Motherhood, the unwanted "privilege"

Service Notice: When people ask me what my newsletter is about, I feel a tinge of embarrassment mixed with panic because I cannot box my newsletter into a single genre. I have read a lot of articles on how to grow your audience and so on, and they all seem to converge on the fact that you need to choose a niche and narrow down on something specific.

For sure, they’re right, but the idea of being too strategic and limited makes me ill. Also, writing is who I am, so if I limit my writing to something specific, it will be like boxing myself into something too. I am unboxable. That much I know by now about myself. So yes, you will have to deal with one article on a super important political and economic historical event one week and the next about thoughts about life that merely living inspires in me. This week belongs to the latter, but perhaps also to the former.

Every month I jot down some ideas about what to write for each week. But when the day arrives for me to write about what I had outlined, life often leads me in another direction. And I follow those signals. This time it was a calendar page and a book from Elena Ferrante on motherhood.

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Yesterday, I was finally turning the monthly calendar page. It is a calendar gifted to me by Father Alessandro, who among other infinitesimal things is also a painter. He even had an exhibition at our parish with drawings centered around the “mother figure”. Which often reminds me that he is a priest, but first and foremost an Italian man. Each page of the calendar has a drawing of a mother and child and a quote about motherhood. In March, it says “Motherhood is life’s biggest privilege”. Frankly, it disturbed me. And not for the reason why this phrase would disturb many of my friends.

When I was younger, I used to cringe so badly when my mother would tell me “You and your brother are my biggest happiness.” I wanted her to feel first like a woman and then a mother. I always had the impression that her life had always revolved around the needs of someone else. As I grew up, I rejected what she represented and bought into the idea that career was the only form of liberation from that model. I know now that from a destructive model, I jumped into another one. Just as toxic, but more socially accepted in this historical context.

Both models, I am convinced now, constrain women. In one, my mother was raised to always be at the service of someone else. She was at the center of caring for someone else and at the periphery of her own needs. I, instead, wanted to please myself first and discover who I was, not backing down an inch on my rights. And a way to have those rights was placing career first. The thing is that we need a third model that reconciles men and women and the need for women to self-realize. As it is right now, women are told that self-realization is only possible if a choice is made between their identity as mothers or professionals. Such a hard choice isn’t asked of fathers.

The narrative around women’s rights has been focused on the “motherhood penalty.” Unquestionably, it was built to shed light on the problem. But I wonder if we’ve pushed it too far. I have the perception that being constantly bombarded by messages about how “having children ruins women’s careers” has taken a toll on my generation. I question whether being continually reminded that becoming mothers would be the ruin of our careers has produced an anxiety that overrides any rise of a desire for maternity.

The issue, once again, is also with the messaging around gender, women’s rights, and “privilege.” We are told that men are the privileged ones. To me, it seems that their privilege until now has been proving their worth in high-stress, high-demand environments. Men’s value has been connected to the value they produce at work. It’s a privilege I am not particularly envious of, not now that I have gone through girlhood and consider myself a woman, not complete but one who has come to terms with her strengths and weaknesses. We have tried as women, left out of the game of the work environment for a long time, to play the same game. We discovered that the game was made for men - we had no strength to create a new model, so we morphed into them. We were left out of the game for such a long time that we mythicized it. And if we continue connecting women’s liberation to abiding by men’s standards for work, we will only exhaust ourselves trying to prove something. Which, more than liberation, seems another form of mental slavery.

Women have been so bullied by this messaging that the only privilege that men still lack (these days I expect anything), they have devalued. They don’t see motherhood, the giving of life, as something special, as something that makes them closest to being God, a creator. They see this privilege as a burden. I don’t blame them when the media is constantly telling them how motherhood will mean the end of their lives as free individuals. A freedom they feel they only recently acquired to give up. There’s a lot of focus on their death as the person they know themselves to be. Nobody ever takes time to tell them that to that death follows their birth as a woman but also a mother - an addition, not a subtraction. Who profits from this? Corporations that want women to be as steadily productive as men can be. Who are the winners, and who are the losers from this?

Narratives that truly care about advancing equity would not pit men and women against each other and wouldn’t scare women into not embracing what differentiates them most from the opposite sex. It saddens me to see that women identify as valuable only what they don’t have. Women forget that they are being asked to choose between things that no human being should be asked to choose from. They forget that not wanting kids because they feel scared isn’t a victory of liberation - it is another injustice that society has painted as the natural result of being a cool modern woman.

The discourse should be around building a society where everyone can thrive. Divide et impera has won until now. It is not women who decide to damage their professional lives by becoming “JUST mothers,” but a society that kills itself by not supporting parenthood. Kids are never made alone. Women shouldn’t be left alone.

Vilma Djala