Motherhood convinces many women that they should, as one eloquent writer put it, be “lauded.” Self-sacrifice demands praise, honor, glory. Afterall, she gave up being a high-powered lawyer for these rotten kids; she deserves homage.
Ah, but demanding forced shows of gratitude, government paychecks for butts cleaned, and recognition for every time you washed the dishes (the machine did most of it, let’s be honest), we give up the joy of quiet satisfaction. Assuredly, this is not the smug, self-righteousness of knowing you are better than everyone else. That is a feeling unlikely to bring peace. No, it is the joyful feeling of knowing you are serving and that your service will bear fruit.
That does not mean mothers should expect to be a doormat. The aforementioned writer at Erstwhile Dear rightly notes that regularly reevaluating patterns of family life is the key to success. Mother’s Day and birthdays are not the time to weep and rage at everyone’s “abuse” and ingrained habits of unhelpfulness and ingratitude. Instead, on ordinary days, course correct the behaviors and habits that are unpleasant or destructive. Then, on those Very Important, Very Meaningful days of Great Expectation, mothers can simply smile at whatever small effort was made to render the day infinitesimally more special than any other.
But isn’t it so extraordinarily difficult to care for people? Shouldn’t we be revolutionizing motherhood and expanding the umbrella of who is considered a “mother” so that more people shoulder the burden of caring whose socks match and what on Earth we are having for dinner? Nice in theory, but practically unlikely to succeed.
As often is the case, we do well to return to the sinews of flesh with which we move through the world and come to know ourselves. There is a message in the body and the actions it takes, revealing meaning that can so easily elude us. Where do babies come from? Well, it’s all rather mysterious. Mothers have been trained to take credit for “producing” their children; we now lab order babies of desired traits, free from certain genetic defects; celebrities and mainstream parents in wealthy societies alike pay to have a wee seedling baby deposited in a rented womb for commercial gestation. But still the experience of pregnancy is more just feeling ill and tired than of commanding some great feat of human engineering.
Motherhood, physically speaking, consists of receiving a gift not becoming the goddess who gives life. That is not, as yet, within our power, nor will it ever be. If one day we advanced to the stage of gestating babies in artificial wombs, theoretically eliminating that meddling middleman known as the mother, we still did not make our own life nor can we sustain ourselves in being. Life is not at our command, however much in the short run we may cultivate the illusion.
From the beginning, motherhood is a quiet growing and becoming while accepting someone who is a gift. That does not mean that mothers must be biological; in situations of deficit, adoptive mothers, spiritual mothers, and mother-figures play an important and undeniably maternal role. It also does not mean that mothers are somehow not allowed to be loud. “Be loud”; “take up space,” as the fat activists demand (not derogatory, apparently). Do all those things, but for goodness’s sake be interesting! Listening to a mother demand cooperation in her “emotional labor” and gratitude for her every self-less inclination is tacky. Don’t be tacky.
In an age in which so many of us are removed from intergenerational wisdom that was perhaps once a more common inheritance, we wrongly think that the role of parents is to radically transform their offspring by correcting all the inexcusable errors of their own parents (good luck!). One place this temptation plays out is in cultivating children’s awareness of what their mothers do. Many children mistakenly (or, more often, accurately) think that their mothers’ professional endeavors consist of talking to their friends online. This is an outrage to women everywhere or should be, we are told.
Is it? There is such a marvel awaiting children who know not what their mothers do when they have to manage their own homes one day and discover just how much their mothers did every day. At some distant future time, discovering artwork, poetry, quilts, and sundry other little accomplishments made by mothers might astonish grown children. Do we want our children to wonder lovingly, “How did she do all those wonderful things for us?” someday or do we want to harangue them shrilly, “Don’t you know how much I do for you? Don’t you know how much I work?” The answer should be (should be, in any event) obvious.
Let us leave off with the mother of the seven martyred sons in the Second Book of Maccabees: “She said to them: I know not how you were formed in my womb: for I neither gave you breath, nor soul, nor life, neither did I frame the limbs of every one of you. But the Creator of the world, that formed the nativity of man, and that found out the origin of all, he will restore to you again in his mercy, both breath and life, as now you despise yourselves for the sake of his laws” (2Maccabees 7:22-23).
Restoring mystery in motherhood gives mothers the freedom to not fret about what other people think they are doing and accept that what they are doing may not be lauded but is good.
