As general advice, I have no problem with this. Easy assumptions should always be examined and examined again. The coinage is catchy and rolls off the tongue. Something important is being said.
It’s the specifics that give me pause. Apple pie, okay, fine, whatever. But motherhood? Nothing, absolutely nothing, appears to me more contested in our political and social and private lives than motherhood. Any woman who has ever had children can tell you it is no picnic of affirmation. Any woman who has not had children can tell you that that, too, is a controversial place to be. Neither is much admired.
Motherhood is a concept that changes from culture to culture and over time. Sometimes, it’s set in opposition to mothering—motherhood, in this schematic, is the sacred duty of women, an artificial construct which underlies the whole system of patriarchy. In this system, a woman with no children is a shirker. Mothering, on the other hand, is simply the work of first bearing and then raising a child. The biological mother need not be the same person who raises the child. The person (or people) who raises the child need not be female. The extent to which this second formulation, mothering, can be untangled from any imposed societal values is unclear. (At the very least, the untangling would be the work of generations.)
Childcare has too often been, as Adrienne Rich once noted, a form of enforced servitude or a duty performed out of guilt with its own unhappy consequences. Equally problematic is the argument that mothers, or women in general, have a particular gift for nurturance and that by putting our politics into the hands of women this gift will transform the world.
Not that the world doesn’t desperately need transforming.
While doing primate research for my most recent novel, I read many pages about Harry Harlow’s infamous studies of rhesus monkey infants raised with replacement mothers, inanimate mothers made of cloth or wire. It’s important to remember that these experiments took place against a backdrop of considerable scientific hostility toward mothers. “Mother love is a dangerous instrument,” John B. Watson, president of the American Psychological Association had said with considerable impact. The influence of the mother should be limited as much as possible and eventually, in some utopian future, eliminated altogether. The “overkissed child” was debilitated for life by such unnecessary affections.
But here is what we think we now know: love (often, but not always mother love) changes the young brain and those changes have permanent consequences. Neuroplasticity is the necessary ability of the brain to rearrange itself, and love is neuroplasticity’s primary source.
A subsequent movement, often exemplified by Dr. Benjamin Spock, assured mothers that they knew more than they thought they knew and encouraged them to trust themselves above all. Affection was okay again; in fact it was essential. World War II had shown us infants who died without it.
According to some, Spock’s advice created an American generation, the baby-boomers of the 1960s, which is a good thing or not, depending on how you think. As one of them, I can attest to the fact that we have never been popular. But we have, some of us, been happy.
Freud, Skinner, and Bettelheim all took their shot at mothers. For many years Bettelheim blamed bad mothering for autism. Our current vocabulary includes “the helicopter mother,” “the tiger mother,” and “the good-enough mother.” Also postpartum depression and the murderous mother.
So which motherhood statement are we burning today?
You will have noted that all the authorities I’ve quoted so far are male. But since the early 1900s at least, women’s literatures have been fighting over the societal and personal issues raised by actual or anticipated reproductive technologies. I started reading science fiction in the 1970s and quickly found my way to the great women writing at that time. I was so thoroughly imprinted by these foundational reading experiences that it took me quite some time to notice that the field of science fiction was not dominated by women.
Nevertheless, during these years, the great science fiction writers were busily burning the motherhood statement. They imagined worlds in which babies were birthed by machines; worlds in which reproduction occurred through cloning or parthenogenesis or with extraterrestrial participation. They pictured motherhood as a paying job or else as a shared responsibility. In Susy McKee Charnas’s Motherlines, every child has five mothers. They imagined worlds in which women were forcibly impregnated and incarcerated in birthing rooms, or worlds in which women freely chose the fathers of their children from sperm banks. They imagined pregnant men. They imagined worlds, like Ursula Le Guin’s The Left Hand of Darkness, in which sexuality is so fluid that the same person might be the biological father of one child and the biological mother of another, or worlds like Vonda McIntyre’s “Dreamsnake,” in which birth control is a biological function that can be learned rather than a right that one must continually fight to keep. The imagining of separatist, all-women worlds often foundered on the issue of sons. It was apparently all too possible to imagine women giving up their fathers and their husbands. Considerable tap-dancing must happen in order to imagine that mothers will give up their sons. At the same time many of these writers and others spoke openly about the anger mothers often feel at the daily abnegation of self that motherhood demands, the impossible requirements of the job.
