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The glamorization of moms feels empowering to some, but other women argue there’s a yucky-mummy reality

Lingerie emporium La Senza has finally discovered what most women knew all along. Lacy bras lead to sex. And sex, at least occasionally, leads to babies. So for the first time in the company's 17-year history, it will sell nursing bras, starting on April Fools' Day.

A spokesperson for La Senza, which owns more than 650 stores in Canada and internationally, declined the Georgia Straight's request for an interview. But it's obvious that the "yummy mummy" phenomenon has officially gone mainstream, becoming accessible to women from Truro to Tokyo.

Meanwhile, as the masses get ready to dress up their breasts, this month's celebrity magazines scream that Hollywood's yummiest mummies are not so yummy anymore. Star magazine promises that "Hollywood Nannies Tell All" about dicey glamour moms Britney Spears and Angelina Jolie. Katie Holmes's marriage to Tom Cruise seems to be unwinding. And, of course, the queen of the celeb-mom set, Anna Nicole Smith, is dead.

But alongside the cacophonous celebration of the sexification of motherhood, a resistance movement of sorts is making itself heard.

Former MuchMusic veejay Erica Ehm, for example, is trying to lead Canada's moms in a yummy mummy revolution. Armed with her Yummy Mummy Club Web site and Yummy Mummy TV show since the summer of 2006, the long-time media personality is pushing a definition of the term that's about empowerment and inspiration, not postpartum buns of steel.

"We've appropriated the term back," she told the Straight in an interview at an Oak Street cafÉ in November. "Men: 'No, no, no. You can try to demean women, but we're so empowered now that we can take the terms back.'"

She referred to yummy mummy as a "Zeitgeist" and said she wants to be its role model. "A true yummy mummy," her Web site claims, "struggles to find the impossible balance between the single sexpot she used to be, the woman she's become, the professional she works hard to be, the wife she aspires to be, and the mother she has to be. Basically, she's confused and exhausted."

Ehm, however, is suspect as a revolutionary leader. She could be the mascot for the other use of the term, which celebrates moms who appear as though having children hasn't affected their looks, free time, wallet, or hipness. At the interview, in her skinny jeans, she could have passed for 30 (she's 46). A Filipino nanny cares for her six-year-old and three-year-old. At eight months pregnant, she posed for Flare magazine–naked. In spite of her "do as I say, not as I do" message, she's at the forefront, but she's not the only one redefining the term.

Locally, West Coast Families publishes Yummy Mummy magazine, which profiles down-to-earth moms who seem to have it together, and not just Gwyneth Paltrow look-alikes. Books like I'm Too Sexy for My Volvo: A Mom's Guide to Staying Fabulous (Adams Media, 2006), preach a kind of self-absorbed balance. "Much as you adore your kid," writes Betty Londergan in that book, "it's just as important to Be Adorable."

This is the confusing mess that yummy mummy has become. It's started as a shorthand for the glamorization of motherhood, a celebrity-led trend featuring "too-posh-to-push" C-sections, sleek and sexy maternity fashion, and a rapid return to fitness, hipness, and career. But for most mothers, that lifestyle is a fantasy. So some mom advocates, such as Ehm, think the term should be reinterpreted. Others think it should be deconstructed: the media's emphasis on this phrase, some argue, reflects the narcissism of the times, when babies become just another accessory along with cellphones and Gucci bags.

Still others, such as the members of Birth Lounge, a Vancouver cooperative of midwives, doulas, and other birth-support workers, think the expression should be retired. "Yummy mummy is negating the fact that we're not just the same people but with a baby," member Sarah Juliusson told the Straight in an interview at a Commercial Drive eatery. "In mothering circles, some of the brand-new moms say, 'I had this image of myself pushing a Bugaboo, wearing skinny jeans, drinking a latte.'" Soon after the birth, Juliusson said, they discover the truth.

The Birth Lounge, which held an alternative baby fair at Britannia Community Centre on March 10, promotes the idea that the transition to motherhood is a major one: bodies change, focus changes, work changes, and relationships change. For a mom's life even to slightly resemble her former world, it takes lots of money–enough for a nanny, a diaper service, a maid service, and the "right" baby wardrobe and accessories. The term yummy mummy has serious class overtones, they agreed.

