Oh dear. Hornets in their nests. I poked at them and now I can’t get them out of my head or my hair. So I have to bounce back briefly into my Hot News Space. Just this once…

I was interviewed, recently, for a feature article in my home town. In the article I mentioned I was distressed by the fact that babies as young as three weeks old were being put into long day child care for up to 60 hours a week. I said: “You might want a baby, but does the baby want you?” And I quoted someone who had called such a practice “child abuse.”

In the misquoting manner of the media it came out as:
AUTHOR MEM FOX SLAMS CHILD CARE.

Australia exploded. But I was talking only about BABIES IN LONG DAY CARE. No wonder people got hot under the collar. I’m so sorry.

So listen…my comments on child care last week were taken out of context from a long feature article about me in the Sunday Mail in Adelaide. I have since written various pieces for media outlets to explain myself. I have posted one such piece—so I can make peace with you—in the column on this website called All About Mem, under the title “Mem on babies in childcare”. This article was first published today: Saturday, September 6th 2008, in the Adelaide Advertiser and the Sydney Telegraph. (Perhaps elsewhere as well, I’m not sure.)

Look, I’m an aging, raging sixties’ feminist. My enlightened parents looked askance at women who did not work so I went back to work when our daughter Chloe was six weeks old. I had to work, anyway. Malcolm had just started full-time study. Neither his parents nor mine lived in Australia so we had no family support.

It was a crazy, difficult time, and good care was hard to find, but we found what we needed, although it was never full-time when she was a baby. I would therefore never lash any other mother for working; or for getting outside help with the care of her children.

And in spite of various stints outside our personal care our daughter, Chloë, as regular readers know, turned into a lovely, lively person and a good citizen.

Now, please can we move on? Can I go back to living under my mushroom again, where I have been trying to behave, as instructed by my asthma specialist—where I have been obedient for a whole year by not being political or controversial, for the sake of my asthmatic, compromised lungs? Can I? And…

am I forgiven?

Heaps of love

Mem Fox