Much has been written about cyberpunk and its bodily modifications, its transcendence of the physical. The cyberpunks had much less interest in the body, especially in the bodily issues of reproduction than the feminists who preceded them. In that way, they represented a return to the more usual mode of genre literatures, the mode in which mothers hardly appear at all. One could argue, I’m sure, that the erasure of the whole topic of motherhood from a literature would qualify as burning the motherhood statement. But not in a very interesting way.
In fact, since the 1970s and ’80s, there has never again been in the field such a concentrated and communal attempt to reimagine motherhood. The texts of the second-wave feminists are sometimes seen as outdated partly by their focus on these very issues.
But fast forward to the present. I know of at least one case where an editor (who eventually did take the story in question) worried about publishing a piece in which a fictional woman got a fictional abortion. In the United States, 624 bills regulating women’s bodies have already been passed and the year is only half over. Ohio has gutted women’s reproductive rights as part of their budget and Wisconsin has done the same. Texas is taking their second run at it and, unless Wendy Davis can filibuster for thirty more hours, will soon follow suit. And these are just the most recent states to do so. Don’t even ask about Kansas. Never ask about Kansas.
I can remember no other time in which the attacks on women’s freedom have been so widespread, so sustained, and so successful. Or half so scary. Incest and rape exceptions are now routinely contested and eliminated by legislation; when the forced-birth movement is finished, even the life of the mother will be insufficient grounds for a legal abortion. An argument that begins by positing women valuable only as mothers will end by suggesting that, even as mothers, women are not valuable at all.
Meanwhile the assault has moved unapologetically from abortion to birth control. A sizable chunk of the population has shown themselves to be absolutely committed to forcing motherhood upon women as the price for having sex. Under these circumstances, motherhood becomes a mechanism for controlling the lives of and limiting the possibilities for women, often openly and consciously so.
In 1976, Adrienne Rich wrote, “We need to imagine a world in which every woman is the presiding genius of her own body. In such a world … sexuality, politics, intelligence, power, motherhood, work, community, intimacy, will develop new meanings; thinking itself will be transformed. This is where we have to begin.”
This is where we have to begin again and with urgency.
Motherhood is an issue crucially impacted by class, race, and culture, and must be recognized as such. Simultaneously, it is the first principle and the thing that we all still, at
least as of 2013, share—that we all had mothers. Who mothered or didn’t mother us and what support or condemnation the surrounding society provided to them still matters in the deepest possible way to our personal lives and to society as a whole. One cannot truly imagine the future without addressing the issue.
The easy assumption that motherhood constitutes some easy assumption is neither accurate nor serving us well. Go ahead and burn it, whatever you think it is. I’m all in favor. We needed a new motherhood statement anyway. It would be so great if, after the burning, you helped with that, too.
THE PELICAN BAR
FOR HER BIRTHDAY, NORAH got a Pink CD from the twins, a book about vampires from her grown-up sister, High School Musical 2 from her grandma (which Norah might have liked if she’d been turning ten instead of fifteen), an iPod shuffle plus an Ecko Red T-shirt and two-hundred-dollar darkwash Seven Jeans—the most expensive clothes Norah had ever owned—from her mother and father.
Not a week earlier, her mother had said it was a shame birthdays came whether you deserved them or not. She’d said she was dog-tired of Norah’s disrespect, her ingratitude, her filthy language—as if fucking was just another word for very—fucking this and fucking that, fucking hot and fucking unfair and you have to be fucking kidding me.
