Motherhood - the secret society
You've read the books, bought the recommended equipment,
welcomed your passionately anticipated bundle of joy into the
world… But did anyone tell you what being a mum was really going to
be like? Welcome to the secret society of motherhood, says midwife
Paula Brasovan.
I read a text on motherhood recently that summarised a
piece of research with, "The feeling of being buried alive is now a
commonplace experience of motherhood." This line stopped me in my
tracks, and I've been mulling it over ever since.
Supporting women is why I chose to become
a midwife. Over the years, I have observed my antenatal practice
becoming more and more oriented around trying to open a dialogue
about motherhood rather than being solely focused on pregnancy: In
no way to diminish the experience of pregnancy, but rather to try
to assist other women in breaking down the veil of silence that
surrounds what I have called "the secret society." My postnatal
care increasingly deals with the shock, elation, exhaustion,
confusion, depression, panic, and utmost inability to "measure up"
to the expectations that our peers, our society, and we ourselves
place upon this most important way of life.
I entered midwifery childless and, in my
final year, fell pregnant with what my friends and I giggled would
be my "practical" study of the subject. What I discovered with my
"research" was something that has taken me five years (and two
children) to verbalise. After the birth of my children, I found
that I had inadvertently become a member of the secret society
of motherhood. I had never stopped to think about the role of
motherhood - the rite of passage when you become someone other than
who you had always previously been. I had no idea what the
membership entailed until after I had joined. I discovered that
while deeply loving my children and being their mother, I was
repeatedly confronted with feelings of discontent and a "loss of
self". I spent years feeling like I was a total failure because of
the guilt of actually "not liking it" quite often, despite the
absolute devotion and love I also had. I didn't know that
this was normal. I thought I just couldn't cut the mustard, so to
speak. Therein lies the secret - and the silence (for me, now
broken).
Mothers can find themselves entangled in
an on-going dance of ambivalence, highs and lows, fierce
indescribable love in times, and an overwhelming urge to flee to
the hills in others. Motherhood is embroiled with both fulfiIlment
and a longing to be other than what you have become. I, like
many mothers I meet, felt I had to be the "perfect" mother. I
approached motherhood like my work, with an "academic mind" as if
it was a series of problems that needed to be solved, and that
somehow it would fit into all the contemporary values that stress
achievement, success, control, high performance culture, and
autonomy. It just so happens that motherhood is utterly
subversive to having any of these values as one's highest of
aspirations.
As a midwife, I'm used to walking into
homes and seeing the baffled, panic-stricken look in the eyes of
new mothers - the look that explicitly reveals, "This is NOT what I
signed up for!" I usually say gently, "Welcome to the secret
society of motherhood." Some would be brave enough to reveal the
extent of her distress by wanting to continue the dialogue and ask
me, "Why is it like this?" But most of us will turn our turmoil
about motherhood into an "it could always be worse" type of
scenario, or say something like, "Oh, but it's so rewarding!", or
mention a positive as if this will negate the negative. And really,
what this does is mimic society's response to these feelings and
devalues the truth in our experience, breeding resentment, guilt,
and a sense of failure.
And then, even worse, we turn on
each other, in the hopes of finding an anchor by making comparisons
with others. I could never before comprehend how it was
that some mothers managed to walk around in nice clothes, having
put on make-up and done their hair. I used to tell myself that
their children obviously couldn't possibly be as happy as mine
because they surely wouldn't have been able to manage their own
appearance and find the time to play with their kids "like I do".
It dawned on me, however, some four years later, that those women
were far cleverer than me, and managed to find refuge in the only
place in their home with a lock on it - the bathroom.
Society does not allow any space for the
innate struggles of motherhood, and prefers to marginalise women's
experience with labels such as "the baby blues" and "post natal
depression". The idea that we are sold is this: Get all the gear,
read all the books, give birth, establish a routine, and then get
back to normal (your "old" self). When this unobtainable ideal
doesn't happen, women who mother therefore fail to qualify as
"normal" in society. I recall a nurse saying to me, in a lecture
where we were discussing a scenario of a woman struggling with
breastfeeding and motherhood, "But if you tell women it's hard,
then you make it hard!" She adamantly believed that acknowledging
the difficulties so many women face would somehow make it harder. I
was baffled by her logic and could only initially reply, "But it is
hard." If women say motherhood is hard, but only in secret to one
another, only after we become mothers, and not to our sisters who
come after us, and only in feminist texts, then what does this
serve? If someone says out loud that this is hard and we rebuke the
comment with some "stiff upper lip" mentality, then we're not
listening. What happens to that expression of a feeling, of a
situation, that goes unacknowledged? The secret society has to be
made public! After all, motherhood is at the very core of
humanity.
Indeed, the ambivalence of motherhood is a
subject that has been studied for decades now. Rozsika Parker,
Susan Maushart, Ann Oakely, and Rima Apple, to name but a few, have
devoted much of their lives to examining this intensely common and
equally silent development of the maternal psyche. What their
research reveals is that the estimation of the demands of
motherhood is unbelievably ill-informed and that the expectation of
seamlessly blending motherhood, relationships, and career into a
self-actualised whole will often fail miserably. In one study I
examined, the majority of women with young families said they
preferred to do no paid work at all, but the reality is that a vast
amount of women with young children do paid work despite the fact
that "the bulk of the chores have not shifted away from women." The
daily stress then becomes a chronic-fatigue lifestyle. In another
it stated that women are increasingly looking to work as an escape
from home, and that paid work is considered by a lot of women
as a form of "recreation." Recreation? What happened to reading a
book on the beach with a cocktail? Has the function of our families
become predicated on the dismembering of women themselves when they
see more work as their way of getting some time to enjoy
themselves?
