Mothering

This morning I met a woman in playgroup who had just been offered a ten episode series shooting in the USA. She was in shock still, (on cloud nine she said) wildly sending emails on an ipad, calling people on the phone and attending to a baby. She was trying to find a TV agent to broker a deal before she was set to start filming in two weeks time.

There was a slightly jarring air about her. She has peroxide hair in a spunky updo, a kind of sports lux peaches geldolf vibe. Which turned out to be appropriate as she had recently become the attachment parenting pundit for daytime TV, as peaches had once been and is also a hypnobirther. She told me that she would be interviewing people about their birthing experiences, and challenging and questioning choices as well as celebrating them. She feels women shouldn't be having birthing experiences which result in so much trauma.

I don't have strong opinions about birthing or parenting and adhere to no formula so was happy to ask questions. However I did start to feel a little uncomfortable with her approach. She told me that the reason she had landed the job was because she had been spotted arguing with Piers Morgan and the leader of the US surrogacy network for gay couples on This Morning. Her stanze was that surrogacy was the commodification of women's bodies and shouldn't be funded by the NHS.

I watched the video clip later, and it was awful. Bizarrely, she actually made Piers look woke, when he asked 'But what about straight couples, is surrogacy okay for them?' It made me realise what a huge amount of cynical and dangerously polarising TV there is out there. Her response to Piers was incoherent but she was right, when she explained to me later she was impressively unruffled by this incoherence. She chalks this up to her autism, which she had only recently been diagnosed with as well as ADHD. When she tells me this it does make sense, accounting for her jarringly direct and candid air.

She reveals several details about her life which appears to have been quite hard going, she is currently a single mum of three kids and her second partner was psychologically abusive. I wish her well, and I'm sure she will do well on TV but I don't want to watch programmes like that. I listened to a podcast with Jon Ronson afterwards and was reminded what made good documentary programming was being open, not approaching others with an agenda but allowing the full and complex story to emerge.

A lesson to be taken for both mothering and doctoring.