'it was your choice to have a child'

“You'd think there was no right more sacred than to be financially underwritten by the community when you choose to have children too young, alone, and without the means to support them” (Columnist Rosemary McLeod writing in The Press)

Choose to? Leaving aside the mean-spirited politics, what kind of ‘choice’ is that?

Choice is a central obsession of late capitalist culture. As long as individuals have plenty of choice then everything is supposed to be all right: we can choose what job to work at, and choose when we have children, how many we might have, and how we might have them.

And, if we make the right choices, our kids will turn out all right ... right?  After all, we can choose to breastfeed them ... if we have the support and the ability to do so; we can choose to stay at home with them ... if we have enough money and the inclination; we can choose to feed them organic hand-reared meat or home-grown vegetables lovingly braised in a slow-cooker ... if we have enough money, our own homes, the time, and the desire to spend all day preparing food; and, eventually, we can choose to send them to private school ... if we have enough money and the right connections.  

The language of choice is ideological. It assumes an individual who has plenty of resources - financial, cultural and institutional - who can make the most of the choices on offer. If someone can’t - or won’t - make the correct socially-approved ‘choices’, they’re bound to be on the receiving end of, at least, disapproval (‘why is your son wearing pink?’) or, at worst, punishment (benefit cuts, children removed). The language of individual choice, then, absolves the community and the state from any stake in those choices: the individual makes the choice, and the individual takes the consequences. It’s a bare step up from ‘you’ve made your bed, you can lie in it.’ There’s precious little soul-searching about how we might have chosen to ignore families in our midst who really struggle with apparent choices that are not much of a choice at all. It’s like we made the bed, but refuse to recognise it as a device for sleeping, much less lying in.

There is a historical dimension to the ascendancy of ‘choice’ in childrearing. Journalist Sue Kedgley found there was a deliberate move away from State support of families to individual choice as part of the general policy shift in the 1980s and 1990s towards free market capitalism. She comments that the New Zealand Treasury no longer saw childbearing and childrearing as ‘critically important activities for the future of the state ... Instead Treasury ... redefined them as activities that are motivated by ‘personal choice’ or ‘irrational desire’ (Mum’s the Word, p 335) This re-definition meant that laws, policies and practices were similarly re-defined: the responsibilities of the State and community to parents and families shifted from collective investment in society’s future to enabling individual choice. Among other things, this has meant the removal of the family benefit, the glacial roll-out of paid parental leave, and, more recently, cuts to early childhood education.

Perhaps one of the most loaded ‘choices’ a mother can make is whether or not to stay at home to look after her children or go out to work to support her children.  But this ‘choice’ is not simply about the best way to mother. In her analysis of US working mothers who quit their jobs to return to the home, Pamela Stone found that the women she interviewed quit as a last resort, and for reasons of work, not family. She calls their decision "a kind of silent strike" and describes their failed efforts to re-invent the workplace in their image: "These women had alternative visions of how to work and be a mother, yet their attempts to maintain their careers on terms other than full-time plus were penalized, not applauded; it was quitting that earned them kudos." Their use of the language of choice "often had the effect of obscuring or rendering invisible to them the constraints they faced”. In “The Opposite of Choice”, Judith Stadtman Tucker agrees, observing that “the discourse of choice masks the persistence and variables of women's inequality, and the scarcity of adequate options”. 

In the absence of real choices, an increasing percentage of well-educated middle-class women - the group with most apparent choice - are choosing what Elisabeth Badinter has described as a ‘nuclear option’. They are not having children at all. For those that do have children, the language of choice has a policing function. As Aminatta Forna observes, “voices of dissent and dissatisfaction are increasingly met with dismissal and a response which has a peculiarly modern twist: that it was their own choice to have a child” (The Mother of All Myths, p 260). So what if you’re finding it hard to make ends meet, you’re about to go postal from isolation, and you’re sick of people telling you that you have to breastfeed: it was your choice to have a child. Or in other words, ‘you’ve made your bed, you can lie in it.’

In order to have real, meaningful choices an individual or couple can’t parent in a vacuum. Community and State support in the form of, among other things, high-quality affordable childcare, paid parental leave (ideally able to be shared), adequate living benefits for solo parents with young children, and commitment to flexible working both in the public and private sectors would be a good start.

Along with a little less sermonising and a little more understanding about the ‘choices’ people have to make.

That would be pretty choice, eh?

review: Mother of All Myths

Aminatta Forna, author of Mother of All Myths: How Society Moulds and Constrains Mothers (1998), is not a mother.

I mention this front and centre because I am willing to bet a substantial sum that it was noted in nearly every review of the book, and her views judged accordingly. Some might think her childlessness is reason enough for her not to write a book about motherhood, because, after all, she doesn’t have the first-hand experience of other writers on the subject. How could she possibly tell us the truth about such a life-changing event?

