting I would know what to do. Nothing prepares you for the magnitude of being so blindly trusted when you don’t even know you need to trust yourself. When you don’t even realise that your motherhood, your birth, your existence is intricately woven with that of those who came before you, those who exist around you.
Fast forward to 2019
Eight years later, I looked back at that moment and at my first few years with my daughter and realise the way her life began holds meaning. It was a meaning that spoke to all the narratives I’d told myself about myself: that I was too sensitive, that I was shy, that I had no creativity, that I froze for no reason. That I was anxious, hyper-vigilant, found interactions uncomfortable, had no inner compass or self-discipline, couldn’t make decisions, couldn’t start things and couldn’t finish things, struggled with basic everyday life. That I was fundamentally lacking in something, fundamentally flawed. Not to be trusted.
That that lack was a personal one, an individual one, and one only I could remedy.
The first day of Phoebe’s life, looking back at it, was almost a confirmation that I simply wasn’t good enough. All of these narratives often felt like weaving strands that somehow never came together as a web. That remained dangling. Strands that in their essence told me one thing: I was broken. The problem was so deep within me that it was utterly unfixable.
I had lived my whole life finding ways to feel less, ranging from disordered eating to depression to masking, and in the process I had buried my sense of self under layers of sand. It would take some serious digging to uncover it.
Looking back, I also began to realise another parallel truth: that for years I had searched for the source of my brokenness within me. But now, as I write this, what I see instead is someone raised with expectations of individualistic success and independence. I see myself alone with my baby in that hospital, and rather than looking inside of me for the problem, I look around me: I believed I needed to do this thing with as little help as possible, and that, ultimately, was my downfall.
We are not meant to do any of this alone. We exist in families and communities because that is what humans have always done: depended on one another.
The adult gaze
That first night with my newborn baby, I also felt the weight of societal expectations on me; that societal, adult gaze zeroing in on our little duo. It was no longer just me. I felt the judging, assessing, evaluating of my child and myself, as one. If she wasn’t following the growth trajectory on the little graph the Health Visitor showed me, then this was a reflection of my mothering. Her perceived successes were mine, and her perceived lack was also mine.
I felt like I had now crossed some sort of divide I didn’t even know existed, and I was now on my baby’s side – me and her, as one. Unsupported, and judged, together.
And from the other side of the divide, I wasn’t doing mothering right. I needed to feed her at the right times, but not hold her too much or I’d be making a rod for own back. I needed to provide her with what she needed, but not too much or she’d be spoiled. All the while, I held that judgment of myself as not good enough, as lacking, within me. It only confirmed what I already knew, anyway.
I didn’t know enough or recognise enough to see that I was operating within a patriarchal, adultist, capitalist binary: which side are you going to be on?, it urged.
Will you stand in solidarity with your child, always, or start acting like the adult in the relationship? Who are you swearing your allegiance to: adult society, or a mere child?
And at that point in my life, I honestly wasn’t sure. My mothering was haphazard, at best. What would they say if I admitted to co-sleeping? Or picking my baby up whenever she cried? If I said I couldn’t relax when my baby was awake? Whose side was I really on? Was I going to be a perpetrator of the adult gaze, or a victim of it? I saw no other way.
Now looking back I see that I simply didn’t know it wasn’t a real choice. I didn’t know that there ARE revolutionary, radically different ways of being in relationship with our children, ourselves, and all humans. And that some of it is up to us, but some of it is an issue with the systems we operate within, that continue to dupe us into thinking the problem is us.
In her essay Mothering as Revolutionary Praxis, poet and author Cynthia Dewi Oka writes that “perhaps we need to become unavailable for state scrutiny so that we can experiment with reorganising our social relations in revolutionary ways.”
The first few years of mothering I found myself still trying to fit within a system that depoliticises, evaluates and divides us, that forces us into binaries and power over dynamics.
I had to hit rock bottom to recognise the truth in Oka’s words.
The bottom of the barrel
In November 2018, I was diagnosed with non-Hodgkins Lymphoma, a cancer of the lymphatic system. My children were 4 and 7.
After over a year of seemingly disconnected and completely baffling symptoms, I was rushed to the emergency room after a suspicious-looking X-Ray, and they evetually found a tumour the size of an orange in my chest.
Everything caved in around me.
And as my son, Leo, began heading into what I would later recognise as burnout, escalating to the point he refused to leave the house, I found myself in no place to be able to handle it all.
I was on my first round of chemotherapy at that point, and I had just shaved my long hair off because I figured it would be easier to handle losing very short hair than long strands of the hair I’d been growing out for years.
I didn’t understand what was happening to my child, and I was not able to honour his needs in that moment.
Writing these words down now, feels devastating. I imagine the deep shame he must have felt, to be told that what he was feeling was abnormal, wrong in some way. That he wasn’t fit to be around others in the only way he felt able to. I imagine how hurtful it must have been to be told he would not be accepted if he didn’t do what I needed him to do.