And then there were a handful of nights when Norah didn’t come home and turned off her phone so they all thought she was in the city in the apartment of some man she’d probably met on the internet and probably dead.
And then there were the horrible things she’d written about both her mother and father on Facebook.
And now they had to buy her presents?
I don’t see that happening, Norah’s mother had said.
So it was all a big surprise, and there was even a party. Her parents didn’t approve of Norah’s friends (and mostly didn’t know who they were), so the party was just family. Norah’s big sister brought the new baby, who yawned and hiccoughed and whose scalp was scaly with cradle cap. There was barbecued chicken and ears of corn cooked in milk, an ice cream cake with pralines and roses, and everyone, even Norah, was really careful and nice except for Norah’s grandma, who had a fight in the kitchen with Norah’s mother that stopped the minute Norah entered. Her grandmother gave Norah a kiss, wished her a happy birthday, and left before the food was served.
The party went late, and Norah’s mother said they’d clean up in the morning. Everyone left or went to bed. Norah made a show of brushing her teeth, but she didn’t undress, because Enoch and Kayla had said they’d come by, which they did, just before midnight. Enoch climbed through Norah’s bedroom window, and then he tiptoed downstairs to the front door to let Kayla in, because she was already too trashed for the window. “Your birthday’s not over yet!” Enoch said, and he’d brought Norah some special birthday shrooms called hawk’s eyes. Half an hour later, the whole bedroom took a little skip sideways and broke open like an egg. Blue light poured over everything, and Norah’s Care Bear, Milo, had a luminous blue aura, as if he were Yoda or something. Milo told Norah to tell Enoch she loved him, which made Enoch laugh.
They took more of the hawk’s eyes, so Norah was still tripping the next morning when a man and a woman came into her bedroom, pulled her from her bed, and forced her onto her feet while her mother and father watched. The woman had a hooked nose and slightly protuberant eyeballs. Norah looked into her face just in time to see the fast retraction of a nictitating membrane. “Look at her eyes,” she said, only the words came out of the woman’s mouth instead of Norah’s. “Look at her eyes,” the woman said. “She’s high as a kite.”
Norah’s mother collected clothes from the floor and the chair in the bedroom. “Put these on,” she told Norah, but Norah couldn’t find the sleeves, so the men left the room while her mother dressed her. Then the man and woman took her down the stairs and out the front door to a car so clean and black that clouds rolled across the hood. Norah’s father put a suitcase in the trunk, and when he slammed it shut, the noise Norah heard was the last note in a Sunday school choir: the men part of amen, sung in many voices.
The music was calming. Her parents had been threatening to ship her off to boarding school for so long she’d stopped hearing it. Even now she thought that they were maybe all just trying to scare her, would drive her around for a bit and then bring her back, lesson learned, and this helped for a minute or two. Then she thought her mother wouldn’t be crying in quite the way she was crying if it was all for show. Norah tried to grab her mother’s arm, but missed. “Please,” she started, “don’t make me,” but before she got the words out the man had leaned in to take them. “Don’t make me hurt you,” he said in a tiny whisper that echoed in her skull. He handcuffed Norah to the seatbelt because she was struggling. His mouth looked like something drawn onto his face with a charcoal pen.
“This is only because we love you,” Norah’s father said. “You were on a really dangerous path.”
“This is the most difficult thing we’ve ever done,” said Norah’s mother. “Please be a good girl, and then you can come right home.”
The man with the charcoal mouth and the woman with the nictitating eyelids drove Norah to an airport. They showed the woman at the ticket counter Norah’s passport, and then they all got on a plane together, the woman in the window seat, the man, the aisle, and Norah in the middle. Sometime during the flight, Norah came down, and the man beside her had an ordinary face and the woman had ordinary eyes, but Norah was still on a plane with nothing beneath her but ocean.
