Model and TV host Peaches Geldof was infamous in the British tabloids from a young age, dabbling in drugs and flirting her way through the London party scene. Her image, though, changed when she became mother to two young boys in her early twenties. She was an advocate of “attachment parenting,” an overly attentive parenting style involving, for instance, letting your child share a bed with you, or continuing breastfeeding until the child is much older than usual.
Most assumed Peaches had turned over a new leaf . . . until she was found dead at home with her nine-month old son on April 7. The official coroner’s report revealed that she had died of a heroin overdose.
The media was quick to judge her. Unfair, patronizing headlines such as “Peaches Geldof Cared More About Heroin Than About Her Children,” (Mirror UK) quickly emerged. While she comes across as overbearing and irritating in her much publicized parenting debates, one thing is clear: she cared about her children. This woman was suffering from a disease, one that she lost her own mother to at a young age.
If her husband, equally outspoken about the “right” way to be a parent, had died, the media would not have been shocked. Fathers, however devoted, are expected to have a life outside of their children. We can equate a father who dabbles in drugs with being a loving guy when he’s home on the weekends.
The public notion is that there are more men who have, to use tabloid terms, “illicit double lives” outside of their family lives. Men are the ones who slip up with affairs and addictions, while women who do the same are home-wreckers and bad mothers. Peaches’ death is proof that addiction doesn’t discriminate and can befall even those who are in a role of extreme responsibility.
Peaches had the means to pay for childcare, but she chose to take drugs while she was alone with her son. We can pity her for being unable to resist heroin, but why would someone who has the money to pay for a babysitter think getting high with her child was a better idea?
Peaches’ overly-attached style of parenting could be to blame for her son’s tragic proximity to her death. She used her role as a mother as a lifeline separating her from the party girl image that seemed to haunt her. This is a woman who associated being a good mother with being a constant presence in her childrens’ lives.
The very notion of motherhood is put under a microscope in modern day society. Motherhood is expected to be central to a woman’s life, with all that came before it being abandoned for breastfeeding and grinning while elbows-deep in poop. We expect mothers to be more central to a child’s upbringing and more devoted than fathers, as reflected most clearly in Peaches’ own parenting style.
The fact that a way of parenting can even be critiqued as right or wrong is ludicrous, but exemplifies the extreme pressure that women are put under to perform to their very best feminine ideal. The pressure of being the ultimate figure in her sons’ lives, which Geldof took on publicly with such vigour, did not leave room for taking the personal time required to fight her addiction.
