wildfire/19_chap13.html

<h1>CHAPTER 13</h1>
<h2>Motherhood: The Last Taboo</h2>
<p>Sometimes when I want to break quickly through the social facade of a woman who is a mother, I quietly drop into the conversation something like "Motherhood is terrible, isn't it?" Although there are always a few who exclaim in shocked tones, "Oh no, I think it's <i>wonderful</i>," I am surprised how often women will dispense with all pretense and admit, sometimes with tears, that yes, it <i>is</i> terrible. Or look at me in surprise and, seeing that I am serious, admit with relief, "It's a nightmare!"</p>
<p>Some mothers tell me that, though their experience has been agonizing, they believe they have learned lessons from it that they could have learned in no other way. I agree that I have learned from it but any positive lessons I learned I could have learned in other ways and the many negative habits patriarchal motherhood reinforced - such as self-sacrifice - I could have done without altogether.</p>
<p>As is true of all other experiences in life, motherhood is not the means to some other end, a way, for instance, to learn to be a more patient, more loving person. It must satisfy our needs for thoughtful engagement, creativity, pleasure, and freedom every moment or it is neither good for us nor for children. That it meets so few of these needs so little of the time is evidence that it is not as it should be and that we collaborate by being involved in it <i>as it is</i>.</p>
<p>Since motherhood was the original battleground of patriarchy, it is small wonder that it is now fraught with tumultuous emotions, contradictions, misperceptions, and illusions. Or that there is terrific denial among women about the reality of the motherhood experience. It has been made our sine qua non; more than that, our raison d'etre, and, accepting this, we have an enormous stake in believing all men's lies about it.</p>
<p>But I have thought about it for 26 years, and though I know every woman's experience is unique, I have heard enough mothers' confessions to know that I am not alone in my conclusions.</p>
<p>I hardly need point out that this is not because our children are not lovable or that we do not love them thoroughly. Nor do I need to point out that finding motherhood unbearable in patriarchy is to admit that one is not a worthy woman, not a decent, kind, valuable human being, making us afraid to be honest with one another about motherhood, afraid to feel, let alone to admit, how desperately oppressive it is, what a torture rack men have made of it to punish us for our greater creative powers.</p>
<p>Even in the Women's Movement to admit this is taboo. Even among ourselves we fear that not kneeling at the motherhood shrine will make us look weak and incompetent and unfeeling. We are afraid that if we speak the truth of our lives as mothers, we will find ourselves standing alone, the unnatural, scorned exception; that if we were to tell what agony motherhood has been for us, women of all political persuasions might fall upon us in rage, so invested are women in keeping the fathers' last guilty secret: that making motherhood horrific while brainwashing us to believe instead that it is beatific, they have effectively secured our minds and hearts, our cooperation.</p>
<p>When Ann Landers asked parents to write in and tell her whether they would have children if they could do it all over again, she received 10,000 replies. Because they could be anonymous, 70 percent said unequivocally, "Not on your life!" I suspect the merest fraction of that number would have admitted this if they had thought their friends or relatives would find out.</p>
<p>What is the matter with motherhood? I'm <i>certain</i> that nothing is intrinsically woman-destroying about it, that it could be marvelous for both mothers and children. But something is desperately wrong with motherhood as a patriarchal institution. Patriarchy, after all, arose in history as men's response to the power of women as mothers. A substantial part of its purpose, therefore, was to subvert motherhood, to plunge it from the apex of status and esteem to the nadir, to make mothers, instead of the <i>most</i>, the <i>least</i> important, least credible people in society, therefore <i>least</i> able to influence anyone, including and most especially the children whom fathers had so recently come to own.</p>
<p>And then, turning the screw, they programmed women to believe that motherhood defined us completely, that if we didn't have children, we were nobody. We have been caught in a classic double bind ever since - we are nobody if we <i>are</i> mothers, nobody if we <i>aren't</i>.</p>
<p>The agony of motherhood in patriarchy is that we are prevented from mothering our children. Looking back after four children and 26 years of motherhood, it seems to me that the moment I had my babies, society tied my hands and feet, stuffed a sock in my mouth, and forced me to sit helplessly by while it systematically tortured and brainwashed and poisoned my children. Men have reduced mothering to feeding, clothing, and comforting - and suffering because this is not enough. It is neither what women are capable of nor need mothering to be.</p>
