Check out Mandy Van Deven’s interview with Mumbai-born author and architect, Meera Godbole Krishnamurthy, in which they discuss the author’s new novel, Balancing Act (Penguin Books India), her experience of coming to writing as an architect, and her thoughts on building an identity as a feminist mother. You can find their conversation over at Bitch Magazine.
motherhood
Over twenty mothers who were mourning the deaths of their children and protesting government violence were arrested and jailed this past weekend in Iran. Valerie Young wrote a great post about it over at her blog, Your (Wo)man in Washington, which can also be found over at MomsRising. Connecting Iranian mothers’ activism with mothers’ activism elsewhere, she writes that
Motherhood instantly ups your ante in the human sweepstakes. It gives you a very personal stake in the future, and makes you vulnerable in every way. It can also empower. Women who hesitated to speak for themselves may find their voice and advocate energetically for themselves as mothers and for the welfare of their children.
Mothers in Iran have been organizing online, on twitter, and on the streets. They have set up a Mournful Mothers Committee with a blog and have been staging anti-government protests on a regular basis in Tehran. They were arrested before Student Day demonstrations planned this past Monday. Watch the video here. Supporters in LA have submitted a petition to the U.N. calling for an investigation of human rights violations in Iran.
I am reminded of the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo who protested regularly during Argentine’s Dirty War–when tens of thousands of Argentinian citizens were abducted, tortured, and “disappeared” by the government–as well as China’s Tiananmen Mothers, or the Welfare Warriors in the U.S. (The picture above is a poster from the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo.) Motherhood can not only be a powerful political motivator for individual women but also provide a potent moral ground from which to protest human rights violations and other injustices. Women in various movements around the world have mobilized the symbolic power of motherhood in ways that work within traditional notions of motherhood to claim authority and demand justice to leave the private space of the home and enter into the public sphere with potentially radical demands.
While it’s true that this form of activism can run the risk of perpetuating traditional definitions of motherhood, it’s also true that it can inspire a powerful activism grounded in an ethics of care. Women who may never have considered themselves activists can suddenly find themselves standing their ground in the face of soldiers with guns, as an anonymous Iranian journalist observes in an article about the ongoing women’s anti-governmental activism in the October 5 issue of The New Yorker.
I am inspired by the brave and media-savvy Mournful Mothers Committee and the mothers who have not let fear stop them from speaking out. They inspire me to consider how caregiving, by women and men, provides us all with an opportunity to extend our circle of concern to our larger communities, both locally and globally.
Anya and Teo are 7 weeks old today, and those first foggy days postpartum are only now coming into hazy relief. Going in, I’d feared postpartum depression; having had a few run-ins with that dark night before, I was all too aware of the risks. Thankfully, depression hasn’t hit. But my mind played some serious tricks on me those first weeks with the babies here at home.
My mind—anxious—obsessed. As in, when not attentively focused elsewhere (diaper, nurse repeat), my mind would wander into spin cycle, grasping over and over again a singular script. You’ll laugh when you hear it. The script went like this: I pretended I was Sarah Jessica Parker. Or rather, I wished I were.
SJP you say? Yes, that’s right. SJP became the object of my relentless postpartum mental gaze because SJP—a soon-to-be Brooklyn neighbor who had recently had twins herself via surrogate—was waited on, I was certain, hand and foot. Nursing at 3am and craving cinnamon toast and fresh orange slices, for example, I’d think: “Sarah Jessica’s cook would be bringing her cinnamon toast and oranges right about now.†And so on. It was the fantasy of the new mother who rather wanted to be cared for herself, and it just didn’t let up.
Until, that is, my hormonally crazed postpartum mind found a new object to twist itself around like a weed: spiders. I’d been up late one night after the hospital watching a National Geographic Special on newborn behavior in the animal kingdom. The program featured a breed of spider for which offsprings’ arrival signaled the mother’s death. Baby spiders hatch, so it’s not like the mother spider died in childbirth; rather, once the voracious offspring hatched, the tiny multi-legged carnivores would feed on the mother’s body, destroying her along the way. I watched, spellbound, repulsed, as she let it happen. It was nature taking its course. And while nursing, I just couldn’t let it go. It was the fantasy of the nursing mother who feared she might disappear.
My obsession with the baby spiders slowly gave way to one more—a fixation that is with me still and one I hope will not go away (unlike the others, which, thankfully, did!). This last postpartum fixation had to do with Marco, and our work/life arrangement, which is in flux. Following the mind meld with SJP and the fixation on the spiders, I became obsessed with the notion of Marco as a stay-at-home-dad. It’s one of many arrangements we are trying on, but in my mind, it stuck like glue. It’s the working mother’s fantasy, and it’s one that many couples have, of course, made real.
I never got my cinnamon toast exactly, though Marco makes me waffles, which do the trick; I no longer worry that I am that mother spider (phew!). But I do still dream about Marco, pictured here reading Michael Chabon’s Manhood for Amateurs with Teo strapped to his chest, being a primary caregiver. Postpartum blur, or potential solution? We shall see. In the meantime, we’re both enjoying these babies, and being home with them, so very much!
Four years ago, Judith Warner made the argument that “hyper-parenting” in the U.S. has caused plenty of mothers to lose all semblance of balance in Perfect Madness: Motherhood in the Age of Anxiety. While the book received its fair share of criticism (for example, see the thoughtful analysis of Warner’s book on The Mothers Movement Online), I recently confronted the bubbling up and spiraling out of my own anxiety–slightly irrational but nonetheless all-consuming–which found its source in the shadowy threat of the H1N1 virus.
A few weeks ago, I was totally caught up in H1N1 anxiety. No doubt some of it had to do with media stories about cases of mortality; the rest of it was wrapped up in having young children. I was managing to control my anxiety surrounding my youngest son, who’s in nursery school, but couldn’t manage to quell the fears about my oldest daughter. J. is in elementary school and has asthma plus multiple food allergies, including to egg; this means she can’t get flu shots. We had plans to travel to see their grandparents for Thanksgiving on two planes. Given our past history of taking her to hospitals for various asthma- and sickness-related issues, both my husband and I were nervous about the whole plan.
