motherhood

Imagine

1. A morning spent reading the newspaper and drinking coffee without constant interruption from the kids.

2. A newspaper filled with stories about the new global peace: no environmental disasters, no bombs exploding, no torture, no hate crimes, no war.

3. A house overflowing with peace (no screaming fights over Lego pieces, etc.).

4. Clean dishes. Even after pancakes.

5. Phone call from father-in-law acknowledging that nearly 20 years of political conversations have resulted in his conversion on certain points, such as the need for nationwide family-friendly policies (affordable childcare, paid parental leave, flexible work/life policies, universal healthcare, etc.).

6. A country with the political will to pass policies such as the ones listed above.

7. A world in which being born a girl is not a risk factor for malnourishment, hunger, neglect, discrimination, poverty, abuse, sexual violence, forced labor, trafficking, or death.

8. A world in which social inequalities are shrinking, and progress is being made toward the UN’s Millennium Development Goals.

9. Sufficient time to play with kids, talk with husband and friends, and care for self (read, exercise, shower, write in journal, and meditate).

10. Ability to do the above with a sense of abundance instead of stress.

And, last but not least:

11. No BlackBerry or iPhone. All day.

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It would seem our much ballyhooed entrance into a “post-feminist” reality would translate into more positive and widespread depictions of females in popular culture. Though mainstream representations of women have improved quite a bit, one type of character is still disproportionately evil, missing, and/or killed off – the mother. The mother has been particularly ill-treated and under-represented in animated films, especially in those of the Disney variety.

The mother’s absence or death is often attributed to the fact many animated films are adaptations of fairy tales. Various studies of such tales argue that the lack of mother figures is based in historical reality, as childbirth was a major cause of death before the nineteenth century (see, for example, Sheldon Casdan’s The Witch Must Die or Bruno Bettelheim’s The Uses of Enchantment). However, even contemporary films with little to no basis in older tales are still inordinately fond of leaving (or forcing) the mother out of the picture.

With the rate of release of children’s and family movies, one would assume that mom characters might finally be able to get a fair shake. Alas, as in the bad ‘ole Disney days, most moms are either silent, dead, or wicked. Most don’t even have names (as with Andy’s mom in Toy Story – maybe in film three she will finally get a moniker…). A few mothers get to hover in the background, occasionally saying something useful, as in Diary of a Wimpy Kid. But, for the most part, modern kids’ movies, the fairy tales of today, still present us with usually absent mothers and all-too-present fathers. While mom is gone, dad is here to stay – doling out advice, jokes, aid, and adventure.

In the recent How to Train Your Dragon, mom is dead, but she kindly left behind one of her breast plates to serve as helmet for the (male!) protagonist, Hiccup. Yup, mom might be under the ground, but at least we can still joke about the size of her mammary glands. How sweet. In a comment thread about this film at Two Peas in a Bucket, someone queried “I really wonder what the makers of kid movies have against moms.” Yeah, me too.

The post entitled, “Mommy, why is the mommy dead?” offers a long list of dead mothers. Similarly, the post Motherhood in Disney Films argues that animation is a patricentric world noting that “Since The Little Mermaid, single fatherhood has risen dramatically in Disney films, as has the death of mothers. More mothers have died in the fourteen years since The Little Mermaid than in the fifty-one years before.” Well, there goes the historical reality theory – at a time when we have far more single mothers and far fewer deaths from childbirth, we have more single dads and dead moms in animated films. Go figure.

When mothers are present, they are treated far differently than fathers. Fathers are the center of a child’s life – not only way back when in Lion King days, but also in recent films such as Nim’s Island, Kicking and Screaming, Elf, even Twilight. Meanwhile, dead or bad moms abound –  Finding Nemo, Nanny McPhee, Coraline, Ice Age, Over the Hedge. Even when the mom is part of the storyline, as in The Princess and the Frog, she rarely remains front and center.
Danae Cassandra, author of Brilliance, a blog dedicated to analyzing gender in animation, offers the following rational:

“The only conjecture I can offer to this depiction of motherhood in American animation is backlash. With the decline of two-parent families and the rise of single motherhood, perhaps Disney and other studios are feeding a conservative, patriarchal reaction to the decline of the role of fathers in the lives of their children. …With the exodus of women from the home, perhaps the backlash in popular entertainment is to exalt the status of a single father, eliminating the mother from the picture as someone who would normally have the custodial rights by killing her off. There is no messy divorce, no custodial battles, and the father comes out as the good guy.”