This leads to the question of who can speak about motherhood: should it only be mothers, the ones who know what it’s really like, or is it the proper concern of all women (and men), particularly those who are avowed feminists? Forna comments on the dearth of feminist literature on motherhood, save for periodic exhortations for the provision of quality childcare. She singles out Naomi Wolf (obviously pre-Misconceptions) as overlooking motherhood in Fire with Fire, which only contains passing references to biology not being destiny, and not giving in to a victim mentality (thanks Naomi!). Writing in the late 1990s, Forna strongly argues that ‘the story of how feminism must tackle the issues surrounding motherhood is only just beginning.’ (11) Post-Misconceptions, which I think left a lot to be desired, I’d say there’s still a lot of work to be done.

Despite her suspect lack of offspring, Forna does have two mothers (of which more later) and, as a feminist, is concerned with the way in which the mythologising of motherhood in Western culture is detrimental to women. Her focus is therefore on myth-busting rather than truth-telling, and I think this book is much the stronger for it. It does not contain the caveats - ‘I love my child really, now let me tell you how bored I am!’ - with which nearly every mother writing on the subject feels obliged to preface any critical comments. It does not focus primarily on women’s own individual experiences of birth and child-rearing. Instead, it locates and critiques the narratives we tell ourselves about motherhood, and traces the ways in which they have become both pervasive and defining. She also sounds a warning about the erosion of feminist gains, particularly in the area of reproductive rights, that could be the cost of this sentimentalised version of motherhood.

Taking aim first at the central plank of the Perfect Mother myth - the exclusivity of the mother-child bond - she critiques the (mostly) male experts who have pronounced on motherhood from Rousseau, to Truby King, to Bowlby to Winnicott. Her conclusion? ‘The relationship between mothers and their children is special because of the work put into it, and not because of a mystical biological impetus.’ (262) That is, mothers are (self-) made, not born. Recognising mothering as work, rather than the result of a natural bond, opens the door for that work to be shared: by partners, families and the wider community.

Where Forna does draw on her own life experience is in her cross-cultural analysis. Born to a Sierra Leonean father and a Scottish mother, who subsequently separated, she was raised alternately in Britain and Sierra Leone. Her father married again, and her second mother helped raise her. Her dual childhood enabled her to experience the different contexts in which children are raised firsthand. Her West African childhood was non-exclusive: she was mothered by parents, cousins and older sons and daughters of family friends. She comments, ‘looking at a subject like motherhood from the vantage point of other cultures does not just help us towards greater international understanding ... it also tells us about our own culture, and moves the debate about motherhood on from its current stalemate by helping to separate what might be ‘natural’ from what is culturally constructed.’ (199-200)

Drawing on her interviews with women from a range of backgrounds and cultures who now live in the West, Forna traces the tensions they experience when they are philosophically - and even linguistically (some, for example, speak languages where ‘mother‘ and ‘aunt‘ are the same word) - at odds with the dominant ideology. Despite this, ‘their experience of coming from one culture while living in another has made them acutely aware of what even the so-called ‘experts’ haven’t grasped: there is more than one script for motherhood.’ (202)

Noting that the Western mother who stays at home with her children is seen, by turns, as living in luxury or being a layabout, she also comments that the conflict between mothering and working outside the home is both a non-issue and a necessity in other contexts. As a result, international feminism, dominated by white, Western middle-class women, has failed to build a consensus on motherhood as a universal, shared experience. Idealising and naturalising the mother as solely and exclusively responsible for her child, not only threatens to crush women under the weight of expectation, but also threatens to cut us off from each other and our different ways of being.

In her strong conclusion, Forna states:

Motherhood is the largest remaining obstacle to women achieving equality in contemporary post-modern society. The problem is not children, having children or the love and care of children, but the framing of Motherhood and the endurance of myths that surround it. For .... all the talk of a new post-feminist generation, women once they have children are every bit as constrained as their own mothers once were. The only difference is in precisely how.

....

Our mothers may have been prisoners in their own homes; mothers today are tangled in a web of responsibilities and conflicting, competing demands and roles. Today’s ‘problem with no name’ is the myth about Motherhood.

...

Far from diminishing, the Motherhood myth is growing more powerful and is enjoying a popular resurgence, propelled by the insistence on linking ideas about Motherhood to every social ailment from crime statistics to personal happiness. (260-61).

She closes with challenges that the whole community must face: women (beware the double-edged sword of idealism - claiming the ‘good’ bits of the motherhood myth does not dispense with the ‘bad’), men (challenge the myth of mother-centric parenting and become more involved with your children), and everyone (recognise that children are not just the individual responsibility of their parents but a community responsibility, and develop policy accordingly - and stop blaming mothers for everything).

As a mother, I couldn’t have put it better myself.

media mamas

A perfect mother is a dead mother.

