Mother

• Review: Dirt Poor Islanders – Winnie Dunn (Hachette) Although Dirt Poor Islanders is her debut novel, Dunn is not new to the literary scene.
• That Dirt Poor Islanders draws on Dunn’s lived experience is crucial to its mission.
• The novel is an impassioned response to dangerous and detrimental stereotypes, such as Chris Lilley’s character Jonah from Tonga.

Whiteness and dirt

Dirt Poor Islanders traces young Meadow Reed’s negotiation of this tension. The novel is a work of autofiction – a blend of autobiography and fiction – which includes metafictional reflections on the genesis of the resulting book.

• The first chapter of Dirt Poor Islanders is a story she writes in her “gifted and talented” class.
• Dirt Poor Islanders contributes to a tradition of Australian narratives of young second- and third-generation migrants, often blending autobiography and fiction.
• They go as far back as Melina Marchetta’s Looking for Alibrandi (1992) and Christos Tsiolkas’s Loaded (1995).
• But Meadow is even more disgusted by the bugs, dirt and mould that infest the family homes and her body.
• Being both Scottish and Tongan, she thinks, meant “we were made out of – whiteness and dirt”.

Togetherness

• Despite the cultural insistence that “togetherness was what it meant to be Tongan”, Meadow resents this idea for most of the novel.
• Togetherness seems to consist primarily of the expectation that the family are together in suffering and poverty, rather than love and community.
• It is only when she recognises the togetherness of “kith and kin – blended not just by blood but by skin and soil too”, rather than perceiving her abjection, that she begins to understand her identity and heritage.

• In a scene that brings the abjection and resistance full circle, she refuses to use the dirty toilet outside the family home.
• She ends up with constipation: a literal blockage or denial of her body.
• Her anguish is only resolved when her grandmother takes her to a sacred site, promising “Tonga making betta you”.
• And her grandmother is right: as Meadow squats on the ground, she realises they are matched in their abjection.

Jessica Gildersleeve does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

• Although the grief of parentally bereaved children and adolescents is widely recognised by charities and in media, people in their twenties and thirties can be overlooked.
• Research shows that many in this age group experience emotional and behavioural issues after losing a parent.
• If they die young when we are still young, it comes as a shock.

• The articles in this series explore the questions and bring answers as we navigate this turbulent period of life.
• We know that the grief for a lost spouse is generally worse than the death of a parent.
• All of this will be harder if you know that back home, your parent is seriously ill or has suddenly died.

Changing circumstances

• Their bond will still be strong and the family unit with mum and dad will be part of everyday life.
• Should one of them die, certainties and assumptions about support networks and family life are shattered.
• Your gender, role in the family and cultural background may also affect how you grieve the loss of a parent.
• I have also counselled newly bereaved widows whose eldest sons tried to become the protector, even at an early age.

Lost role models

• You’re putting up shelves, or cooking a new recipe, but there is nobody to phone home to get advice when it goes pear-shaped.
• Many young mothers who had previously coped with losing their own mother, first come to bereavement counselling when they become mothers themselves.
• I have worked with many adults whose grief has been complicated by guilt at not patching up the relationship before it was too late.

Learning to cope

• What did they teach us about life – purposely or by example?
• Whatever your age, remember that grief is an intensely personal experience, and no two people grieve the same.

John Frederick Wilson does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

• Voters also rejected a second referendum on changing wording about a woman’s “duties in the home”.
• The change would have reflected the diversity of families in contemporary Ireland, and granted equal constitutional rights to single parents.
• By 2022, the last Irish census, 45% of all family units were defined as a married couple with children.
• But my research shows that marriage itself isn’t, on its own, necessarily the most important factor for family or child wellbeing.

Marriage isn’t everything

• I’m a sociologist who studies family life, marriage and relationships.
• My analysis of this data, with colleagues, shows that marriage isn’t the most important factor in determining whether children thrive.
• One-parent families were largely lone mother families with 9% defined as “never married” lone mothers and 8% as “previously married”.

• The children born to never married mothers tend on average to weigh less than those born to married mothers.
• Families differ for many reasons besides marriage.
• In other words, we estimated that most of the difference was due to the socioeconomic resources available to families, rather than to marriage itself.

Carmel Hannan receives funding from the Family Support Agency administered
through the Irish Research Council

• When I ask my menstrual health workshop participants – including clinicians – there’s usually a lot of shrugging and shaking of heads.
• If given multiple choice options, most think that periods either “clean the womb” or somehow “help prepare for pregnancy”.
• Yes, the blood part can stain clothing, but there is nothing pathological, contaminating, or dangerous about periods.

So, why do we have periods?

• Periods likely evolved as a kind of preemptive abortion, to protect women from unviable or dangerous pregnancies.
• As a result, we have low rates of conception, high rates of miscarriage, and extremely high rates of maternal mortality in comparison to other mammals.
• The menstrual cycle is critical for facilitation of the initial steps of this raison d’être of the female reproductive system.
• The menstrual cycle is critical for facilitation of the initial steps of this raison d’être of the female reproductive system.

What else don’t we know?

• Perhaps with the fact that the second phase of the cycle from ovulation to menstruation is a series of highly inflammatory processes.
• This was only very briefly mentioned in three out of 16 textbooks.
• We really ought to be taught from puberty how to reduce period pain and blood loss – this is not difficult science.

Why aren’t we taught this stuff?

• My research shows that the exclusive focus on the female sex hormones in menstrual education is informed by societal influences, such as the myth of the hysterical or hormonal female.
• This gender myth is still alive and well, although now we tend to blame the (female sex) hormones.

• Again, there was no scientific reason for this change in focus, although it reflected existing societal beliefs about the inherently irrational behaviour of women.
• Unfortunately, menstrual health literacy has not yet recovered from this shift in physiological models.

So what?

• It also becomes much easier to differentiate premenstrual changes from underlying health conditions, since the latter will not be substantially alleviated by anti-inflammatory interventions alone.
• Teaching the reductive hormonal model of the menstrual cycle unintentionally provides pseudo-scientific evidence for the damaging hormonal or hysterical female gender myth.

Sally King is the founder of Menstrual Matters- the world's first evidence-based info hub on menstrual health and rights www.menstrual-matters.com. Her doctoral research and current research fellowship were funded by the ESRC (Economic and Social Research Council).