Sounds plausible to me. Though I don’t feel there is necessarily a “decline in the role of fathers” nor a new mass “exodus of women from the home” – rather, there continues to be a decidedly unequal approach to parenting specifically and gender more generally. Or, in other words, we are nowhere near the neighborhood of “post-feminism.” However, our steps towards gender equality do seem to be engendering a conservative backlash (one recently and brilliantly explored in Susan Douglas’ new book, Enlightened Sexism: The Seductive Message That Feminism’s Work is Done).

Whatever rational one uses, the father certainly continues to be the good guy in most children’s films, especially in those stories with a girl child at the helm. These narratives always seem to involve kindly males ushering girls through a strange and dangerous world filled with monstrous females. Think Wizard of Oz. Coraline. Alice in Wonderland. The Golden Compass.

One of my mom’s favorite quotes is “The hand that rocks the cradle rules the world.” Ah, would this were true. Seems more like the hand that pens, produces, and animates the films rules children’s imaginations – teaching them that mothers disappoint but dads deliver.

This mother’s day, why not rock your child’s world – find a film to watch together that portrays a strong, intelligent, wise, funny, courageous, and ALIVE mother. Good luck.

I dedicate this month’s column to parents who are in the midst of crises which are well-articulated on the website A Heartbreaking Choice:

Pregnancy does not end happily for everyone. Sadly, some parents receive grim prenatal news that something is seriously or fatally wrong with their loved and wanted unborn baby. They have to make a decision about continuing or ending pregnancy. We realize that all parents make a loving choice, one they feel is better for their baby. Regardless of the fetal anomaly found, the decision to end a pregnancy is always a difficult one.

Although it is estimated that between 80 and 95 percent of parents receiving a severe prenatal diagnosis choose to end the pregnancy, those who face this nightmare often feel alone. There is very little in the way of support programs for them. With this site and the dedication of courageous parents willing to reach out, we hope to create a safe haven of encouragement, validation, hope and healing.

How many of us have thought about all that is involved with therapeutic abortions?  Parents in these situations have to navigate a medical system which is under the influence of a legal system which (in my humble opinion) has succumbed to a failure of the separation between church and state. It saddens and infuriates me that these mothers — especially those in their third trimesters — may be denied access to medical options which could best protect their physical and mental health. In this day and age of U.S. abortion policies, should we be grateful that any states allow any options at all?  Gratefulness is hard to come by in the face of so much suffering.  My prayers and love go out to all parents who face these heartbreaking choices.

I never thought I’d find myself saying something this banal here on Girl w/Pen, but a certain double stroller has changed my life. A stylish red and black jogging stroller came into my life three weeks ago as a gift from my parents. It was a mercy gift, intended to replace the clunky Double Snap N Go babytrain I had lugged through snow and ice. Now, I can venture into stores without knocking clothing racks down! Now, I can exercise in the park! I feel giddy, the way one might when one unexpectedly finds herself the owner of a shiny red Ferrari. After all that time spent immobile, Mama’s got wheels.

But I think I’m moving too fast. Like many new mothers my generation who’ve found themselves quickly back at work, both because the work is compelling and because Daddy’s been downsized, I’m always in a rush.

The other day, while pushing the jog stroller with one hand I dropped (and shattered) my iPhone. I’ve been nagging my husband and fighting with my mother. I’ve choked more than a few times on food. Starting a company at the same time that I’ve started motherhood, I’ve been racing, a bit, through my life.

The new stroller liberated me from a prolonged state of physical frozenness. But now I want to liberate me from myself. This perpetual feeling of precarious haste–like I’m sure to get smacked by a bus if I don’t look both ways when rushing across the street–is exhausting. I thought motherhood might be a vacation from my own professional intensity or rather, my intensity as a professional. Instead, it’s only intensified the race.

So here I am, turning to this column, and to my She Writes on Fridays column over at She Writes, as a way to slow it all down. I want to savor motherhood. I want to savor the process of starting a wonderful company with a fellow mother of two little ones who is genuinely sympathetic but who is also my sister in ambition and drive. We want to do our company differently. The question is, given our own intensity, given the needs of the marketplace, will we be able to live that different dream?

Obviously, I’m not alone. As Judith Warner wrote recently in a forum about motherhood at the New York Times, my generation doesn’t revel in the new possibilities of motherhood today, largely because the promises of feminism have time and again come up against a wall of political impossibility.  In an absence of family-friendly social policies, she rightly insists, “[o]ur much-vaunted ‘choices’…have largely proven hollow.” This past month, a hard-charging woman I hold dear, someone who needs to work, quit a job she loved rather than keep her baby in daycare. It broke my heart to hear it. But truly, what choice did she have?