In fact, they think that yummy mummies are a myth. No matter what a mom looks like on the outside, you never know what's going on beneath her mascara–or tank top.

"Between all of us," said Birth Lounge mom and midwife Lehe Elarar, "we know thousands of moms. But we can't think of one yummy mummy."

Stunning West End mom Judith Barliszen is new to Canada, but she's not new to the concept of the yummy mummy. In Ivory Coast, her home until seven months ago, the beauty regime for new moms is intense, she said. During pregnancy, the family feeds the mom like she's a goose being readied for foie gras. After the birth, women try to slim down quickly to keep their partners' eyes from wandering.

The difference between there and here, she said, is that being a Canadian yummy mummy is far more difficult–and expensive. "In Africa, there's a constant warm temperature, so you can show off your figure," she told the Straight through her husband's French-to-English translation in an interview at their apartment. "Here, you have to be much more conscious of clothing to be beautiful. You're always piling on coats and sweaters. You can be sexy in Côte D'Ivoire without much."

Even if being a glam mom is out of reach for most, the products to back up the lifestyle are doing a booming business locally. A stroll down Vancouver's West 4th Avenue, where baby merchandise has exploded over the past few years, is an education in yummy-mummy consumer culture. At Crocodile Baby, the $1,125 Bugaboo stroller vies for hippest carrier with the $1,149 Stokke system. At Hip Baby, eco-conscious moms can get $10.95 cloth diapers with $14.95 covers. Lululemon's line of maternity yogawear is called, of course, Yummy Mummy. Thyme Maternity and Motherhood Maternity offer formfitting clothes for the bump. Baby's World, TJ's, Babes on Fourth, and other businesses are cashing in on moms' new pursuit of hip.

Also locally, the May 2006 issue of Vancouver Fashion magazine profiled then-editor Sarah Bancroft (and photographed her with a $1,000 high chair) for Vancouver's yummy mummies, who learned of her three-push, four-hour labour.

Coquitlam-based mompreneur Sydney Irvine, co-owner of Urbanmummies.com, is fearful that mother-aimed materialism has infected the world of young children. "It goes farther than just little babies," she told the Straight in an interview at a Davie Street coffee shop. "It's $400 birthday parties for toddlers; five-year-olds are fashion-savvy. The marketing to mothers is insane."

Irvine thinks the phrase yummy mummy should be scrapped: it's too loaded, too physically oriented. It doesn't appear anywhere on her Web site. As the mom of two young girls, she added, she wouldn't want to model self-centred, looks-obsessed behaviour. But like Ehm, Irvine believes there's more to the new motherhood than products and image. It's about being active and physically fit; about staying stimulated and valuing yourself as a mother first, she said. Those are values that are worth modelling for your kids.

"In Canada, the standards are really high. There's enormous pressure to be everything. You're judged whether you're a CEO or a stay-at-home mom. There's got to be balance.

"The opposite to being a yummy mummy is sitting at home and eating bonbons on the couch," Irvine shared. "We all do that at some time too. I certainly did!"

Realistically, most moms should be so lucky as to eat bonbons on the couch, according to a creator of the locally created and wildly popular play Mom's the Word. Deborah Williams, artist and mother of two teenagers, has been watching motherhood evolve for three decades. Though her fight was with the supermom fantasy of the 1980s, she said the yummy mummy is the same icon reworked for the 21st century.

"Our plays are about yucky mummies," she told the Straight in a mid-Main coffee shop. "That's the joy of it.…I see people at the show and they're laughing hysterically with a sense of relief because it's touching a chord. It's such a gift to be able to go out for an evening and feel better, to know that everyone is screwing up. You can just laugh at yourself."

Mom's the Word, which was written in 1993, has touched a nerve. With more than one million viewers so far in Canada and internationally, it may be the most popular play to come out of Vancouver, the Arts Club publicity department believes. The sequel, 2005's Mom's the Word 2: Unhinged, is touring B.C.

In the original, cowriter Robin Nichol speaks: "I'm not going to be one of those women who sit around all day gossiping and talking diapers. I'm not going to live in shopping malls, and I'm not going to watch hours and hours of daytime TV. Just because I have a child doesn't mean that it's going to change who I am.…Then I gave birth."

