Moms are the best
What I’m Writing
Megan Markle’s Post-Partum Photo Was Subtly Radical. Yeah, she was in a chic dress and heels. But she also had the body of a woman who just had a baby — something rare to see from celebrities.
What I’m Reading
Game of Crones by Laura Lippman. Lippman became a mother in her 50s, and writes so winningly about all the good things that come with that, and the very human fear of not being able to write the end of our own stories.
This is one of the better meditations on masculinity I’ve read in a while. It would have been easy to Hylton to portray his cousin as the archetype of toxic masculinity and himself as a gentler decent man, but he dug into all of it, as unsparing with himself as anyone else.
Speaking of masculinity, the kids are all right (or at least the talented feminist-minded ones who to go Brown). “Somewhere inside each man is a list of all the other men he’s loved without ever finding the words to tell them so.”
My kingdom for the work ethic of Danielle Steele.
My friend and New America co-fellow Jonathan Katz has a new newsletter and it’s incredible. Read it! You will learn a lot.
This is such a great essay on the meditative power of walking in big cities, by Judnick Mayard. When I moved to Washington, exploring on foot was the first thing I did, and most days, I still walk for an hour or two. “Walking is in and of itself a practice in empathy, which is the only thing I seek to produce in my work,” Mayard writes. “You spend time walking the streets, and you cannot ignore what you see in them. The pain, the joy, the hope are all there in front of you.”
The View From Here
I’m back in DC this week, and spent this rainy weekend curled up with my cats and husband, which was glorious. Yesterday was Mother’s Day, and my own mom is in town visiting from Seattle, which has been just lovely. In lieu of flowers, I made her steak au poivre (I used Ina’s recipe, of course) and picked up a tart sparkly red and a big funky peppery Cabernet Franc from one of my favorite shops. And I spent the day thinking about moms.
It’s extraordinarily lucky to have a great mother. We pay a lot of lip service to how much we value motherhood (it’s the most important job in the world!) and how every mother loves their children unconditionally and does their best for them.
But both of those things are very demonstrably untrue.
You’ve heard this before: If we really valued mothers (and parents in general), we would not be the only developed nation without paid maternity leave — we would instead have generous parental leave policies, with incentives for men to take leave as well. If we really valued motherhood — if we really believed it was the hardest and most important job in the world — we would insist it be fully voluntary; we wouldn’t even debate things like contraception and abortion because no one should be legally forced into the hardest and most important job in the world. If we really valued mothers, we would take simple steps to keep women from dying unnecessarily — we would widely vaccinate against cervical cancer; we would address our absurd rate of maternal mortality in the United States, and the enormous racial gap in who lives and who dies in giving life; we would combat domestic violence and recognize that it’s abusers with guns who do the deadliest damage to women. It is simply false that we in the United States value motherhood much at all.
But we also aren’t particularly honest about mothers, either.
Mothers, in our cultural storytelling, are either angels or villains, selfless nurturers or deranged Mommie Dearests. Feminists, for good reason, defend mothers, especially “bad” mothers of various kinds: the great many mothers who also have abortions; the great many mothers who put their kids in daycare; the silenced mothers who placed their children for adoption; the stigmatized mothers who don’t have custody of their children; the extraordinarily demonized mothers who use drugs while pregnant. This is a positive and necessary thing. But in doing so, we also fall back on familiar tropes: That every mother is doing her best. That every mother loves her children. That it’s systematic failures, not personal ones, that make for bad mothers.
What if every mother isn’t doing her best, or even trying to? What if every mother doesn’t love her children? What if mothers are just as capable as anyone else of being selfish, violent, sociopathic, idiotic, and negligent?
These are thorny questions, in part because we have so thoroughly socially venerated motherhood (I suspect in exchange for politically and financially neglecting it, and as a way to keep women obligated to mother so that men can maintain their hold on power and “have it all”). They are also thorny in part because we punish “bad” mothers, often severely, and our definition of “bad” is skewed, usually having more to do with race, poverty, and culture than anything else. We also assume maternal love is biological and innate. For most women perhaps it is. But for all women?
Mothers abuse, neglect, mistreat, and reject their children. Not all mothers, and not most mothers, but even some mothers still adds up to a lot of mothers — billions of mothers, and billions of abused, neglected, mistreated, rejected children. The overwhelming majority of these women and girls (and some of them are indeed just girls) also, I suspect, have been abused, neglected, mistreated and rejected themselves; I would also guess that the first person these women abuse, neglect, mistreat or reject is themselves.
Babies hold promise. Where motherhood is a choice, babies offer redemption. Where it’s not, babies confirm adulthood. (Sometimes — usually? — babies promise both). We believe that maternity means automatic love, and that maternal love is selfless; we believe motherhood is a path to growth. We pretend like this just happens, like human beings are biological animals but not social ones; like motherhood is a status, not a relationship. Like how to mother well isn’t learned and cultivated and refined and worked at.
The idea of motherhood as a status also turns it static. It situates a child as an extension of her mother, and defines women by their childbearing. Motherhood imagined as a relationship with a distinct, initially totally vulnerable individual who you have intentionally invited into your life and agreed to tend to, teach, and grow into independence? That is a different project than just “I am a mom.”
It’s a project that allows for maternal independence — motherhood may be an important relationship in a woman’s life, perhaps even the most important, but like any external relationship it is not wholly definitional. It gives motherhood its due as a two-way process, and as an evolutionary one, not a fixed position. It recognizes that, like any relationship, no participant is at their best at every moment; no participant is even doing their best at every moment. The bar for success of not perfection, or some Hallmarked approximation of it. The bar is: Do you keep showing up, looking in as much as you look out, and try to do better? Are you present and kind? Do you work to truly see and hear the other person, to meet their needs and express your own?
It also recognizes that some relationships sour and, sometimes, they end. I have met far too many adult children who carry the guilt of estrangement or resentment, for whom Mother’s Day is remarkably painful. At their best, family relationships are enduring, and there can be magic at the end of working through the rough parts. But everyone has to want to work through those rough parts. If there is no relationship to work through, only a status, well — then there is no relationship to salvage. If this is you, know that you are seen and you are very far from alone.
If you are lucky to be the child of a kind, nurturing, generous mother (hi, that’s me), this is also a good opportunity to step back from the platitudes of World’s Best Mom and think of the layers of care (physical, emotional, psychological, financial) that your mother spend years upon years building. She didn’t become a great mother the day she birthed you (or adopted you or gained custody of you or otherwise joined her life with yours). She became a great mother because she mothered you. Maybe she did that with her own hands, every day, doing her part to forge a relationship with small you. Maybe she knew her hands couldn’t hold you, and so she made a decision to put you in different arms, for a little while or forever. Maybe you’re a mother now and the work your own mother did is more visible and visceral than ever. Maybe you’re a mother now and the work your mother didn’t do is more viscerally painful than you imagined.
It’s this work that I am grateful for today. What a profound gift, not just to bring life into the world, but to dedicate so much of one’s life to the cultivation of a whole, separate human being, and the risky and fragile two-way relationship that entails.
Happy Mother’s Day (a day late) to the great moms out there, and the moms who don’t feel like they’re doing so great (my bet is that if you’re conscious enough to be worried about it, you’re probably fine). Happy Mother’s Day to the aunties, grandmas, sisters, friends, teachers, and many other women who mother those of us who have needed it. We are lucky for all of you.
And of course happy Mother’s Day most of all to the actual World’s Best Mom.
Incoming later this week: A new yoga series; very addictive sipping broth; and an interview with an incredible Honduran women’s rights activist on why women are fleeing her nation and how the US abortion wars get exported abroad.
xx Jill