We have a remarkable choice and opportunity, with She Writes, a woman-owned company, to live a more manageable work/life equation. Eventually, we will get there. But in the meantime, I will bet you my new stroller that my partner and I will continue to rev it up even as we work toward slowing it all down.

Yesterday I participated in a Women’s Studies Quarterly Symposium on their recent Mother issue. Among the many excellent talks and readings, I was particularly struck by a talk given by Tamara Mose Brown, a sociologist at Brooklyn College and author of the forthcoming book Raising Brooklyn: Nannies, Childcare, and Caribbeans Creating Community (NYU Press, Dec. 2010). Dr. Brown discussed her own experiences as a graduate student and mother of West Indian decent researching West Indian childcare providers in Brooklyn’s public parks (as well as some of the reflections of her WSQ co-author, Erynn Masi de Casanova). In her talk, she reflected on how her subjects defined motherhood, and how they viewed her–she was clearly identified as a mother, since she often brought her son with her to the parks–as well as how she tried to deal with their expectations of how she should be mothering.

Because many of these childcare workers were also mothers, they viewed themselves as “expert” mothers and frequently gave her “lessons” about good West Indian mothering. As she writes in her WSQ article, these lessons included ideas about what was “expected behavior for a boy”–such as the expectation that boys should not play with strollers or wear dresses. Although she herself did not subscribe to this view of gender roles, she found herself watching her son more closely when she was doing research at the park, to make sure he did not wander over to a stroller. Subconsciously, she found herself seeking the approval of her subjects.

Her story resonated with me, a working mother who relies upon a Latina babysitter, L., to care for her children when my husband and I are at work. I like to think that in most ways I consider L. a co-parent as well as an employee. After all, I trust her with my kids; I trust her judgment and her ability to help us raise our children. Her daughter is much older than my kids (now in the dreaded teen years!) and L. has worked in a school, so she is “ahead” of me in this mothering job and thus an expert in ways that I’m not. And yet, I don’t consult her about certain ways that we’re raising our kids that may differ from what she herself has done. She’s very discreet, but I wonder what she thinks about some things.

For example, I’ve frequently wondered what L., a devout Catholic, thinks about the fact that we are raising our kids as non-baptized, non-Communion-participating Unitarian Universalists. Or what she thinks about the fact that my 3-year-old son loves to play with princesses more than my 6-year-old daughter. In general, I suspect she’s OK with all this; she’s tolerant to the core. And yet, precisely because she cares deeply for our kids, I do sometimes wonder whether she sometimes views our parenting choices as ones that aren’t quite right for our children.

I suspect that we might get a free pass on these issues; but I also wonder what L. thinks of the fact that I work. Dr. Brown noted that the West Indian childcare workers had very definite ideas about what defines a good mother and had this to say about their employers:

Motherhood means that you feed your children, you bathe your children, and you spend time with your children. These mothers go to work and don’t do anything for their children and then want the sitters or nannies to do everything; that’s not motherhood. See, you want to be with your children, feed them, give them a bath to be with them; that is a good mother.

— Child care provider in Brooklyn, New York, 2007 (Mose Brown and Masi de Casanova, “Mothers in the Field,” WSQ 37.3, 4)

When I heard this quote yesterday, it struck to the core of my anxieties! I don’t bathe and feed my children every day; most days, yes, but certainly not every day. It brought up the ages-old guilt about working, as well as the familiar anger: why do mothers still carry this burden? Why do they carry it alone? Why don’t we question the fatherhood of fathers when they are at work? For that matter, why don’t we question the absence of flexible work-life policies, not to mention childcare, at many of our workplaces? the absence of a national response to working families that might go a long way toward enabling mothers and fathers to work and parent? the frequent absence of childcare workers and their own families in these debates about work and family?

After all these anxieties subsided, I began to think about the historical, invisible, and yet very real forces that have created generations of West Indian nannies, caring for white children; and I began to think that one response, one way of finding self-empowerment and agency if you find yourself in this situation, might be to embrace the identity of expert mother who spends time with the children. There is some truth, after all, in what that West Indian childcare provider says. Not the idea that working mothers aren’t mothers, but the fact that there are probably some employers who ask a lot from their nannies. I am speaking here from experience: when you have a demanding job, and you have a babysitter, it’s hard not to ask. There are days when, exhausted from teaching and meetings all day, I really don’t want to come home and be a mother. On these days, while I am grateful to all that L. has already done, and even though I know that it’s my turn, I wish that she could stay. But L. has her own family to go home to, no doubt exhausted from mothering my kids, and perhaps even sometimes reluctant, herself, to contemplate the evening’s work ahead at her house.