What to do? Forego the trip to see aging grandparents because of our generalized anxiety about the possibilities of the kids catching H1N1 (from which plenty of kids have recovered)? Grit our teeth and try our best to get a grip on the anxiety and fear we knew were being influenced by media hype? Silence our concerns about a relatively new vaccine and do everything we could to find out if it was possible for both of our kids to get vaccinated?
In the end, we settled on choice #3. This wasn’t hard for my youngest one, but proved more time- and labor- intensive for my oldest. We finally managed to score a dose of the vaccine from the pediatrician, which we transported to the allergist–where we sat, all morning, watching Sponge Bob in the waiting room while the doctor skin-tested her for reactions to the vaccine and eventually administered the dose in two stages.
So, what does this have to do with global motherhood? For one, our little family drama was set into play by globalization, which not only affects the pathways of pandemic viruses and the constant flow of information about them, but also the fact that we were living two plane flights away from my parents. At the same time, our experience represents parenting from a position of privilege: we had health insurance, access to the vaccine, and the ability to take a whole day off from work in order to vaccinate our daughter. It reminded me how many U.S. families don’t have the resources to access preventative care, or even to navigate relatively minor medical issues.
Subsequent phone conversations with friends in other states made me realize how this global scenario was at the same time very local. My friend in Boston? Couldn’t get the vaccine for her two kids but didn’t seem overly worried about it. The pregnant friend of friends in Atlanta who wanted the vaccine? Wanted it but couldn’t get it. Those same friends in Atlanta? Had one child who got sick with H1N1, recovered, and subsequently got the vaccine with the rest of the family. These geographical differences are exacerbated when we look at other countries, where H1N1 has sometimes not even registered on the radar. In many countries, it’s diseases such as pneumonia, diarrhea, malaria, and HIV/AIDS that threaten children on a daily basis. (Here’s a link to UNICEF’s The State of the World’s Children 2009 report.)
Parenting in the time of H1N1: for those of us with some degree of resources, it highlights how caring for children often boils down to managing risks. Does the risk of a relatively new vaccine outweigh the potential risks of contracting a virus? Or is it the other way around? (For that matter, how risky is a plane flight to visit grandparents? The car trip to the airport? The list goes on and on.) Thoughtful parents perceive and weigh risks in different ways. There don’t seem to be right or wrong answers, except in hindsight, which can be kind or cruel. We can never know in the moment.
Families without resources have fewer choices, less ability to take control of these anxiety-ridden situations. I suspect it’s far more stressful not to have choices, to care for small children when you can’t take control and you can’t battle fate with much more than prayers and crossed fingers. Even if “control” is anything but.
As I slowly reenter the world–Anya and Teo are 6 weeks old!–I can’t think of a better place to start than She Writes’ webinar tomorrow, “Time Management for Mother Writers” with Change Agent extraordinaire (and mother of two) Rebecca Rodskog. It’s not too late to register. It’s at 1-2 pm Eastern Standard Time, via conference call and web. Join us! And if you can’t, you can always order the download after the event. And also do check out the Mother Writers group at She Writes too–for “moms who write with spunk and sass.”
Not sure I’ve got spunk/sass yet since I’m a little, how do you say, sleep deprived, but I do have a post up over at the She Writes blog called : “Finding Mother Writer” which excerpts a GWP post of course.
Here’s to all you mother writers out there who have been doing it for some time. You inspire the heck out of me over here!
In Of Woman Born, Adrienne Rich famously made the distinction between the institution of patriarchal motherhood and the experience of motherhood. I’ve always wondered to what degree this distinction bears out in other countries and cultures. According to a new book, Motherhood in India: Glorification without Empowerment?, published by Routledge India and edited by Maithreyi Krishnaraj, India also suffers from a gap between the cultural glorification of mothers and the actual treatment of mothers. Many thanks to writer and Feminist Review blogger Mandy Van Deven, who just told me about it! Mandy wrote a great piece for The Women’s International Perspective (The WIP) in which she interviews Veena Poonancha, one of the book’s contributors. Read her article, “Parvati’s Burden: Scratching the Surface of Motherhood in India,” over at The WIP.
Speaking of motherhood: I’m heading out to the National Women’s Studies Association conference in Atlanta tomorrow, where I’ll be on a panel entitled “Globalizing Motherhood Studies” (and another one on “Feminist Publishing 2.0″)–and will be conference blogging (along with fellow Girl with Penner Alison Piepmeier) over at She Writes!
Impossible Motherhood is a new memoir by Irene Vilar, editor of The Americas series at Texas Tech University Press and a writer who uses the history of her life and the lives of her mother and maternal grandmother to highlight critical relationships between colonialism, sexism, reproductive rights, and motherhood. But this will not be the headline that captures the interest of the public. Vilar’s fifteen abortions in fifteen years, on the other hand, seems to be causing quite a stir of attention.
In many ways, this is a memoir about misery. Throughout the book, Vilar critiques the idea that her success on paper — early graduation from high school and a move from Puerto Rico to the U.S. at the age of fifteen, marriage to a Syracuse University professor, book publishing – has not kept her from suffering with severe issues of depression, abuse, self-mutilation, and addiction. Her marriage to a highly regarded, intellectual writer several decades her senior, who defines “independence†by keeping her forever at an emotional distance from him and insisting that the couple cannot have children together, triggers a downward spiral which culminated in twelve abortions in an eleven year relationship, followed by three others with another partner after the dissolution of her marriage. However, with intense therapy and a happy second marriage, Vilar overcomes her painful ambivalence toward biological motherhood and gives birth to two daughters.
The seemingly happy ending of Vilar’s tale of thwarted motherhood will still raise ethical and moral red flags in readers, causing us to squirm uncomfortably as we embark on the author’s lifelong journey of recovery. Vilar does not go for pat answers or self-satisfied conclusions about her decision to repeatedly abort unwanted pregnancies rather than utilize birth control (which was available during her time in the U.S.). Instead, this a complex, emotional account of one woman’s emergence from cycles of oppression into an acceptance of her unique identity and experiences.