<p>It seems to me that mothering is the business of making the world amenable to children, seeing to it, for example, that every child born is immensely valued for being exactly who they are, making a world in which they therefore automatically love and cherish themselves, a safe, wholesome, healthful world, a world in which they can cooperate, not compete, can have time to be children, are encouraged to listen to their own voices so they will learn to have integrity and to rule themselves with wisdom and mercy, a world in which they can be themselves fully.</p>
<p>I want a world in which women can <i>mother</i>, not just bear children and keep them alive the best we can in a world that hates them and wants to kill them because they are ours. <i>That</i> is patriarchy's definition of motherhood, not mine.</p>
<p>Patriarchy continues to define for women what we want, continues to control the discussion of mothering. Which of us, for instance, would ever have thought of such a hideous idea as child care centers, for instance? It simply would not have occurred to mothers to solve the problem of child care in a way so profoundly unsatisfactory for both children and adults and ultimately for all of society.</p>
<p>Women, if we had felt powerful and had been setting the terms of our own debate, would never have been persuaded by men to accept child care centers as one of our "issues" (nearly all of which men have defined for us). We would have understood that the reason parents cannot care for children is that men's world is organized insanely, from its basic life-negating values out through every aspect of life. We would have begun, as we have, to ask the world-changing questions: what do <i>we</i> value? How do we want to live? What kinds of work really need to be done? How many hours a day of work would that take per person? How could we organize society so that everyone's needs could be met, only useful and healthful work would be done, and everyone would have time to live?</p>
<p>I dream of a world in which women are willing to take responsibility for reshaping the world. I dream of a world in which children do not entrust their lives to us only to have us, traitor-like, turn them over to the soul-killing, joy-destroying agents of patriarchy -particularly its schools.</p>
<p>Though the teachers in patriarchy's schools are mostly women, regardless of their bravery and gifts they are fronting unwittingly for the fathers. Daily they enculturate children with patriarchal values and encourage patriarchal thought and behavior. I am not the only mother who has watched and protested futilely in misery and rage while the schools battered her children's psyches and minds. I can't remember why I ever thought I had to send them there.</p>
<p>I ask the young women now having babies everywhere if they are prepared to make a new world for their children. Are they, for instance, prepared to rethink men's competitive, hierarchical, creativity-murdering education altogether?<a href="#fn1">[1]</a> I ask them if they are ready perhaps to get others like themselves together to do <i>themselves</i> whatever their children need. Are they ready to go ahead on their own without relying on men's imprimatur or funding?</p>
<p>We are fond of asserting that though men obviously do not care about the well-being of children, fortunately women do. But to the degree that women are not prepared to take full responsibility for creating from the ground up the world their children need, to the degree that they are still in their dependent, victim, powerless minds, I believe their having children is as immoral as anything men do. Women's passivity is not excused by men's evil. Neither is it less destructive.</p>
<p>I would go farther than asserting the immorality of bringing children into men's childtorturing world. I would say that any conscious woman who bears a child without the intent to structure her child's environment <i>actively and fully</i> so that that child cannot be destroyed daily by the fathers is committing a crime against humanity.</p>
<p>It is as reprehensible as it is unnecessary any longer to bring children into the old world. We are capable of doing something completely different and I think we do not need to worry much about what that something is. We can begin by doing <i>anything</i> else; anything else will be a sign that we are not morally and spiritually dead, anything else will be an incredible achievement, a massive improvement, a movement toward life and health and a cause for rejoicing.</p>
<p>If we choose to be mothers, we have no choice but to organize our world as it needs to be for mothers and children alike. The most obvious and crucial part of our living in a new, feminist society will be that we make taking women and children seriously our first priority, that we treat them as the sacred, holy ones they are.</p>

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<p><a id="fn1">[1]</a> Marge Piercy has done a remarkable job of this in <i>Woman on the Edge of Time</i>. Ballanline Books: New York. 1976.</p>