The French justice minister and the Kinsale Road roundabout

THE picture was on the right of the front door of my grandmother’s house in Dublin’s Liberties.

Straight ahead was the kitchen. To the left was the drawing room into which nobody ever went, firstly because it had to be kept perfect, in case somebody died or the Pope dropped in, and secondly because it had horsehair furniture which is pure misery to sit on.

To the right was the stairs — and a small reproduction of Millais’ painting The Gleaners.

It wasn’t just a print reproduction of the famous painting of women at sunset, taking in the harvest in the fields. This framed version was embossed, the figures raised out of a hard material which certainly wasn’t plastic, which didn’t exist at that time. It could have been ivory, because many of my grandaunts and uncles and first cousins twice removed had served as nuns and priests in Africa and might have sent back the odd tusk or artifact rendered from a tusk. More likely it was humble Bakelite, the precursor to plastic, out of which were made the knobs on my nana’s cooker, the controls on the huge Bush radio and the handles on the saucepans.

Embossing Millais’ gleaner improved it no end, if you were a four-year-old reaching with effort to dip your middle finger into the holy water in the slimy little trough underneath the picture. You could stand on your tippytoes and feel the figures, remembering in your mind’s eye what you’d seen when your father had lifted you up to see the artwork. Oh, yes, this tufty bit was two sheaves of corn stacked up, one against the other. This roundy bit was the back end of one of the two women bent over, working, enveloped to the heels in big thick skirts that reached their ankles.

I was running my forefinger over the embossing one day when my father muttered that no females should complain, these days. We had it easy, compared to the women in the picture. One of the gleaning women, he opined, had probably given birth to a baby the morning the picture was made.

“Back in the fields by sundown,” he said, and went off to get a light for his Players Untipped.

I didn’t have a clue as to what he meant. My big sister served as a kind of instantaneous translation of the weird stuff my parents said to us, to each other, and about each other. I went and asked her to explain.

“In the old days, before hospitals, women just had babies in fields and went back to work straight away,” she said.

I considered this in silence. Only a few weeks earlier, the same sister had explained the motor mechanics of childbirth to me. I was still in shock and awe, not to mention revulsion. Bad enough to do this horrible thing at all, but doing it in a field before resuming work didn’t sound either hygienic or comfortable. I stood, knees clenched together in sympathy with historic mothers.

“That was back then,” my sister said, getting impatient with my over-reaction. “Everybody has their baby in hospital now.” (You have to forgive my sister. Because she was a Dub, she had not heard of the popularity of the Kinsale Road roundabout as a place to give birth.) When my father finished his fag and rejoined the two of us, he got quite enthusiastic about the Back in the Fields by Sundown approach to having babies. For heavens sake, he said, wasn’t it the most natural thing in the world? I wasn’t old enough to tell him maggots were natural, too, but that didn’t make me like them.

He got positively lyrical, did my father, about negro spirituals, and how, if you listened to the words, you’d realise they were sung to a fractious baby by its mother while she worked, gathering cotton or slashing sugar cane.

This made the whole proposition even worse. Now, the poor mother was not only to interrupt her daily grind in the cotton fields to sidle sideways, deliver a baby, wash it off, wrap it up and go back to the day job, she now had to sing, as well, to keep the new infant from bawling and putting the other workers off the task in hand. Work/life balance, anyone? That was nothing, my father went on, compared to the native American Indian females.

These squaws would be out on the prairie, disembowelling recently-killed buffalo, when they’d go into labour.

“All of them?” I shrieked, and my sister rolled her eyes to heaven.

“The pregnant ones,” she said on a gusty older-sister sigh.

The poor squaws had to deliver the infant and get back to buffalo-gutting. But, in addition, they had to ensure the baby didn’t cry, in case it distracted from the entrail-removal. So the squaws brought papooses with them (no doubt saying casually to each other “I made this one earlier”) and, when the baby emerged, pinned it into this tennis racquet type crib and hung baby, cradle and all on a handy cactus.

Immobilised babies cry less, and the papoose, the bottom part of which was stuffed with grass, acted as a naturally recyclable, infinitely sustainable and literally green nappy. All the squaw had to do was slide the baby out at the end of the day, give him or her a quick wipe, throw away the soiled grass and replaced it with fragrant fresh stuff.

The reality represented by such detail is that for millennia, child-birth carried with it no entitlement to maternal leave, never mind parental leave. It was a minor blip in the working life of the mother.

All of which has been forgotten by humankind, to judge by the controversy surrounding the French justice minister. Rachita Dati returned to work last week, slim and businesslike, five days after giving birth to her first baby by Caesarean. Female commentators are livid. They say what she did is bad for her own health, bad for her bonding with her baby, and puts terrible pressure on other women.

“Maternity rights have been hard won,” said one, “and should not be ignored by new mothers.”

Which principle, carried to its logical conclusion, would condemn anyone who buys a book rather than borrow it from a public library. As is their right.

That Sarah Palin apparently returned to work — looking infuriatingly slim — only three days after giving birth to her most recent baby son is equally maddening to this branch of the sisterhood.

To get wrought up about Dati or Palin is to give them a power they don’t have, and portray every new mother as pathetically likely to compare herself to them.

Motherhood is as individual as a fingerprint.

We all do it our own way. We survive it using whatever mixture of hope, prayer, diet, denial, delight and help we can.

The great thing about the 21st century is that we can choose to be back in the fields (or at the desk) by sunset or take extended maternity leave.