Or, at least, so the newspapers would have you believe. After exploring a series of representations of mothers in British newspapers, Aminatta Forna, author of Mother of All Myths, concludes:

Images of mothers are created by popular culture to reflect and sometimes manipulate a set of values about what constitutes exemplary mothering. Behind each individual depiction, good or bad, lies the model of the perfect mother. Private decisions about work, relationships, fertility, and behaviour become public property because women are mothers. The mothers who are the subjects of press stories are judged by that standard, and so are women in the general populace who do not or cannot fulfill society’s expectations of what a mother should be. They are all found guilty. (118)

Inspired, I decided to conduct an impressionistic survey of recent articles on mothers and motherhood on the Stuff and New Zealand Herald websites, to see whether I could trace any similarities. After sifting through more dead bodies than Hercule Poirot, I came up with the following Top Five recurring themes.

(I should add the disclaimer that I’m not focussing on what happened in the following articles - happy or tragic - but what, taken together, they might indicate about the stories we tell ourselves about motherhood. Asking why these stories are so popular and so often repeated, gives a sense of the core values that a mother must possess if she is to measure up to the perfect mother ideal.)

1. Dead or dying mothers are newspaper gold: without a troublesome, contrary, living woman around to disrupt the narrative, dead mothers can be idealised and sentimentalised as perfect. This seems to recur time and time again. Whether it’s a dying mother spending her last few days compiling keepsakes for her child, or a mother who is the victim of a tragic accident or a mother who dies with her child in her arms, trying in vain to protect him or her or even a mother who gives up her life for her baby.

Dead mothers are apparently the only ones able to achieve that elusive goal of perfection. Forna comments:

In media terms, the ultimate ‘motherhood’ story is an exclusive on a woman who has made the ultimate sacrifice: a woman who has died in childbirth, or died trying to bear a child, or, best of all, who has died so her child could live. These stories are run regularly, the prose is heavy with pathos and the picture content is high. (105)

The core mothering value that these stories collectively reproduce (no pun intended) and reinforce is that of selflessness. The perfect mother always thinks of others before herself. Her hopes, dreams, wants, needs, and fears, do not warrant attention until she has not only taken care of her child, but also her partner, her family, friends and community. And by then she is probably so exhausted that she’s forgotten what they were.

2. Following closely behind dead mothers are stories about ‘unnatural’, villainous mothers, whose chief fault, it seems, is to not be dead and therefore perfect. At the extreme, these are the mothers that abuse and kill their children. Elsewhere, these are the negligent mothers, who are uncaring or disinterested in their children, even when they’re dead.

If a dead mother is perfect, an unnatural mother is a warning. Sometimes spelled out, sometimes just heavily implied, is the moral: if you loved your children enough, you would not take drugs, you would not get stressed and lash out, and you would not resort to social media in a panic after a fatal accident. The moral applies to all mothers though, acting as a warning against their more negative impulses. If you love your children enough you will not want release from them from time to time (whether through drugs or catching a movie), you will not lose your temper ever, nor get stressed and feel overwhelmed, you will not panic or feel like you don’t know what to do ... much less admit it. Because if you lapse for one single moment, you might end up as the example held up to others in the newspapers.

3. A mother’s anguish is number three with a bullet, sometimes literally. This includes grieving over a dead or dying child or a missing child. It can also encompass rage at society giving children too much information too soon, which is usually to do with sex and family planning. Occasionally, there is the odd good news story to leaven the heartache, particularly in the case of missing children.

The anguished mother is a variation on the theme of the dead or dying mother. Not yet perfect because she is still drawing breath, nevertheless, she is utterly consumed by her child’s wellbeing. Unable to eat, sleep, or get on with her ‘normal’ life while she is grieving or awaiting news, any news, her child is her top priority. She can, however, quickly fall into the ‘unnatural’ mother category if she is seen to get over her grief too quickly, or does something that might interfere with her constant vigil.

4. Everyday mothers are not immune either: stories about the ways in which mothers mess up their children by basically just living their lives also feature heavily. Working is usually the top crime (if you are middle class, at least), followed by eating and drinking. If you are poor or working class, not working is the biggest crime (thank you Paula Bennett).

As a mother, working is, of course, incompatible with being truly selfless. Nothing is as fulfilling as raising a child, not a promotion, an award, nor an independent income. And don’t try to kid yourself that you can have the best of both worlds. You will only fail at both.

If you want to stay home, but you are a single mother on a benefit, however, you are not fulfilling the perfect mother ideal. You are just a bludger and should search for a minimum wage job at once. This is the only way to teach your children not to grow up to be bludgers, and is therefore more selfless than staying at home with them and passing on your own bad habits.

5. Last, but not least, is stories about celebrity mothers, both lauding them and questioning how much value they have as role models. Even celebrities can’t be perfect mothers, though, as they are only going through the motions with the aid of lots of money and an army of nannies. And who knows what special celebrity ways they might have to mess up their kids, given their unusual approaches to motherhood, whether artistically or financially motivated?

There will be articles that don’t fit these themes of course, but the overwhelming majority that I found could broadly be categorised according to my Top Five, with dead mothers well and truly coming out on top. It certainly gave me a bit of a chill to see how obsessed newspapers seem to be with this theme. And what the stakes of playing the perfection game might be.

Me? I’d rather have a life than be perfect.