While this was happening, Norah’s mother drove to the mall. She had cried all morning, and now she was returning the iPod shuffle to the Apple store and the expensive clothes to Nordstrom. She had all her receipts, and everything still had the tags, plus she was sobbing intermittently, but uncontrollably, so there was no problem getting her money back.
Norah’s new home was an old motel. She arrived after dark, the sky above pinned with stars and the road so quiet she could hear a bubbling chorus of frogs and crickets. The man held her arm and walked just fast enough to make Norah stumble. He let her fall onto one knee. The ground was asphalt covered with a grit that stuck in her skin and couldn’t be brushed off. She was having trouble believing she was here. She was having trouble remembering the plane. It was a bad trip, a bad dream, as if she’d gone to bed in her bedroom as usual and awakened here. Her drugged-up visions of eyelids and mouths were forgotten; she was left with only a nagging suspicion she couldn’t track back. But she didn’t feel like a person being punished for bad behavior. She felt like an abductee.
An elderly woman in a flowered caftan met them at a chain-link gate. She unlocked it, and the man pushed Norah through without a word. “My suitcase,” Norah said to the man, but he was already gone.
“Now I am your mother,” the woman told Norah. She was very old, face like a crumpled leaf. “But not like your other mother. Two things different. One: I don’t love you. Two: when I tell you what to do, you do it. You call me Mama Strong.” Mama Strong stooped a little so she and Norah were eye to eye. Her pupils were tiny black beads. “You sleep now. We talk tomorrow.”
They climbed an outside stairway, and Norah had just a glimpse of the moon-streaked ocean on the other side of the chainlink. Mama Strong took Norah to Room 217. Inside, ten girls were already in bed, the floor nearly covered with mattresses, only narrow channels of brown rug between. The light in the ceiling was on, but the girls’ eyes were shut. A second old woman sat on a stool in the corner. She was sucking loudly on a red lollipop. “I don’t have my toothbrush,” Norah said.
“I didn’t say brush your teeth,” said Mama Strong. She gave Norah a yellow T-shirt, gray sweatpants, and plastic flip-flops, took her to the bathroom and waited for Norah to use the toilet, wash her face with tap water, and change. Then she took the clothes Norah had arrived in and went away.
The old woman pointed with her lollipop to an empty mattress, thin wool blanket folded at the foot. Norah lay down, covered he
rself with the blanket. The room was stuffy, warm, and smelled of the bodies in it. The mattress closest to Norah’s belonged to a skinny black girl with a scabbed nose and a bad cough. Norah knew she was awake because of the coughing. “I’m Norah,” she whispered, but the old woman in the corner hissed and clapped her hands. It took Norah a long time to realize that no one was ever going to turn off the light.
Three times during the night she heard someone screaming. Other times she thought she heard the ocean, but she was never sure; it could have been a furnace or a fan.
In the morning, the skinny girl told Mama Strong that Norah had talked to her. The girl earned five points for this, which was enough to be given her hairbrush.
“I said no talking,” Mama Strong told Norah.
“No, you didn’t,” said Norah.
“Who is telling the truth? You or me?” asked Mama Strong.
Norah, who hadn’t eaten since the airplane or brushed her teeth in twenty-four hours, had a foul taste in her mouth like rotting eggs. Even so, she could smell the onions on Mama Strong’s breath. “Me,” said Norah.
She lost ten points for the talking and thirty for the talking back. This put her, on her first day, at minus forty. At plus ten she would have earned her toothbrush; at plus twenty, her hairbrush.
Mama Strong said that no talking was allowed anywhere—points deducted for talking—except at group sessions, where talking was required—points deducted for no talking. Breakfast was cold hard toast with canned peaches—points deducted for not eating—after which Norah had her first group session.
Mama Strong was her group leader. Norah’s group was the girls from Room 217. They were, Norah was told, her new family. Her family name was Power. Other families in the hotel were named Dignity, Consideration, Serenity, and Respect. These were, Mama Strong said, not so good as family names. Power was the best.