|
|
|
|
What About Motherhood? Minor Details |
|
For many grown kids, standing in front of the Mother's Day cards at the store is an exercise of mixed feelings - hope, sadness, love, guilt, fear, denial, and confusion. Finding the one card that says exactly how you feel without giving in to Hallmark-induced fantasies about the perfect mother is a challenge as difficult as any we may face.
A friend of mine who's an English professor claims that there are no good poems about mothers in all of English literature. They all end up like those sentimental greeting card rhymes. Our mothers have generally done the best they could with what they were given about motherhood from a culture that's filled with messages that extol motherhood while taking away as much from mothers as possible. And all the conservatives' high-minded blather about valuing motherhood is suspiciously empty to mothers who suspect that something else is really going on around them. We certainly talk a good line about the value of motherhood, but our real values are betrayed by the fact that we never use mothering as a model for dealing with real problems. In a culture that still doesn't really value women as men's equals, we rather brag about putting women and mothers on pedestals. Balancing up there precariously, they're supposed to appreciate the fact that they're shelved up on those narrow pillars. Why, then, would they ever want powerful equality, pay, or monetary benefits? Instead of "mothering" problems, we use political, economic and social models that replicate punishing fathers and masculine ideals fundamental to a war-based economy. We don't "mother" our issues. We have wars on everything - drugs, violence, terrorism, illiteracy, poverty, AIDS, delinquency, crime. And like well-conditioned males, we keep on warring whether we win any of the "wars" or not. Like our other poorly paid professionals who also deal with children and the needy, mothers are expected to settle for "fulfillment." In fact, women are taught that it's motherhood that will ultimately fulfill them as women. And that should be enough. Instead of mainstream culture embracing the fact that healthy psychological fulfilment is not found in others but in oneself, women are told that their fulfillment needs will be met in bearing and raising children. Society pictures the ideal woman as the mother who has sacrificed her own life goals, dreams, personal career, emotional and romantic life, and aspirations for a husband's fulfillment and for children. To the extent that this doesn't work, instead of therapy or group support, the common response is for mothers to apply more pressure on children to fulfill women's needs. Without another life beyond their children, without the financial and retirement security of a pension, without investments except those of a husband who could leave them for someone else, all their hope relies on the loyalty and emotional dependence of their kids. Then women are told that the ideal mother stays at home with the children, and preferably home schools them. There's little praise for the stay-at-home father and significantly less blame for failing fathers, but much concern about mothers 'balancing" work and children so as to be Super Moms. And the implication is always that the mother's (not the father's) career should suffer. The more pressure we put on mothers instead of fathers, the more mothers end up being the communicators of unhealthy fulfillment messages from family and society. And, as the closer parent, the more they'll get most of the derision for what are really society's, and then children's, issues. Instead of realizing that our system's ongoing sexism is pressuring women into this role, we blame women who do attempt to find healthy alternatives that could actually help them be whole and complete women and, most likely, healthier mothers. So, children often grow up with a mix of resentment and attachment toward their mothers and other women - particularly if they're authority figures. Children want to believe the best about mom. They want their relationship with their mothers to be better. But they know how easily the one who installed the emotional buttons in them can push them. They feel the fact that mom was taught that you and I had to fulfill her. Blaming mothers, rather than the system, for this element of sexism, is reflected in jokes about mothers, mother-in-laws, and women. It's codified in the stereotypes about Jewish mothers, Italian mothers, or you-fill-in-the-blank mothers. But it's based in the unexamined realization by children that, instead of being here to live their own lives, a child's life goals must include fulfilling their mothers' otherwise unfulfilled lives.
On top of the usual motherhood confusion, there are the lingering messages of white racism that picture "traditional family values" as very white. Mothers of people of color are assumed to be victims of incomplete families, over-functioning, or limited by their need to be stopgaps in supposedly dysfunctional non-white cultures. Even though statistics show that African American parents spend more time than white parents doing homework with their children, that reality never seems to make it into the white-affirming stereotypes of the African American family.
So mothers are blamed for the problems with our children. Fathers are faulted for not being leaders of their families - affirming that masculinity-style leadership preference. Fathers are faulted for not being good disciplinarians, that is good punishers, maybe even because they didn't hit their children enough. But Mothers are blamed more broadly for not passing on traditional values, not staying home or not staying home "enough," not making their home a comfortable place, putting their child into day care, being "selfish" about their own lives, acting in their own interests, being too strong or domineering, being too close to their sons, being jealous of their daughters, and on and on and on. All of these arise out of stereotypes about women and the way we condition women out of their full humanity. And if a child turns out to be LGBT, who is at fault? Conservative theories that are still pushed by so-called ex-gay ministries and the "therapies" of anti-gay counselors who are out of touch with all mainstream psychology, blame bad parenting in a way that often sounds like the blaming of mothers. So, given the pressures placed on women, the hypocritical lip service for motherhood, the inhuman expectations placed on mothers, and the blaming of mothers who step out of the role for their own health, it's no wonder Mother's Day is often a mix of feelings that really point to the deep changes our society needs in its value structure and it's on-going conditioning of women. 
Robert N. Minor, Ph.D., is Professor of Religious Studies at the University of Kansas. His Gay & Healthy in a Sick Society (HumanityWorks, 2003), was named one of the "Best Gay Books of 2003" and his Scared Straight (HumanityWorks!, 2001) was a finalist for the Lambda Literary and Independent Publisher Book Awards. He may be reached at www.fairnessproject.org.
|
|