More often than not, this is when the TV seduces me with its nearly impossible-to-refuse offer: Kids entertained! Peace and quiet! No 1,001 demands while I’m trying to make dinner!

But sometimes, too, I start talking with my kids, and they tell me about the adventures of their day, and they blow me away with their ideas, and they make me laugh with their wacky and idiosyncratic knock-knock jokes–and I realize that this is the best moment of my day.

As I write this, I also realize that having the resources to hire a nanny, babysitter, or other childcare worker is just that–a privilege–and while this relationship is quite accurately described as employer and employee, it’s simultaneously a unique kind of relationship whereby the employee can become part of the family. And with family, as we all know, comes opinions and ideas about how we should live our lives and how we should parent, not always reflecting the deeply-held decisions we’ve forged for ourselves and our kids.

Wishing everyone a year of true freedom, however you define it!

My own little “Exodus” story of going through divorce and infertility and coming out the other side inspired my dear friend the talented filmmaker Ilana Trachtman (of Praying with Lior fame) to make a little movie as part of the Projecting Freedom Project, sponsored by the Skirball Foundation. For this project, different filmmakers were commissioned to do a cinematic interpretation of a specific aspect of the Hagaddah. Here are Ilana’s, below (starring Marco, Anya, and Teo!)

Rachatza:

Nirtza:

Alas, it was snowed out last month… but it has been rescheduled for this Wednesday, March 31 at the CUNY Graduate Center. This time around, I’ll be talking about mothering across borders in a couple of recent films in addition to interviewing writer Amy Sohn. Other participants include Meena Alexander, Leah Souffrant, Stephanie Cleveland and others, in addition to organizers Pamela Stone and Nicole Cooley, who edited the Mother issue of Women’s Studies Quarterly.

Check out the program here.

For my (new!) regular column over at She Writes, called She Writes on Fridays (because “she’s” trying, really really trying), I wrote a very Mama w/Pen-ish post, which I wanted to share here.  In “Through the Maternal Looking Glass,” I struggle with the inevitable question: is “mommy blogging” narcissistic?  Of wider interest? Neither? Both?

Sayeth fellow GwP blogger Natalie Wilson in comments over there: “The “new momism” documented by Susan Douglas is alive and well. We are supposed to be do-it-all supermoms consumed with our children. Yet, dare we blog/write about this and we are narcissists. Post-feminist society my foot. Adrienne Rich is rolling in her grave..”

And sayeth my partner in crime over at She Writes Kamy Wicoff: Bad writing is narcissistic. The narcissist fails to observe the telling details; fails to achieve the clarity and compassionate attention which characterize the writing that moves us and changes us. Are male coming-of-age stories, so ubiquitous in our literature, narcissistic by definition, simply because of the perspective from which they are told? Diminishing women who write simply because they write about motherhood is indefensible — the deeper question, I think, is whether writing that takes place in nearly real time, a kind of continuous unedited “feed” from a person’s latest experience to a written form shared with the world, can be GOOD or not. If it’s good, I’m in. If it’s not, I’m out.

What sayeth YOU?

(Photo cred: We Picture This)

This is Alison Piepmeier, recovering well from brain surgery, and planning to be back on Girl with Pen really soon.  In the meantime, I’m delighted to introduce you to this month’s guest columnist, Eliza McGraw, writer, mother, and great friend of mine.

Earache

I’m here in Charleston, South Carolina visiting my pal Alison Piepmeier, whom you all know from her blog here on Girl with Pen.  Theoretically, I am helping her, Walter, and Maybelle out, given Alison’s recent brain surgery.  And I am bunking with the baby and did just now make some pumpkin muffins, but I am not sure that I am helping as much as I am just, as always–we have been friends since 1994, when we met in graduate school, I just have avoided putting my education to the same kind of productive use that Alison has–enjoying being with Team Biffle-Piepmeier.

To be here for the week did, however, entail a thorough job of organization on my part.  I live in Washington, D.C., and am a freelance writer.  I also am the primary caregiver, driver, cupcake-maker, room parent, tutor and hockey mom to my 6 and 8-year-old children.  My days are happily complex so the list on instructions I left behind–also known as “the matrix”–included such entries such as “Wednesday–bring in a green food for St Patrick’s day,” “Thursday:  put Simon’s lacrosse shorts in backpack,” “Friday is P.E. day–Macie
in sneakers.”  It had a long list of contact information for the many family members, friends, and neighbors who knew I’d be away, permission slips for various pickups, and a refrigerator roll call so my husband Adam would know what I had made to eat.