Williams considers the play's writers to be pioneers in sharing the gritty realities of first-time motherhood. It certainly appears to have kicked off a decade of confessional "momoirs". From the mid 1990s to the early 2000s, yucky moms were everywhere. Think of the TV mothers: the overbearing Roseanne Barr and Lois from Malcolm in the Middle; the lifeless Jill Taylor from Home Improvement; the invisible Lilith from Frasier and the dead mom from Full House; the gritty, aging single moms on Reba and Grace Under Fire.

Also consider journalists Camille Peri and Kate Moses, who launched Mothers Who Think in 1997 on Salon.com. Their column, dedicated to telling real stories about real moms, became a book in 2005, Because I Said So (HarperCollins), winning that year's American Book Award. Its 33 essays include a story by a Muslim woman thrown out of her mosque for bearing a child out of marriage, as well as several tales about mothering through breast cancer. Not a single essay is fantasy-worthy.

Yummy mummy, Williams said, challenges the yuckiness of motherhood in the same way that the perky 1940s housewife challenged her grandmother and the supermom challenged her. Like those stereotypes, the yummy mummy is totally unrealistic for today's women anxious to appear to have it all.

"I imagine their kids will be laughing at them in 20 years.…'Oh, Mom, what were you doing?' It's about trying to hang on to youth, and it's going to spurt out the side in a nasty way.…It's this prefeminist stuff popping up again."

Dad Roger Barliszen believes it's not the yummy that Canadian women struggle with: it's the mummy. Motherhood is not enough, he said, for many Canadian women. And that's a turnoff.

An overseas agent with Citizenship and Immigration Canada, Barliszen related that as a bachelor overseas he found himself attracted to foreign women, in part because they are willing to primarily be moms–over career, style, and other self-oriented business.

"Our society has seen a big revolution," he told the Straight in an interview at the West End apartment he shares with his wife and five-month-old daughter. "Women do not take a traditional role, and many men wouldn't want that, anyway.…[Many Canadian] women are stretched now, and having a child is a labour-[intense] and financially intense thing. With Canadian women–and I'm generalizing–it's more stressful because that woman is educated, she wants to work, and she'll want to go back sooner rather than later. There's the time-management thing when you've got two parents working, and a lot of guys are not going to go there."

It's not just him, Barliszen said. Plenty of men in the Canadian foreign service marry foreign wives and set up families in Africa, Asia, or Latin America, where their dollars go further and their wives are happy with their roles as "just" moms.

Indeed, Canadian women today work more and birth fewer babies than at any time in history. The number of 25-to-44-year-old women who work outside the home has quadrupled since the Second World War, to 81 percent, according to the Canadian Economic Observer. That rise echoes almost exactly the increased percentage of Canadian women with at least some postsecondary education.

With the country's birthrate hovering at about 1.5 births per woman (1.4 in B.C.), Canadian women have fewer kids than those in the U.S. (2.0), the United Kingdom (1.7), Australia (1.7), and even China with its one-child policy (1.7), according to the 2006 United Nations Development Index report.

Birth Lounge mom and midwife Elarar said that all women who choose to raise children are yummy. Before she understood the term yummy mummy to be pejorative, she remembers thinking, "Cool. It's nice to be noticed rather than just being invisible."

She added: "You become so defined as a mom, and that means you're no longer defined as a beautiful, sexy, funny woman."

The glamorization of moms doesn't seem to be going away. Nelly Furtado, oft-described as a yummy mummy, played GM Place on March 22. She'll be hosting the Juno Awards on April 1, the same day La Senza's nursing-bra debuts. Crocodile Baby just opened a store in Surrey.

Instead of fighting the trend, Elarar said, the Birth Lounge has a more important job: to help moms be proud of their bodies and build community between families. Ehm's Yummy Mummy Club is trying to do that on-line, just as Williams's Mom's the Word is doing on-stage.

Back in 1985, Margaret Atwood's novel A Handmaid's Tale predicted that fertile women would be rare and desirable in the future. With Canada's birthrates continuing to decline, and international birthrates falling even faster, the glamorization of motherhood 10 years from now may become a much more serious, and significant, phenomenon.