Vilar’s unhappy childhood – a distant philandering father and a mother who committed suicide when Vilar was only eight years old – contributes to her feelings of abandonment and a need to please authority figures, if only to ensure her survival. Vilar is not claiming to be a representative for pro-choice or pro-life arguments, though she does offer this disclaimer in the prologue:
“This testimony… does not grapple with the political issues revolving around abortion, nor does it have anything to do with illegal, unsafe abortion, a historical and important concern for generations of women. Instead, my story is an exploration of family trauma, self-inflicted wounds, compulsive patterns, and the moral clarity and moral confusion guiding my choice. This story won’t fit neatly into the bumper sticker slogan ‘my body, my choice.’ In order to protect reproductive freedom, many of us pro-choice women usually choose to not talk publicly about experiences such as mine because we might compromise our right to choose. In opening up the conversation on abortion to the existential experience that it can represent to many, for the sake of greater honesty and a richer language of choice, we run risks.”
Reproductive justice movements, particularly in the U.S. and its territories, often have a tumultuous history with communities of color. But many readers will likely approach the book with little, if any, background knowledge of reproductive justice movements in Puerto Rico. So how did colonialist policies and a U.S.-driven abortion counseling, abortion services, and abortion outreach contribute to these decisions? In an interview with The L.A. Times, :
“Puerto Rico, at the time, was a living laboratory for American-sponsored birth control research. In 1956, the first birth control pills — 20 times stronger than they are today — were tested on mostly poor Puerto Rican women, who suffered dramatic side effects. Starting in the 1930s, the American government’s fear of overpopulation and poverty on the island led to a program of coerced sterilization. After Vilar’s mother gave birth to one of her brothers, she writes, doctors threatened to withhold care unless she consented to a tubal ligation. These feelings of powerlessness — born of a colonial past, acted out on a grand scale or an intimate one — are the ties that bind the women of Vilar’s family.“
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How did the pro-choice movement fail to help a survivor of abuse like Vilar? Is there a theoretical and activist disconnect between three major intersections — martial strife/violence, psychological trauma, and reproductive justice? Pro-choice communities would do well to examine books like these and form outreach for women who have experienced multiple abortions. Vilar understands the stigma which confronts women who have had multiple abortions and does not shame these women, but tries to provide a lens of her own experiences with repeat abortions as a way to personalize this sensitive issue. In a 2006 Salon.com Broadsheet post, Page Rockwell notes that:
Liberal message-makers would probably have an easier time if repeat abortions were rare, but the truth is, they’re not: According to a report (PDF) released last week by the Guttmacher Institute, which we found thanks to a flare from the Kaiser Foundation, about half of the women who terminated pregnancies in 2002 had previously had at least one abortion. (The report notes that because many women do not accurately report their abortion experiences, these findings are “exploratory.”) Rates of repeat abortion have been on the rise since Roe v. Wade, and ignoring that fact isn’t doing women who need multiple procedures any favors.
In the anthology Making Face, Making Soul, Gloria Anzaldúa wrote that, “[W]omen of color strip off the mascaras [masks] others have imposed on us, see through the disguises we hide behind and drop our personas so that we may become subjects in our own discourses. We rip out the stitches, expose the multi-layered ‘inner faces,’ attempting to confront and oust the internalized oppression embedded in them, and remake anew both inner and outer faces…. We begin to acquire the agency of making our own caras [faces].â€Â This is one of those books that rips out the metaphoric stitches and exposes Vilar’s process of multilation and healing, addiction and recovery, for readers to examine. This is not an easy or light book; it will trigger and it will probe and it will leave readers feeling as if they’ve been punched in the stomach, repeatedly. But it also has the power to transform and expose previously hidden oppressions.
The outer face of Vilar is a brave one and so is the inner face. Impossible Motherhood is a book for any pro-choice believer who wants a deeper understanding of the complex issues surrounding reproductive rights in the U.S. and its territories in the twentieth century. This is also a book for people who believe in the power of personal redemption. It will leave readers aching, hopeful, and perhaps a little more empathetic to Vilar’s life.
On October 27, the World Economic Forum released its 2009 Global Gender Gap report, which ranks countries according to four categories: economic participation and opportunity, educational attainment, political empowerment, and health and survival. Who wins? Iceland, with the world’s smallest gender gap. Who loses? Yemen, coming in at 134th place. But lest we point fingers, the U.S. dropped four places, to 31st place, owing to minor drops in the participation of women in the economy and improvements in the scores of previously lower-ranking countries. (Though we’re top of the heap for educational attainment, we’re #61 for political empowerment. Ouch!)
The authors, Ricardo Hausmann of Harvard University, Laura D. Tyson of the University of California at Berkeley, and Saadia Zahidi of the World Economic Forum, have put together an accessible and informative report. Among many other issues, their report suggests how motherhood can, in a word, kill. Consider a few of the statistics surrounding maternal health in many parts of the world:
Annually, more than half a million women and girls die in pregnancy and childbirth and 3.7 million newborns die within their first 28 days. (Appendix E, “Maternal Health and Mortality”)
Approximately 80% of maternal deaths could be averted if women had access to essential maternity and basic healthcare services. (Appendix E, “Maternal Health and Mortality”)
The need for paying greater attention to maternal health has been underscored by Nicholas Kristof in his New York Times column and his recent book Half the Sky, co-authored with Sheryl WuDunn. And while plenty of criticism has been levied against Kristof’s book, succinctly and fairly voiced by Katha Pollitt in her review in The Nation (thanks to my colleague Amy Kesselman for bringing her review to my attention!), Kristof deserves kudos for bringing media attention to the health issues that needlessly affect mothers in many developing countries, such as obstetric fistula.
