I’m sitting at the table in the living room. My baby son is eating slices of plum next to me. His face screws up sometimes because it is sour. I like how he holds a cardboard book in his non-eating hand. Now that is multi-tasking at its most joyful! I move towards joyful multi-tasking, the kind that arises as naturally and organically as the eating of plum and the lifting of books. So I am eating toast, buttered, drinking tea, checking email, if not quite joyfully, then at least with the intention to one day allow all my actions to arise from a place of absolute, joyful necessity. My friend has sent me a link to an article about a woman who has set up an organisation to make space for women who are making peace with the fact that they are not going to have children, whether they wanted them or not. Jody Day makes some important points. Motherhood has become a practice that can be self-contained, consuming, competitive, exclusive. Even the word ‘motherhood’. Sound like a special hat that takes over your whole head; disguising other identities.
Motherhood has become an all-consuming role during the past couple of decades – dominating women’s thoughts and conversations – possibly because the pressure on mothers to get it right is greater than ever………..Websites such as Mumsnet and Netmums feed this obsession and sense of common identity.
I get this. And I don’t come at it from an ivory tower perspective. I feel this gnawing sense of inadequacy as soon as I open myself to the ‘community’ of motherhood that exists out in the forums, and the family press or in the playgrounds where there is a smiling and ruthless cult of self-expression mediated through the prism of offspring. I did it, do it, fight it, work at it, get agitated at it. Honestly, it gets silly! I spent literally hours and hours of my life researching and hunting for a second hand version of a very popular and prestigious pram brand that I couldn’t afford new (and probably couldn’t really afford second hand either) to fit into the construction of myself that accompanied my second pregnancy. And I got a kick out of swanning about with this pram! Even now, writing this, I am thinking about how this bloody pram eats into the time and space I have on this planet and wonder what it’s all about. I’m trying to sell it now because we need the money (these things are so valuable that selling one means releasing collateral!) and someone has given me an umbrella fold run-around that is more manageable in our tiny flat. But it’s hard to let go of the thing! Hard to let go of the illusion! Look how much space it’s taken up in this blog already! I guess the point is that parenting and most especially motherhood takes up a lot of cultural and social space for people and yes, especially women who remain disproportionately invested in it as their primary source of identity.
She goes on to say,
I don’t blame mothers for their single-issue approach to life; I would probably have been the same. However, the result is that women are separating into two tribes: the mothers and the childfree, and we are struggling to find common ground. It is perhaps all the more significant because the number of women who, like me, will never have children, through choice or circumstance, is steadily growing. In the post-second world war years, just 10% of women were childless while the number of women who now reach the menopause without having children has risen to 20%.
So, if a fifth of women are child-free, why do we feel so peripheral, so shut out? Perhaps – despite decades of feminism – it’s because there’s an assumption that the only truly worthwhile job a woman can do is to raise children.
This is where I start to get itchy and uncomfortable. Not because of the ethos of what she is saying, or the fact that she is attempting to redress this imbalance. It’s this dichotomising this. This two tribes business. Here’s what I’m questioning, :
1. Why does motherhood remain incompatiable with feminism in the mainstream imagination?
2. Why does motherhood get separated out from other kinds of life?
3. Why is it necessary to elaborate on these differences and turn them into oppositions? Why is this so prevalent with the stuff that women are concerned with? I’ll be blunt. It seems to me like a pretty effective and insidious divide and rule strategy, if you believe the hype that is, and it’s hard not to.
What do I mean by divide and rule? I mean the continual, even unconscious, process which simplistically divides highly complex social phenomenon like the motherhood, childbirth, breastfeeding, menstruation, gender itself, and oh my word the list goes on, into two distinct and opposing camps. That’s where language like ‘tribes’ is so evocative. It implies a naturalistic, timeless quailty to these constructed divisions, making them appear more visceral and natural than they are. So there is women without children vs women with; those for natural childbirth vs those who want an epidural; those who breastfeed and those who bottlefeed; those who suppress their periods with hormones and those who use mooncups. It’s a Cartesian thing again, and western culture does it I think without even realising half the time that it is re-inforcing and playing out a particular kind of cultural script that emhasises a dualistic separation. All debates and discussion subsequently get framed within the dualism. This masks complexity; it simplifies debate to the point that the debate becomes a caricature of discussion. It’s harder to imagine or acknowledge ways of being female, male, a mother, a woman, a father, a parent or whatever else, that are not confined to the two tribes debate. So you make a space for childless women. OK. That’s important. But what gets moved on by making this space? How does this genuinely challenge the tyranny of social roles in which we are ourselves complicit (trust me, the pram story is not the half of it in my own complicity….).
I don’t have the time to really get under the skin of what I’ve put on the table here. The baby has woken up and these things like caring for another being do take up energy and time. That doesn’t mean that the way we organise it is right or inevitable, or that the solution lies in rejecting one way of doing things for one which in being diametrically opposed ironically reproduces the discourse. that throws the baby out with the bathwater, if you’ll excuse the pun.
Bottom line. Untangle the oppositions. It’s a lot more complex on the ground than two tribes of anything suggests. In acknowledging that complexity and beginning to unpack how it operates, that’s where the juicy stuff that offers an alternative to the tyranny of simplistic dualisms comes into its own.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/2012/feb/25/child-free-women-jody-day?newsfeed=true
Written in 2012
Initiation Songs 