Mothering and Recovery Seven
This Stuff Is Not Yours to Own
While I do hold with the framing that it’s our environment, and not an individual lack of capacity, that is most responsible for the broad level of stress experienced by mothers today, it’s a bit too much “good ol’ days” to suggest there was some optimal paleolithic utopian space for relishing all things motherhood.
Motherhood is, as it has always been, tough. “Mother” is a role and not a complete definition of sentient aliveness. It is likely motherhood is more tough these days because there is a fundamental fissure in how we define the role in a capitalist system.
We are only valuable and valid if we are providing our labour and it has measurable outcomes for an Economy that must forever expand. A mother is a suboptimal unit of labour in the Economy as she usually is the one to attend to raising children and therefore cannot devote all/enough waking hours to delivering her waged labour. Her children are invalid in that same Economy—not yet able to provide any waged labour.
However, children are necessary for the future of the constantly expanding production-and-consumption model that defines a capitalist system. Children mature and become producers and consumers in turn just as their grandparents become incapable of offering labour for wages and join the ranks of invalid. Yet in order for children to become valid adult producers, significant time must be invested in their development.
In nation states such as Norway, they have the state attend to the development of the next generation of producers and consumers so that the labour given by people of child-bearing age isn’t compromised with child raising duties. In nation states like America, the state expects individual parents to maintain their production and consumption responsibilities while raising children off the sides of their desks.
Just as “mother” is a role, so too is “child.” Children have sentient aliveness from the day they’re born as much as any human being. They should not be reduced to yet-to-be-leveraged labour providers.
Yet few of us have the privileged circumstances to create some bubble or protected enclave where our motherhood status is indeed just a role (not the sum total of our value, or lack of value) and we are not stigmatized for the way in which we enact that role.
A Little Bit of This a Little Bit of That
The reason for the long detours into the broad sweeping realities of stress and motherhood in our modern times is to highlight that hidden biases underpin so much of the stressful and negative experiences of motherhood today. Biases are basically unexamined assumptions and internalized values. Biases cause us to feel, think and act in specific ways aligned to those underlying assumptions and it’s all happening unconsciously.
One of the most powerful brain modulating tools at our disposal is to make hidden bias visible to ourselves. Just by becoming aware of it, that reduces its influence on you.
The following all result in hidden biases:
You have internalized the stigma of being a less than excellent mother because you wish to continue fulltime employment, or conversely you wish to raise your children fulltime and are therefore invalid in society at large.
You have internalized the cultural inequality that your motherhood status is reductive and limiting, however your partner’s fatherhood status is additive and expanding.
You have watched countless videos, listened to endless podcasts and read heaps of books on how to mother, but your day-to-day experience includes isolation, a sense of failure, and distress.
You are sure you’re doing something wrong because everyone else seems fine with the challenges of motherhood.
If you’re blaming yourself, or even your child, for the stress of mothering, then look up and around you. You have a role that epitomizes a fundamental fissure in our modern world: the task of raising children is a role that is absolutely necessary and yet is treated as completely superfluous in a system where only units of labour hold value.
Of course, any living creature and their demands on us can add to our stress levels in real ways (ourselves included). Nonetheless, as we live in a system that has no space to integrate the centrality of raising children, we have no space for bringing ourselves back to a baseline when we find ourselves utterly out of reserves for suppressing our own needs in favour of those of others.
If you’re part of the !Kung tribe and you’re only picking up your baby half the time when they cry, then that’s a lot of space to get back to a destressed baseline.
After you’ve attended to any unconsolidated trauma in your life experience, then uncovering all your hidden biases lays the groundwork for next steps. A good book to get you started is Invisible Women: data bias in a world designed for men and I’ve already mentioned one of my favourite books by Cordelia Fine Delusions of Gender: how are minds, society, and neurosexism create difference.
External Stressors and Biases
Many external stressors for mothers are simply not removeable or even particularly modifiable. Nonetheless it’s worth looking at a few of these things for lowering the overall need for brain manipulation tools for stress management. Some external stressors, or potential future stressors, have pieces that can be removed and resolved.
External stressors are often internalized and become automatic assumptions we don’t question or examine. What follows are suggestions for common stressors that are situational and perhaps the origins of these stressors have not been examined through the lens of the untenable reality that is mothering in a modern world. Although they are categorized by the mother’s status (i.e. at home, working, single, etc.), most of the suggestions can be applied across all categories.
Part Eight coming May 2.