The Global Gender Gap report provides other glimpses into how the experience of motherhood varies from country to country. Consider what Ricardo Hausmann, Ina Ganguli, and Martina Viarengo have to say about the relationship between marriage and motherhood, and their impact on the labor force participation gap between men and women:
…while the education gap has been reversed in quite a few countries, the employment gap has not. This gap is related to the compatibility of marriage and motherhood with a lifestyle where women can work.
(Here, the U.S. has a dubious distinction: of those countries where the employment gap has been rising, it has seen the biggest increase.)
Overall, however, there are some signs of positive change when examining the “motherhood gap” within labor force participation globally:
Motherhood has not been a universal obstacle for female labour force participation. In almost half the countries we studied, women with three children work at least as much as women with no children. However, in other countries, especially in Latin America, the motherhood gap is very large, with Chile exhibiting the largest gap. But there is good news: the motherhood gap has been falling in almost two-thirds of the countries, with the biggest reductions shown again by Brazil and Greece, accompanied by Austria and Bolivia.
There isn’t room in this report to explore all the complexities of paid work and mothering–such as who cares for children when mothers work in countries that don’t support working mothers, the working conditions mothers face, and so on–not to mention the wide spectrum of how women experience motherhood according to identity (class, ethnicity, religion), educational background, and geographical location (whether mothers live in a village or an urban environment). Even so, the report provides some broad brushstrokes that help situate the many different kids of gendered gaps in the world.
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Back in the 1970s, feminists took toy companies to task for their sexist marketing practices. They railed against the board game “Battleship†for depicting a father and son at play while an apron-clad mother and daughter washed dishes in the background. (One outraged mother even sent the cardboard game box to the editors of Ms. magazine to prove her point.) They questioned why pretend kitchens were fashioned out of pink plastic, when the majority of professional chefs were men. And they urged puzzle-makers to depict women piloting airplanes and fighting fires.
One of the youngest toy activists was a seven-year-old from New York City named Caroline Ranald. In 1972, the second-grader wrote a letter to the Lionel train company admonishing them for their boy-dominated ads. “Girls like trains too,†she explained. “I am a girl. I have seven locomotives. Your catalog only has boys. Don’t you like girls?†Caroline’s short letter made a big impression. Not only did the toy train makers feature girls in their subsequent catalogs, they also circulated a press release with endorsements touting the psychological and cognitive benefits of train play for girls.
Fast forward to 2009…and we have to ask: what happened to the gains feminists made in toyland? I literally did a double-take when I read that the Toy Association’s “Toy of the Year Awards†offer separate prize categories for “Best Boy Toy†and “Best Girl Toy.â€Â Sure, they slot some contenders into gender-neutral categories like “Best Outdoor Toy†and “Best Educational Toy.†But they don’t even try to airbrush the fact that when it comes to selling toys, gender divisions—and gender stereotypes—still reign.
In case you’re wondering, the “Best Boy Toy†of 2009 went to the Bakugan Battle Brawlers Battle Pack Action Series. These intricately wrought orbs of plastic snap open into dragon- and vulcan-like shapes when they are hurled onto corresponding magnetized cards. Bakugan isn’t just a Manga-inspired action toy, it’s an entertainment brand, complete with a website, television show, and other paraphernalia. According to the Toy Association’s website, Bakugan beat out the Handy Manny 2-in-1 Transforming Tool Truck, the EyeClops Night Vision Infrared Stealth Goggles, and a few other trinkets for the top boy toy honors.
My own boys, ages 8 and 11, can’t seem to get enough Bakugan spheres, priced around ten dollars a pop. When I asked my younger son why he thinks girls aren’t into Bakugan, he replied that “they don’t like to fight and brawl the way boys do.†Maybe so, but when toy companies are so explicit about developing toys for gender-specific markets, we have to ask the proverbial chicken-and-egg question: do boys like Bakugan because it taps into some innate affinity for competitive, militaristic play—or because they are being socialized and culturally conditioned to prefer those forms of play?
For the record, the Best Girl Toy of 2009 was the Playmobil Horse Farm, a plastic play-set complete with stables, ponies, and equestrian figurines. (In 2007, the honor went to Hasbro’s FurReal Friends Butterscotch Pony—which raises the question of why a horse-related toys have become so feminized in recent years.) Runner-ups for Best Girl Toy include a Pedicure Salon activity kit, a Talking Dollhouse, and Hannah Montana’s Malibu Beach House—toys based on stereotypes of beauty and domesticity so blatant they speak for themselves.
Although most elementary-school boys probably wouldn’t beg for a kiddie pedicure set, children display more variation and boundary-crossing in their play than the toy industry might care to admit. Decades after the heyday of second-wave feminism, few parents would bat an eye at a girl playing with StarWars action figures or a boy weaving a potholder on a loom. But for the purveyors of playthings, pink and blue don’t make purple; they make green. Toy makers have a vested interested in selling to a gender-bifurcated market, because they can make double the money selling twice as many toys.
In the spirit of feminist toy activism, perhaps it’s time, once again, to argue the point. If there are any little boys out there who have a thing for horses, maybe they can e-mail the folks at Playmobil and set them straight.
On October 20, 2009, I became a mother.
Since it’s all far too big to digest, I’m starting with a small bite first: the hospital, where mothers are made, not born.
I’d always thought I’d cry in the delivery room or, as happened to be in my case, the OR. The way I pictured it, I’d hear the wail of a healthy baby (in my case, two) and I’d be so overcome with relief and beauty and gratitude, moved by the sheer spectacle of it all, the tears would flow and flow and flow. Because that’s what mothers, and fathers of course, do. But to our surprise, neither Marco nor I cried. Surprising, since both of us consider ourselves gushers.
Instead, it was more a feeling of frozen awe.
When Anya and Teo were pulled from my open belly 14 days ago and I first heard their newborn gasps for air, in stereo, I felt numb. Literally, figuratively, emotionally. Eventually I cried, when we brought them home and laid them on our bed and together with my parents sang a Shehechiyanu, the blessing of gratitude for having reached this season. But I shed not a tear in the hospital. Don’t get me wrong. I felt relief and beauty and gratitude. But I mostly felt surreal.