Where motherhood used to be an unavoidable
part of the fabric of daily social life, we now have to seek
"training" and "expert" advice in caring for our children. But
"mothering from a book" can exacerbate the anxiety and guilt,
because you don't learn to trust yourself. Before my first child
was born, I read a book that talked about the merits of a child
essentially being continuously held until crawling. I tried to
stick to this so rigorously, because it stated that this was what
made children healthier, happier and secure, that I didn't even
succumb to buying a stroller until she was over 10 months old. The
book failed to mention the cost of such an endeavour when you don't
live in a long house with a tribe of mothers all sharing childcare,
feeding, domestics, and work! Perhaps (if) these children were
happier and more secure, it was because there was a "collective
responsibility" to raising children, shared and embraced by
the whole community.
Books imply that motherhood is some kind
of learnable sequence of events: That infant/child behaviour is (or
can be, if "managed properly") malleable and predictable. What
really matters is practical experience with babies and children;
support from partners, family, society, and friends; acceptance
that children have personalities that make them
genetically/spiritually predisposed to relatively settled
behaviours; and realising that becoming a mother is a
process. It happens slowly, in small increments and degrees,
with accumulated experience, observation, wisdom, and
confidence.
Listening to the broken silence
It is true that the "inner conviction that the hard and often
lonely work of mothering is an infinitely worthwhile endeavour"
never wavered for me. I imagine this to be true also for the
vast majority of mothers. The fulfillment and intense joy that
children bring is beyond all words to describe, and if I knew then
what I know now, I would absolutely still choose my life. One laugh
out of my children's mouths cradles the entirety of my soul.
In my personal experience of motherhood,
my biggest struggles to date have been not with my children, but
from being positioned to have to also be the breadwinner, have a
career, still be fit and look good, have a social life, find time
for myself, friends and family, have a relationship with my
partner, continuously study for my profession, do hobbies and have
interests "outside of home and work", and be happy with this
load and not grumble about it very much. Mothering small children
(and perhaps stretching it to include part-time work) would be more
than enough for me. What really saddens me is that women and
society seem to have a sense of hubris attached to just how much we
can take on and do - like "full-time" mothers are taking the easy
road or somehow "opting-out", completely misrepresenting and
devaluing the role.
I envy my mother's generation. She was
able to stay home with my sister and me until we were in school
full-time. She didn't have to concentrate on anything more than
being our great mum for those years, and so I imagine that somehow
she didn't have to juggle quite so many balls so tenuously in the
air. I don't know though if this is entirely true, as she never
really said - perhaps her silence in fact reinforces that for each
generation of mothers, ambivalence is present. I do know that my
own mother does not report feeling a "loss of herself" to the
degree to which I have, and she does often say that "mothers of
today are taking on too much". I happen to agree. Diminishing your
own needs for the sake of your family means you are living a lie,
no matter how greatly intended your motives are. But perhaps we, as
mothers need to actually include ourselves in our definition of
"our family needs." After all, aren't we part of the family?
I know full-time motherhood isn't for
everyone and I hope readers will not find any judgement in my
preferred longing to be a full-time mother. I fully appreciate the
love of one's work (I do love being a midwife), or the need to hide
(I am one of those mothers who sees work as a break at times, too).
Motherhood is a full time role that seems to be on top of a lot of
other full time roles for women. I hope that the next generation of
mothers continues to break the silence and take the women's
movement one step beyond having it all, being it all, doing it all
- to being authentically ourselves, and admitting our limitations.
Maushart writes: "We will never attain the goal of living
comfortably in our choices as mothers until we acknowledge that we
have choices and even more importantly that we deserve to have
them." Feeling buried alive is not how anyone should be feeling,
least of all the mothers of us all.
Paula Brasovan is a registered midwife and the busy
mother of two young children. She lives in
Auckland.
References
* Apple, R. Perfect Motherhood. 2006: Rutgers University
Press, USA.
* Bittman, M (1991). "Juggling Time: How Australian families use
time. Prepared for the office of the status of women." 1991: Dept.
of the Prime Minister and Cabinet, Canberra, Australia
* Brannen, J and Moss, P. Managing Mothers: Dual Earner Households
after Maternity Leave. 1990: Unvin Hyman, UK.
* Hochschild, A. The time Bind: When Work Becomes Home and Home
Becomes Work. 1991: Holt and Company, USA
* Hochschild, A and Machung, A. The Second Shift: Working Parents
and The Revolution At Home. 1989: Penguin, USA
* Maushart, S. The Mask of Motherhood. 2000: Penguin, USA
* Oakley, A. Social Support and Motherhood. 1992: Oxford and
Cambridge Press, UK
* Parker, R. Torn in Two: The Experience of Maternal Ambivalence.
2005: Virago Press, UK
* Rothman, B. Recreating Motherhood: Ideology and Technology in a
Patriarchal Society. 1990: WW Norton, USA
As seen in OHbaby!
magazine Issue 10: 2010
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