{"id":24476,"date":"2023-03-17T10:54:00","date_gmt":"2023-03-17T05:24:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.tarshi.net\/inplainspeak\/?p=24476"},"modified":"2023-03-17T11:20:22","modified_gmt":"2023-03-17T05:50:22","slug":"the-motherhood-dilemma","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.tarshi.net\/inplainspeak\/the-motherhood-dilemma\/","title":{"rendered":"The Motherhood Dilemma"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

In Ann Patchett\u2019s The Dutch House<\/em>, a mother runs away, leaving behind her young kids. Years later, she returns \u2013 the daughter is forgiving, but the son is distant. When the brother confronts his sister for her acceptance of their estranged mother, he asks, \u201cWhat kind of person leaves their kids?\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

She answers, \u201cMen leave their children all the time and the world celebrates them for it. The Buddha left and Odysseus left and no one gave a shit about their sons. They set out on their noble journeys to do whatever the hell they wanted to do and thousands of years later we\u2019re still singing about it.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It is women\u2019s socio-economic role to produce babies and to nurture them. Reproductive labour, which forms the backbone of a capitalist society, goes unnoticed and unpaid, and women are expected to perform it without complaint. These expectations, as Patchett rightly points out, are limited to women. In Marriage Story<\/em>, a divorce lawyer details how fathers are expected to be silent, selfish and unreliable, while we don\u2019t accept any of those failings in women. She sums up, \u201c\u2026 the basis of our Judeo-Christian whatever is Mary, Mother of Jesus, and she’s perfect. She’s a virgin who gives birth, unwaveringly supports her child and holds his dead body when he’s gone. And the dad isn’t there.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The idealisation of motherhood is crucial to our culture; it is important that the mother is self-sacrificing. This sacrificial instinct isn\u2019t limited to women\u2019s behaviour. It goes on to encompass the entirety of her corporeality and the way she performs it. In its extremities, it valorises women\u2019s pain, most visible in the societal disdain for epidurals and caesareans. Women mustn\u2019t take drugs to ease their pain, there is excessive regard for those who give birth \u2018naturally\u2019. Documenting these hypocrisies in her book (M)otherhood<\/em>, Pragya Agarwal writes, \u201cThese women were the true mothers, the ones who were cooking for the husband and the family in the hour after they gave birth, which they often did smiling. Never grimacing, never screaming, never incapacitated after the ordeal of childbirth.\u201d Implicit in this desensitization is also the absolute disregard for women\u2019s mental health, whether during pregnancy or after. There exists a lot of stigma around post-partum depression, often discouraging women from seeking medical help.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Any deviation from this norm is seen as a woman dodging her reproductive duties. When Priyanka Chopra and her partner Nick Jonas decided to have a child through surrogacy, the Internet was flooded with criticisms of her choice. There were tirades against her vanity and wealth, but the point to the criticism is much simpler \u2013 what grants you the right to call yourself a mother is the unflinching \u2018willingness\u2019 to sacrifice. In \u2018renting a womb,\u2019 Chopra committed the greatest folly of all, treasuring your own career over your maternal duty of bearing your child.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In Chopra\u2019s own response<\/a>, she is careful not to stray too far from the narrative herself: \u201cYou don\u2019t know me. You don\u2019t know what I\u2019ve been through. And just because I don\u2019t want to make my medical history, or my daughter\u2019s, public [sic] doesn\u2019t give you the right to make up whatever the reasons were.\u201d Chopra defends her privacy but falls short of acknowledging the significance of her autonomy. The societal obsession with women\u2019s wombs is not limited to an invasion of another\u2019s privacy, nor is it a consequence of a cultural fixation on gossip. It is a carefully constructed adage that must be bowed down to in order to defend a patriarchal structure: women must cherish motherhood above all. Since women\u2019s wombs exclusively service this structure, it is their duty to accept the pain biology confers.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The notion of choice and autonomy is either entirely missing or conditional; no truly liberating framework exists. Even when women are allowed to not have a child, they must offer a convincing explanation for what they plan on doing instead. In Sheila Heti\u2019s Motherhood<\/em>, a girl interrupts a Marxist intellectual intent on not having children, and says, \u201cBeing a woman, you can\u2019t just say you don\u2019t want a child. You have to have some big plan or idea of what you\u2019re going to do instead. And it better be something great.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Gendered vocabulary, Agarwal points out, furthers societal myths. Fertility is a woman\u2019s biggest asset, and she is responsible for it, in ways men are not. Implicit in the vocabulary \u2018child-bearer\u2019, is the notion of women being property, and their wombs being the site of profit. Men may be called \u2018sterile,\u2019 but never \u2018barren\u2019. The stake society sees in another woman\u2019s child would have one believe children are societal property. And yet, we know, single mothers frequently face economic struggles<\/a> compounded with issues of high unemployment rates, child-care, and affordability. In her book, Agarwal adequately sums up the experience as \u201cresponsibility sans choice\u201d.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Societal narratives around motherhood assume a universal category of the mother, on to whom are imposed gendered expectations. Recent feminist discourse reveals this assumption to be false. Women, in the way Sara Ahmed uses the term in her book Living a Feminist Life<\/em>, is for all those \u201cwho travel under the sign woman\u201d. The diversity of these experiences are not considered in any of our accounts, even those that consciously do the work of subversion, like Agarwal\u2019s book. However, Agarwal points us to an important lacuna, a problem she encountered while writing her book, \u201cI am unable to fall back on hard science, data, and research here, as so little has been done in this area.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In the absence of this research, any endeavour to incorporate these experiences is tokenistic. Encouraging these conversations directs the discourse to the individual, away from a \u201cbiologically predetermined reality\u201d. The consequence, Agarwal hopes, is a re-imagination of motherhood, \u201cas women\u2019s choice rather than destiny\u201d.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Cover Image: Photo by Markus Winkler<\/a> on Unsplash<\/a> <\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The idealisation of motherhood is crucial to our culture; it is important that the mother is self-sacrificing. This sacrificial instinct isn\u2019t limited to women\u2019s behaviour. It goes on to encompass the entirety of her corporeality and the way she performs it.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":450,"featured_media":24477,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1,3977,8],"tags":[4049,380,445,26,4048,689,4046,4045,2390,30,25,4047,298,499],"class_list":{"0":"post-24476","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-categories","8":"category-narratives-and-sexuality","9":"category-voices","10":"tag-birth","11":"tag-children","12":"tag-fertility","13":"tag-gender","14":"tag-maternity","15":"tag-motherhood","16":"tag-mothering","17":"tag-mothers","18":"tag-narratives","19":"tag-objectification","20":"tag-sexualities","21":"tag-societal-norms","22":"tag-stereotypes","23":"tag-women"},"menu_order":0,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.tarshi.net\/inplainspeak\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24476","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.tarshi.net\/inplainspeak\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.tarshi.net\/inplainspeak\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.tarshi.net\/inplainspeak\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/450"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.tarshi.net\/inplainspeak\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=24476"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.tarshi.net\/inplainspeak\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24476\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":24506,"href":"https:\/\/www.tarshi.net\/inplainspeak\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24476\/revisions\/24506"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.tarshi.net\/inplainspeak\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/24477"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.tarshi.net\/inplainspeak\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=24476"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.tarshi.net\/inplainspeak\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=24476"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.tarshi.net\/inplainspeak\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=24476"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}