Me? A mother? Of two? In all honesty, it still hasn’t sunk in. And I’m thinking maybe that’s ok. When I spoke to a dear friend, a mother of two, about this feeling of disconnect between the love I feel for these two new beings and the sense of myself as someone’s “mother,” she told me she still felt that way–and her oldest is now four.
I get that mothers are of woman born, but do all women immediately, naturally think of themselves as mothers at the moment of that becoming? I’d love to hear your experiences, your thoughts.
Over twenty mothers who were mourning the deaths of their children and protesting government violence were arrested and jailed this past weekend in Iran. Valerie Young wrote a great post about it over at her blog, Your (Wo)man in Washington, which can also be found over at MomsRising. Connecting Iranian mothers’ activism with mothers’ activism elsewhere, she writes that
Motherhood instantly ups your ante in the human sweepstakes. It gives you a very personal stake in the future, and makes you vulnerable in every way. It can also empower. Women who hesitated to speak for themselves may find their voice and advocate energetically for themselves as mothers and for the welfare of their children.
Mothers in Iran have been organizing online, on twitter, and on the streets. They have set up a Mournful Mothers Committee with a blog and have been staging anti-government protests on a regular basis in Tehran. They were arrested before Student Day demonstrations planned this past Monday. Watch the video here. Supporters in LA have submitted a petition to the U.N. calling for an investigation of human rights violations in Iran.
I am reminded of the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo who protested regularly during Argentine’s Dirty War–when tens of thousands of Argentinian citizens were abducted, tortured, and “disappeared” by the government–as well as China’s Tiananmen Mothers, or the Welfare Warriors in the U.S. (The picture above is a poster from the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo.) Motherhood can not only be a powerful political motivator for individual women but also provide a potent moral ground from which to protest human rights violations and other injustices. Women in various movements around the world have mobilized the symbolic power of motherhood in ways that work within traditional notions of motherhood to claim authority and demand justice to leave the private space of the home and enter into the public sphere with potentially radical demands.
While it’s true that this form of activism can run the risk of perpetuating traditional definitions of motherhood, it’s also true that it can inspire a powerful activism grounded in an ethics of care. Women who may never have considered themselves activists can suddenly find themselves standing their ground in the face of soldiers with guns, as an anonymous Iranian journalist observes in an article about the ongoing women’s anti-governmental activism in the October 5 issue of The New Yorker.
I am inspired by the brave and media-savvy Mournful Mothers Committee and the mothers who have not let fear stop them from speaking out. They inspire me to consider how caregiving, by women and men, provides us all with an opportunity to extend our circle of concern to our larger communities, both locally and globally.
Anya and Teo are 7 weeks old today, and those first foggy days postpartum are only now coming into hazy relief. Going in, I’d feared postpartum depression; having had a few run-ins with that dark night before, I was all too aware of the risks. Thankfully, depression hasn’t hit. But my mind played some serious tricks on me those first weeks with the babies here at home.
My mind—anxious—obsessed. As in, when not attentively focused elsewhere (diaper, nurse repeat), my mind would wander into spin cycle, grasping over and over again a singular script. You’ll laugh when you hear it. The script went like this: I pretended I was Sarah Jessica Parker. Or rather, I wished I were.
SJP you say? Yes, that’s right. SJP became the object of my relentless postpartum mental gaze because SJP—a soon-to-be Brooklyn neighbor who had recently had twins herself via surrogate—was waited on, I was certain, hand and foot. Nursing at 3am and craving cinnamon toast and fresh orange slices, for example, I’d think: “Sarah Jessica’s cook would be bringing her cinnamon toast and oranges right about now.†And so on. It was the fantasy of the new mother who rather wanted to be cared for herself, and it just didn’t let up.
Until, that is, my hormonally crazed postpartum mind found a new object to twist itself around like a weed: spiders. I’d been up late one night after the hospital watching a National Geographic Special on newborn behavior in the animal kingdom. The program featured a breed of spider for which offsprings’ arrival signaled the mother’s death. Baby spiders hatch, so it’s not like the mother spider died in childbirth; rather, once the voracious offspring hatched, the tiny multi-legged carnivores would feed on the mother’s body, destroying her along the way. I watched, spellbound, repulsed, as she let it happen. It was nature taking its course. And while nursing, I just couldn’t let it go. It was the fantasy of the nursing mother who feared she might disappear.
My obsession with the baby spiders slowly gave way to one more—a fixation that is with me still and one I hope will not go away (unlike the others, which, thankfully, did!). This last postpartum fixation had to do with Marco, and our work/life arrangement, which is in flux. Following the mind meld with SJP and the fixation on the spiders, I became obsessed with the notion of Marco as a stay-at-home-dad. It’s one of many arrangements we are trying on, but in my mind, it stuck like glue. It’s the working mother’s fantasy, and it’s one that many couples have, of course, made real.
I never got my cinnamon toast exactly, though Marco makes me waffles, which do the trick; I no longer worry that I am that mother spider (phew!). But I do still dream about Marco, pictured here reading Michael Chabon’s Manhood for Amateurs with Teo strapped to his chest, being a primary caregiver. Postpartum blur, or potential solution? We shall see. In the meantime, we’re both enjoying these babies, and being home with them, so very much!
Four years ago, Judith Warner made the argument that “hyper-parenting” in the U.S. has caused plenty of mothers to lose all semblance of balance in Perfect Madness: Motherhood in the Age of Anxiety. While the book received its fair share of criticism (for example, see the thoughtful analysis of Warner’s book on The Mothers Movement Online), I recently confronted the bubbling up and spiraling out of my own anxiety–slightly irrational but nonetheless all-consuming–which found its source in the shadowy threat of the H1N1 virus.
A few weeks ago, I was totally caught up in H1N1 anxiety. No doubt some of it had to do with media stories about cases of mortality; the rest of it was wrapped up in having young children. I was managing to control my anxiety surrounding my youngest son, who’s in nursery school, but couldn’t manage to quell the fears about my oldest daughter. J. is in elementary school and has asthma plus multiple food allergies, including to egg; this means she can’t get flu shots. We had plans to travel to see their grandparents for Thanksgiving on two planes. Given our past history of taking her to hospitals for various asthma- and sickness-related issues, both my husband and I were nervous about the whole plan.