On Monday, I received an email from Adam inquiring when the pediatrician’s office opened, since Macie (my 6-year-old) had an earache.  We’re not an earachey kind of family, as a rule–no tubes, no audiologists–so I was concerned.  Macie has also wound up in the hospital more than once, so any time she develops the slightest sniffle, I get a little anxious.  Also, it was only day two.  Things were already falling apart already?

Adam is an architect, and while it’s not as if he were expected in the OR momently, he was supposed to be at work with roll of drawings spread out on the desk (my mental image of architectural design), not heading out to the pediatrician’s.  If you looked at the matrix, there was no mention of “Take Macie to pediatrician.”  (If there had been, I would have written, “Remember insurance card and to stop for bagel on the way
home at bagel shop on Connecticut Avenue.”)

Even knowing that Adam, eminently competent and adaptable, had Earache 2010 covered, I felt like something was a little off all day as I played with Maybelle, went to the grocery store with Alison, and generally existed here in Charleston, 539 miles from the situation room at home.  When I called and heard Macie crying in the background (over Adam’s shouting from the front seat “She’s fine!  We’re going to get medicine now!”) I experienced that sensation that makes you realize why people say hearts “sink.”  Even once I received the update that Macie was at my mom’s and tucked under the same animal-themed blanket I used to curl up with when I felt sick (nosebleed stains, 1970s brown and orange zebras) while watching Mulan, I felt like I should have been with her.

But as the day wore on–hearing Macie’s voice be a tad bossy about which of the previews she deigned amusing enough to watch reassured me that her health was stabilizing–I realized I only sort of felt that way.  I missed her, and hated to think of her in any kind of pain.  But I was glad to be here, with Alison, Walter, and Maybelle.  I learned that is possible to be in the right place, even if that place is not with my own children for a certain painful moment, the one thing even I never planned for.

International Women’s Day has its roots in the labor movement and the early 20^th-century international women’s rights movement. The UN has a nice site about International Women’s Day here. This year also marks the 15^th anniversary of the adoption of the groundbreaking Beijing Declaration and Platform for Action, which has spurred much activity among women’s rights activists globally and is currently under review at the UN.

This mama would have loved to have told you all about the goings-on at the UN, since I had been planning on attending some of the panels this past week; instead, I’ve been dealing with an issue that has left me housebound (when I’m not at the doctor’s office) and caring for my little ones: stomach flu!

So, instead of fabulously interesting insights (and no doubt plenty of bureaucratic speak) from inside the UN, I will leave you with the following call for submissions: an anthology about Globalized Motherhood! The deadline for submission is June 1, 2010.

Globalized Motherhood: a Short Story Collection

Editor: Wendy Chavkin MD, MPH

Publisher: Feminist Press at City University of New York

Debby lives on Manhattan’s upper West side. She is the 41 year old mother of 4 month old twins conceived via a Hungarian IVF clinic, and of 3 year old Lindsay, adopted from a Chinese orphanage at 11 months of age.

Basha lost her job in Poland when she became pregnant and could not find another. So she left her 7 month old son with her grandmother and left Poland. She now works off the books as a nanny in London for Gemma and Erik who have a 2 year old.

Gita lives outside of Bangalore and is the married mother of two. She has never had a Pap test. She is undergoing hormonal stimulation of ovulation so that she can donate ova to her sister who has not become pregnant in five years of marriage.

These stories signify a world in flux about the most intimate of human connections, a world wide open to a host of possibilities for reconfiguring family and parenthood, and perhaps of liberating women from the constraints of reproductive biology. The physical, emotional and caring aspects of motherhood are separable in new ways, pushed by demographic shifts, bio-technological innovations and global travel of babies, women, body parts, information, and technologies.

This is a call for submission of literary works: contemporary short stories, memoirs, and creative nonfiction that convey the transformation of motherhood in the globalized moment. Short fiction and creative non-fiction offer the chance to illuminate these experiences and to vividly present the voices of those affected. We are looking for short stories and memoirs primarily in English, although it may be possible to translate some works; previously published work is welcome.

We are particularly, but not solely, interested in the inter-relationship of transnational adoption, “reproductive tourism” (transnational travel for treatment, gametes or uteri) and women’s migration to do nanny work, which together comprise the globalization of motherhood.

This will be an anthology directed at a general audience for whom the issue of motherhood-in-flux particularly resonates: those adopting and relinquishing babies; those traveling to obtain IVF, ova or “surrogates” and those selling body parts and services; those dependent on and ambivalent towards nannies caring for their children and those working as nannies who have left their own children and home behind.

Please submit to:

Wendy Chavkin: wc9 at Columbia.edu

Gloria Jacobs: GJacobs at gc.cuny.edu