Just writing this down I am fighting back tears; tears for my beautiful boy, and tears for my own struggle, too. For my lack of empathy in that moment, and my inability to show up for him. I was physically and emotionally depleted, worn out from months of undiagnosed cancer and the first cycle of chemo. I felt like I just couldn’t handle another crisis. I needed to focus on surviving and everyone else needed to step up.
Our stories matter
I’ve tried writing about this period (the cancer, the relationship with my children unravelling) so many times, and I want to turn it into a narrative that feels coherent and makes sense.
But the truth it, it isn’t neat and tidy. It is full of loose bits and moments when I backtrack and doubt myself, and periods of grief and denial. And also, I have called it ‘no big deal’ in my head so many times that I sometimes still believe it was that.
Even though there was a specific moment when I metaphorically shook myself and told myself things needed to change - let’s call it The Bathroom Scales Moment, because that’s where I was when it happened - I wonder whether I’ve constructed it to be the single important moment, and whether the reality was it took me a whole year post-cancer to gather all the bits of my life in one place, and begin doing what needed to be done.
I wonder whether it’s actually much more of a continuous process, than a neat storyline. And that writing about years of slow, intentional progress, makes for some boring-ass writing, frankly.
So here is the narrative I’ve created, that makes it make sense for me – and hopefully for you too. I care that you understand where I’m coming from, because I think everyone’s story matters, and it also informs every single thing I talk about.
I see things the way I do because of who I am, and who my children are, and the stories we tell ourselves.
But also, I am here writing this because of a myriad of other factors that have little to do with my own attributes or failings, and much more to do with the ways we have constructed our economic and social systems and my relatively privileged place within them.
I say this not to diminish my own experiences, but to contextualise them. I have struggled in so many ways, and I have had the privilege of living in a white body, and of being able to access a degree of financial, medical and emotional support along the way.
When we were left reeling from Leo’s extreme behaviour, and grappling with the idea I might not be around as long as I thought I would be, we were able to start an entire journey of figuring out how we could change the ways we cared for him, how I could repair my relationship with both my children and myself.
I was able to do it because I did the inner work, because I took responsibility, sure. And equally, I did it because I didn’t have to work one or more jobs while also parenting and fighting cancer, because I was able to get excellent medical care, because I had various levels of support.
None of us are okay under our current oppressive systems; but some of us have greater access to what we need than others, and that is by design. One of my biggest worries about sharing my story is that it might imply that parenting and care work are somehow apolitical and individualistic, and I want to make sure I emphasize the ways that mothering, parenthood and care, and the ways we value them and practice them, are shaped by our political, social and economic systems and the place we happen to inhabit within them.
Expanding out
Everything in this book spirals back out from that one moment, The Bathroom Scales Moment, when everything in my life converged and I, for perhaps the first time ever, landed on my own side.
And as a result, I also landed on my children’s side. I gradually began to recognise I’d been trying to control and dominate them, too. I began to figure out how I could build a relationship where we all felt the full meaning of the phrase:
You are perfect and worthy and enough, just as you are. I trust you, and I trust you can do it.
I started reading lots. About human brains and bodies, about belonging, about education and radical politics, motherhood, neurodivergence, and consent.
I started writing again, after years of quiet.
When I was tempted to look at myself in the mirror, and offer up judgment, I chose love instead.
I finally admitted I was angry. More than angry – enraged. I felt rage at everyone around me, but mostly I was enraged at myself – for, as I saw it, failing at so many things, finding life so utterly baffling and hard, even though I had had all the privileges and opportunities I could ask for.
How is that possible? my rage asked. Don’t you know how lucky you are? How can you not just be happy? How are you not just able to be normal and get on with it? How?!?
From rage, and self-love, and a slow and gradual understanding about how the systems we exist inside of intentionally keep us separate, in our place, alone and believing we need to find all of the resources within ourselves, I came to consent.
This book comes a whole 5 years after my cancer diagnosis.
During those years I went back to studying, first training as an early years educator then starting a Masters in Education. Covid-19 happened, and my children and I decided to give home education a go. I kept writing. I took courses and learned from amazing people who have been thinking about and practicing consent-based, self-directed education, and advocating for the liberation of children.
Those years led me to know this: we all deserve physical, mental and spiritual integrity. We all deserve to reclaim as much of our ability to consent as we possibly can. I do, my children do, you and your children do – and every other person does, too.
We deserve this as people, and as a collective. Our communities also deserve wholeness and autonomy.
This is what centering consent means, and why it matters.
It is telling our children they deserve to be whole; and in the same breath telling ourselves that we too, deserve it. It is recognising that our individual integrity is tied to the freedom and wholeness of the collective.
(I want to thank my friend Eleanor for reading through this chapter and offering feedback.)
Thank you for reading!
Next up.. Chapter Two. Consent: what is it and why do we need it?
I’ll be sharing the next chapter in a week or so!