What to do? Forego the trip to see aging grandparents because of our generalized anxiety about the possibilities of the kids catching H1N1 (from which plenty of kids have recovered)? Grit our teeth and try our best to get a grip on the anxiety and fear we knew were being influenced by media hype? Silence our concerns about a relatively new vaccine and do everything we could to find out if it was possible for both of our kids to get vaccinated?
In the end, we settled on choice #3. This wasn’t hard for my youngest one, but proved more time- and labor- intensive for my oldest. We finally managed to score a dose of the vaccine from the pediatrician, which we transported to the allergist–where we sat, all morning, watching Sponge Bob in the waiting room while the doctor skin-tested her for reactions to the vaccine and eventually administered the dose in two stages.
So, what does this have to do with global motherhood? For one, our little family drama was set into play by globalization, which not only affects the pathways of pandemic viruses and the constant flow of information about them, but also the fact that we were living two plane flights away from my parents. At the same time, our experience represents parenting from a position of privilege: we had health insurance, access to the vaccine, and the ability to take a whole day off from work in order to vaccinate our daughter. It reminded me how many U.S. families don’t have the resources to access preventative care, or even to navigate relatively minor medical issues.
Subsequent phone conversations with friends in other states made me realize how this global scenario was at the same time very local. My friend in Boston? Couldn’t get the vaccine for her two kids but didn’t seem overly worried about it. The pregnant friend of friends in Atlanta who wanted the vaccine? Wanted it but couldn’t get it. Those same friends in Atlanta? Had one child who got sick with H1N1, recovered, and subsequently got the vaccine with the rest of the family. These geographical differences are exacerbated when we look at other countries, where H1N1 has sometimes not even registered on the radar. In many countries, it’s diseases such as pneumonia, diarrhea, malaria, and HIV/AIDS that threaten children on a daily basis. (Here’s a link to UNICEF’s The State of the World’s Children 2009 report.)
Parenting in the time of H1N1: for those of us with some degree of resources, it highlights how caring for children often boils down to managing risks. Does the risk of a relatively new vaccine outweigh the potential risks of contracting a virus? Or is it the other way around? (For that matter, how risky is a plane flight to visit grandparents? The car trip to the airport? The list goes on and on.) Thoughtful parents perceive and weigh risks in different ways. There don’t seem to be right or wrong answers, except in hindsight, which can be kind or cruel. We can never know in the moment.
Families without resources have fewer choices, less ability to take control of these anxiety-ridden situations. I suspect it’s far more stressful not to have choices, to care for small children when you can’t take control and you can’t battle fate with much more than prayers and crossed fingers. Even if “control” is anything but.
Not sure I’ve got spunk/sass yet since I’m a little, how do you say, sleep deprived, but I do have a post up over at the She Writes blog called : “Finding Mother Writer” which excerpts a GWP post of course.
Here’s to all you mother writers out there who have been doing it for some time. You inspire the heck out of me over here!
In Of Woman Born, Adrienne Rich famously made the distinction between the institution of patriarchal motherhood and the experience of motherhood. I’ve always wondered to what degree this distinction bears out in other countries and cultures. According to a new book, Motherhood in India: Glorification without Empowerment?, published by Routledge India and edited by Maithreyi Krishnaraj, India also suffers from a gap between the cultural glorification of mothers and the actual treatment of mothers. Many thanks to writer and Feminist Review blogger Mandy Van Deven, who just told me about it! Mandy wrote a great piece for The Women’s International Perspective (The WIP) in which she interviews Veena Poonancha, one of the book’s contributors. Read her article, “Parvati’s Burden: Scratching the Surface of Motherhood in India,” over at The WIP.
Speaking of motherhood: I’m heading out to the National Women’s Studies Association conference in Atlanta tomorrow, where I’ll be on a panel entitled “Globalizing Motherhood Studies” (and another one on “Feminist Publishing 2.0″)–and will be conference blogging (along with fellow Girl with Penner Alison Piepmeier) over at She Writes!
Impossible Motherhood is a new memoir by Irene Vilar, editor of The Americas series at Texas Tech University Press and a writer who uses the history of her life and the lives of her mother and maternal grandmother to highlight critical relationships between colonialism, sexism, reproductive rights, and motherhood. But this will not be the headline that captures the interest of the public. Vilar’s fifteen abortions in fifteen years, on the other hand, seems to be causing quite a stir of attention.
In many ways, this is a memoir about misery. Throughout the book, Vilar critiques the idea that her success on paper — early graduation from high school and a move from Puerto Rico to the U.S. at the age of fifteen, marriage to a Syracuse University professor, book publishing – has not kept her from suffering with severe issues of depression, abuse, self-mutilation, and addiction. Her marriage to a highly regarded, intellectual writer several decades her senior, who defines “independence†by keeping her forever at an emotional distance from him and insisting that the couple cannot have children together, triggers a downward spiral which culminated in twelve abortions in an eleven year relationship, followed by three others with another partner after the dissolution of her marriage. However, with intense therapy and a happy second marriage, Vilar overcomes her painful ambivalence toward biological motherhood and gives birth to two daughters.
The seemingly happy ending of Vilar’s tale of thwarted motherhood will still raise ethical and moral red flags in readers, causing us to squirm uncomfortably as we embark on the author’s lifelong journey of recovery. Vilar does not go for pat answers or self-satisfied conclusions about her decision to repeatedly abort unwanted pregnancies rather than utilize birth control (which was available during her time in the U.S.). Instead, this a complex, emotional account of one woman’s emergence from cycles of oppression into an acceptance of her unique identity and experiences.
