Not the writer and not her baby. Photo credit: Helga's Lobster Stew
When I first fell pregnant, amid the overwhelming joy and the excitement and the near-constant fear that I could suddenly become not pregnant, I told myself that I wouldn’t become a Mommy.
Not that I wouldn’t be a mother, obviously, or even that I would resist being called Mommy by my child. But rather, I wouldn’t call myself Mommy – I didn’t want to say horribly twee things like, “Mommy thinks somebody needs a nappy change” or “Please stop pulling Mommy’s hair” or “Mommy needs a little timeout”. The reason I didn’t want to be “Mommy” was that I didn’t want to start off my motherhood adventure by subjugate my own personality to the great, faceless figure of the Mommy.
I didn’t want to start off my motherhood adventure by subjugate my own personality to the great, faceless figure of the Mommy.
This changed within probably 45 seconds of giving birth, right about when the midwives handed me my little bundle of goop-covered joy and set to work putting my lady bits back together again. In fact, I said “Please stop pulling Mommy’s hair” just this morning.
But being “Mommy” evidently isn’t good enough.
Amy Reiter, writing at The Daily Beast, had herself a “moment that shifts your perspective” sitting in her hairdresser’s chair in Brooklyn. Her hairdresser explained that she gets all kinds in her shop – “Artists, writers, dancers, actresses, lawyers, businesswomen … “ and, indicating Reiter, “moms”. Reiter “felt gut-punched”. It would have been a better story if she’d risen up like righteous indignation personified, overturned the little cart bearing the hairdryer and the Barbicided combs, scattering hair clips to the ground in a frothy, incandescent rage. But she didn’t and instead quietly seethed until she could put fingers to keyboard.
Reiter’s problem is that she was classed as a “mom” when she feels like she’s so much more – “a person separate and apart from them”, “them” being her two children, ages 6 and 8. And, she complained, it’s not fair that dads get to be people other than dads, that they get to “choose” what identity they want to wear. The logical conclusion, therefore, is that we as a society ought to retire the identity of “mother”.
The logical conclusion, therefore, is that we as a society ought to retire the identity of “mother”.
Now, putting aside for the moment that Reiter has just classed her hairdresser as “hairdresser” without qualifying that categorization with all of the other things I’m sure that the nice lady does, separate and apart from her job, Reiter’s conclusion is just a bit frustrating.
She is, she says, “a woman with a career, a born-again bike rider, a just-learning cook, a closet karaoke singer, an occasional watcher of crappy TV” and that “All those things define me just as much as my role as a mother”. Reiter is, she says, “obsessed” with her two children, but she doesn’t rely on being their mother as her primary identity. Good for her.
I do.
People are often handily sorted into whatever category seems like the biggest thing in their lives and usually, that’s work. I’m a mother first because right now, the absolute biggest thing in my life is shepherding this small human – it’s a human! I made a human, from scratch! – safely into his adulthood. This, over my career, which I have also worked hard to cultivate, over my exceptional love of baking and pretending to read smart people books, over any of the other life-padding that I enjoy and the other identities that I might want to assume. And I would venture to say that if asked, Reiter would sure as hell say that her two kids are way more important to her than being a “born-again bike rider” or a “closet karaoke singer” or even, her career.
I’m a mother first because right now, the absolute biggest thing in my life is shepherding this small human – it’s a human! I made a human, from scratch! – safely into his adulthood.
The problem isn’t that dads get to choose or that women aren’t seen as anything other than mothers, but it’s that Reiter’s complaint comes from a place where being a mother just isn’t as good as being something else. And where being a mom isn’t just uncool – that “frumpy hairdo, mom jeans, under-eye bags and all” image – it’s demeaning.
Reiter’s anger at being labeled a “mom” is part of the revulsion directed at “mommy blogs”, sprouting up around the internets like mushrooms in a cow field; in the same piece, Reiter was casually dismissive of “the ever-growing slew” of mommy blogs. Brian Moylan at Gawker spent an entire post taking one mommy blogger to task for having the temerity to say she didn’t want an ad for a casual sex hook-up app on a massive billboard outside her 9-year-old’s school. Of course, Moylan’s problem was less about what the mommy blogger had to say, but rather that she was a mommy blogger at all. “Is there anything worse than mommy bloggers? That is a rhetorical question because if you have two firing synapses, you know the answer to that question,” he begins.
Reiter doesn’t want to just be a “Mom” because she’s so much more and plus, all they want to talk about is “diapers and sleep schedules and preschools”; Moylan hates on mommy bloggers because ugh, they’re just so annoying and worried about their children and stuff.
Really, this is the macro of a problem that everyone has in micro: A complicated relationship with their mothers. Every person who has ever lived on this planet has had some kind of complicated mother thing, by the simple act of being born from woman, as they say. Even if you have the best relationship with your mom or mom or Mother Dear, it’s still fraught with something; and if you have no relationship at all, for whatever reason, that’s certainly a something.
As a society, we venerate some mothers (the Virgin Mary, Mother Theresa), revile others (Casey Anthony, for obvious reasons), but mothers in the main occupy a desperate no-man’s land littered with Mother’s Day cards and crappy romantic comedies, tell-all books about Joan Crawford and big icebergs of entitlement and self-sacrifice – and now, mommy blogs, attempting to make society understand why motherhood is something of intrinsic value and is in itself endlessly fascinating.
I don’t have any answers on how to deal with humanity’s big old mommy complex, but I do know this: It’s by no means time to retire the “mommy” identity – it’s time to value it.