Vilar’s unhappy childhood – a distant philandering father and a mother who committed suicide when Vilar was only eight years old – contributes to her feelings of abandonment and a need to please authority figures, if only to ensure her survival. Vilar is not claiming to be a representative for pro-choice or pro-life arguments, though she does offer this disclaimer in the prologue:
“This testimony… does not grapple with the political issues revolving around abortion, nor does it have anything to do with illegal, unsafe abortion, a historical and important concern for generations of women. Instead, my story is an exploration of family trauma, self-inflicted wounds, compulsive patterns, and the moral clarity and moral confusion guiding my choice. This story won’t fit neatly into the bumper sticker slogan ‘my body, my choice.’ In order to protect reproductive freedom, many of us pro-choice women usually choose to not talk publicly about experiences such as mine because we might compromise our right to choose. In opening up the conversation on abortion to the existential experience that it can represent to many, for the sake of greater honesty and a richer language of choice, we run risks.”
Reproductive justice movements, particularly in the U.S. and its territories, often have a tumultuous history with communities of color. But many readers will likely approach the book with little, if any, background knowledge of reproductive justice movements in Puerto Rico. So how did colonialist policies and a U.S.-driven abortion counseling, abortion services, and abortion outreach contribute to these decisions? In an interview with The L.A. Times, :
“Puerto Rico, at the time, was a living laboratory for American-sponsored birth control research. In 1956, the first birth control pills — 20 times stronger than they are today — were tested on mostly poor Puerto Rican women, who suffered dramatic side effects. Starting in the 1930s, the American government’s fear of overpopulation and poverty on the island led to a program of coerced sterilization. After Vilar’s mother gave birth to one of her brothers, she writes, doctors threatened to withhold care unless she consented to a tubal ligation. These feelings of powerlessness — born of a colonial past, acted out on a grand scale or an intimate one — are the ties that bind the women of Vilar’s family.“
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How did the pro-choice movement fail to help a survivor of abuse like Vilar? Is there a theoretical and activist disconnect between three major intersections — martial strife/violence, psychological trauma, and reproductive justice? Pro-choice communities would do well to examine books like these and form outreach for women who have experienced multiple abortions. Vilar understands the stigma which confronts women who have had multiple abortions and does not shame these women, but tries to provide a lens of her own experiences with repeat abortions as a way to personalize this sensitive issue. In a 2006 Salon.com Broadsheet post, Page Rockwell notes that:
Liberal message-makers would probably have an easier time if repeat abortions were rare, but the truth is, they’re not: According to a report (PDF) released last week by the Guttmacher Institute, which we found thanks to a flare from the Kaiser Foundation, about half of the women who terminated pregnancies in 2002 had previously had at least one abortion. (The report notes that because many women do not accurately report their abortion experiences, these findings are “exploratory.”) Rates of repeat abortion have been on the rise since Roe v. Wade, and ignoring that fact isn’t doing women who need multiple procedures any favors.
In the anthology Making Face, Making Soul, Gloria Anzaldúa wrote that, “[W]omen of color strip off the mascaras [masks] others have imposed on us, see through the disguises we hide behind and drop our personas so that we may become subjects in our own discourses. We rip out the stitches, expose the multi-layered ‘inner faces,’ attempting to confront and oust the internalized oppression embedded in them, and remake anew both inner and outer faces…. We begin to acquire the agency of making our own caras [faces].â€Â This is one of those books that rips out the metaphoric stitches and exposes Vilar’s process of multilation and healing, addiction and recovery, for readers to examine. This is not an easy or light book; it will trigger and it will probe and it will leave readers feeling as if they’ve been punched in the stomach, repeatedly. But it also has the power to transform and expose previously hidden oppressions.
The outer face of Vilar is a brave one and so is the inner face. Impossible Motherhood is a book for any pro-choice believer who wants a deeper understanding of the complex issues surrounding reproductive rights in the U.S. and its territories in the twentieth century. This is also a book for people who believe in the power of personal redemption. It will leave readers aching, hopeful, and perhaps a little more empathetic to Vilar’s life.
On October 27, the World Economic Forum released its 2009 Global Gender Gap report, which ranks countries according to four categories: economic participation and opportunity, educational attainment, political empowerment, and health and survival. Who wins? Iceland, with the world’s smallest gender gap. Who loses? Yemen, coming in at 134th place. But lest we point fingers, the U.S. dropped four places, to 31st place, owing to minor drops in the participation of women in the economy and improvements in the scores of previously lower-ranking countries. (Though we’re top of the heap for educational attainment, we’re #61 for political empowerment. Ouch!)
The authors, Ricardo Hausmann of Harvard University, Laura D. Tyson of the University of California at Berkeley, and Saadia Zahidi of the World Economic Forum, have put together an accessible and informative report. Among many other issues, their report suggests how motherhood can, in a word, kill. Consider a few of the statistics surrounding maternal health in many parts of the world:
Annually, more than half a million women and girls die in pregnancy and childbirth and 3.7 million newborns die within their first 28 days. (Appendix E, “Maternal Health and Mortality”)
Approximately 80% of maternal deaths could be averted if women had access to essential maternity and basic healthcare services. (Appendix E, “Maternal Health and Mortality”)
The need for paying greater attention to maternal health has been underscored by Nicholas Kristof in his New York Times column and his recent book Half the Sky, co-authored with Sheryl WuDunn. And while plenty of criticism has been levied against Kristof’s book, succinctly and fairly voiced by Katha Pollitt in her review in The Nation (thanks to my colleague Amy Kesselman for bringing her review to my attention!), Kristof deserves kudos for bringing media attention to the health issues that needlessly affect mothers in many developing countries, such as obstetric fistula.
The Global Gender Gap report provides other glimpses into how the experience of motherhood varies from country to country. Consider what Ricardo Hausmann, Ina Ganguli, and Martina Viarengo have to say about the relationship between marriage and motherhood, and their impact on the labor force participation gap between men and women:
…while the education gap has been reversed in quite a few countries, the employment gap has not. This gap is related to the compatibility of marriage and motherhood with a lifestyle where women can work.
(Here, the U.S. has a dubious distinction: of those countries where the employment gap has been rising, it has seen the biggest increase.)
Overall, however, there are some signs of positive change when examining the “motherhood gap” within labor force participation globally:
Motherhood has not been a universal obstacle for female labour force participation. In almost half the countries we studied, women with three children work at least as much as women with no children. However, in other countries, especially in Latin America, the motherhood gap is very large, with Chile exhibiting the largest gap. But there is good news: the motherhood gap has been falling in almost two-thirds of the countries, with the biggest reductions shown again by Brazil and Greece, accompanied by Austria and Bolivia.
There isn’t room in this report to explore all the complexities of paid work and mothering–such as who cares for children when mothers work in countries that don’t support working mothers, the working conditions mothers face, and so on–not to mention the wide spectrum of how women experience motherhood according to identity (class, ethnicity, religion), educational background, and geographical location (whether mothers live in a village or an urban environment). Even so, the report provides some broad brushstrokes that help situate the many different kids of gendered gaps in the world.
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Back in the 1970s, feminists took toy companies to task for their sexist marketing practices. They railed against the board game “Battleship†for depicting a father and son at play while an apron-clad mother and daughter washed dishes in the background. (One outraged mother even sent the cardboard game box to the editors of Ms. magazine to prove her point.) They questioned why pretend kitchens were fashioned out of pink plastic, when the majority of professional chefs were men. And they urged puzzle-makers to depict women piloting airplanes and fighting fires.
One of the youngest toy activists was a seven-year-old from New York City named Caroline Ranald. In 1972, the second-grader wrote a letter to the Lionel train company admonishing them for their boy-dominated ads. “Girls like trains too,†she explained. “I am a girl. I have seven locomotives. Your catalog only has boys. Don’t you like girls?†Caroline’s short letter made a big impression. Not only did the toy train makers feature girls in their subsequent catalogs, they also circulated a press release with endorsements touting the psychological and cognitive benefits of train play for girls.
Fast forward to 2009…and we have to ask: what happened to the gains feminists made in toyland? I literally did a double-take when I read that the Toy Association’s “Toy of the Year Awards†offer separate prize categories for “Best Boy Toy†and “Best Girl Toy.â€Â Sure, they slot some contenders into gender-neutral categories like “Best Outdoor Toy†and “Best Educational Toy.†But they don’t even try to airbrush the fact that when it comes to selling toys, gender divisions—and gender stereotypes—still reign.
In case you’re wondering, the “Best Boy Toy†of 2009 went to the Bakugan Battle Brawlers Battle Pack Action Series. These intricately wrought orbs of plastic snap open into dragon- and vulcan-like shapes when they are hurled onto corresponding magnetized cards. Bakugan isn’t just a Manga-inspired action toy, it’s an entertainment brand, complete with a website, television show, and other paraphernalia. According to the Toy Association’s website, Bakugan beat out the Handy Manny 2-in-1 Transforming Tool Truck, the EyeClops Night Vision Infrared Stealth Goggles, and a few other trinkets for the top boy toy honors.
My own boys, ages 8 and 11, can’t seem to get enough Bakugan spheres, priced around ten dollars a pop. When I asked my younger son why he thinks girls aren’t into Bakugan, he replied that “they don’t like to fight and brawl the way boys do.†Maybe so, but when toy companies are so explicit about developing toys for gender-specific markets, we have to ask the proverbial chicken-and-egg question: do boys like Bakugan because it taps into some innate affinity for competitive, militaristic play—or because they are being socialized and culturally conditioned to prefer those forms of play?
For the record, the Best Girl Toy of 2009 was the Playmobil Horse Farm, a plastic play-set complete with stables, ponies, and equestrian figurines. (In 2007, the honor went to Hasbro’s FurReal Friends Butterscotch Pony—which raises the question of why a horse-related toys have become so feminized in recent years.) Runner-ups for Best Girl Toy include a Pedicure Salon activity kit, a Talking Dollhouse, and Hannah Montana’s Malibu Beach House—toys based on stereotypes of beauty and domesticity so blatant they speak for themselves.
Although most elementary-school boys probably wouldn’t beg for a kiddie pedicure set, children display more variation and boundary-crossing in their play than the toy industry might care to admit. Decades after the heyday of second-wave feminism, few parents would bat an eye at a girl playing with StarWars action figures or a boy weaving a potholder on a loom. But for the purveyors of playthings, pink and blue don’t make purple; they make green. Toy makers have a vested interested in selling to a gender-bifurcated market, because they can make double the money selling twice as many toys.
In the spirit of feminist toy activism, perhaps it’s time, once again, to argue the point. If there are any little boys out there who have a thing for horses, maybe they can e-mail the folks at Playmobil and set them straight.
On October 20, 2009, I became a mother.
Since it’s all far too big to digest, I’m starting with a small bite first: the hospital, where mothers are made, not born.
I’d always thought I’d cry in the delivery room or, as happened to be in my case, the OR. The way I pictured it, I’d hear the wail of a healthy baby (in my case, two) and I’d be so overcome with relief and beauty and gratitude, moved by the sheer spectacle of it all, the tears would flow and flow and flow. Because that’s what mothers, and fathers of course, do. But to our surprise, neither Marco nor I cried. Surprising, since both of us consider ourselves gushers.
Instead, it was more a feeling of frozen awe.
When Anya and Teo were pulled from my open belly 14 days ago and I first heard their newborn gasps for air, in stereo, I felt numb. Literally, figuratively, emotionally. Eventually I cried, when we brought them home and laid them on our bed and together with my parents sang a Shehechiyanu, the blessing of gratitude for having reached this season. But I shed not a tear in the hospital. Don’t get me wrong. I felt relief and beauty and gratitude. But I mostly felt surreal.
Me? A mother? Of two? In all honesty, it still hasn’t sunk in. And I’m thinking maybe that’s ok. When I spoke to a dear friend, a mother of two, about this feeling of disconnect between the love I feel for these two new beings and the sense of myself as someone’s “mother,” she told me she still felt that way–and her oldest is now four.
I get that mothers are of woman born, but do all women immediately, naturally think of themselves as mothers at the moment of that becoming? I’d love to hear your experiences, your thoughts.
