Who's The Dummy, Mummy?

Rachel Cooke thinks that I'm a dummy. Okay, maybe not me specifically, but women like me. Women who talk or write incessantly about their children and their experience as mothers. Women who, when asked how they're doing, launch into a extended narrative about sleeplessness and breastfeeding and hormones and Xanax. Women who are - how did she put it? - "boring, selfish, smug and obsessed with motherhood."

Like I said: women like me.

"Once upon a time," says Cooke, "educated women fought to separate their identities from the ideal of mother, knowing that until the two came to be seen as wholly distinct they would never be taken seriously; and, in any case, who wants to be defined by only one aspect of their life? In the past decade, however, a growing number of women have reverted, 50s-style, to identifying themselves primarily, vociferously, and sometimes exclusively, as mothers. They fetishise childbirth, and obsess about all that follows it, in a way that is almost, if not quite, beyond satire, and which makes me feel a bit sick."

Which, whatever. So she's not interested in mothers; I can live with that. I wasn't all that interested in motherhood before I became a mother, either. But there's a very great difference between lacking an interest in a subject and asserting that any discussion or celebration of that subject is somehow subversive of broader social goods. That someone, anyone, lacks an interest in the motherhood does not mean that the celebration of motherhood or extensive discourse on the subject of motherhood represent broader social problems for which mothers should be held responsible. I mean, seriously. I'm not interested in hip-hop, but would it make sense for me to say, on that basis, that pop-cultural attention to hip-hop is fetishistic and sick-making? I've certainly had the experience - pre-motherhood - of being trapped in conversations with women who went on at length about the details of childrearing and wondering how I was a) going to escape, and b) scrub my brain of the mental image of mustard poo, but I've also had that very same experience with people who only want to talk about politics (an occupational hazard as a former academic specializing in political philosophy) or cats or global warming. The fact that those subjects, in excess, cause my eyes to roll back in my head does not mean that anyone who is passionate about those things is an out-of-control fetishist. It only means that I am not interested.

Like any reflective bigot, Ms. Cooke asserts that she is not attacking all mothers - some her best friends are mothers! but they're, like, the smart kind who you don't mind hanging out with! - just the smug, stupid mothers who talk too much about being mothers. Because, you know, it's not that mothers as a community are sickening in their fetishistic attachment to the terms and trappings of motherhood. It's that so many of them are, and Ms. Cooke is starting to find it overwhelming. Can't we all just shut up already about childbirth and our children and everything having to do with our children? Don't we realize that the more we talk about this stuff, the more stupid and smug and selfish and Stepford we sound? Can't we see that we are setting women back? And, also, nauseating everybody in the process?

This is what is, to me, most hateful about Cooke's diatribe: the assertion that there is not only something unseemly and uninteresting about the discourse of motherhood, but also something fundamentally unfeminist about it. This is Linda Hirschmann Lite: devotion to motherhood is somehow not deserving of respect, because it limits - limits - women to a life experience that has been dictated, in some part, by the terms of their biology. This is biology-as-destiny, this is femininity-as-enclosure: this is what prevents us from being free, like, men, to do whatever we want. This is an old feminist argument (one, if you're interested, that has roots in Marx), that women need to be liberated from their biological destinies - from the almost-inevitable biological condition of motherhood - so that they might work and contribute to society like men, because only then do they meaningfully contribute to society, only then are they members in full, only then are they interesting.

This is bullshit. Women do not become free by rejecting motherhood, by ignoring motherhood, by keeping the stories of motherhood hidden behind the veil, the wall, the enclosures of the private sphere. Women become free, in some significant part, by celebrating motherhood - by celebrating parenthood (men love their children too, you know, and some might even choose to make parenting their primary occupation, if it were more generally accepted and recognized as important work) - by demanding that it be as valued a part of civil society as politics and business and the arts and, you know, whatever else people like Rachel Cooke and Linda Hirschmann deem to be important and interesting. Celebrating motherhood doesn't mean that every woman must choose motherhood as part of her life experience - we celebrate all variety of callings, without insisting that any of them are necessary for every individual's self-fulfillment - it only means that we all of us recognize that mothering - parenting - and all that it involves is important work. Which means, in turn, we recognize discourse on those subjects as important discourse.

This is not to say, of course, that every anecdote about poo explosions in public places or every detailed explanation of the effects of sleep deprivation on the post-partum mother is in itself a critically important contribution to public discourse. It is to say, rather, that the sum of these stories is important: that in telling these stories, and in recognizing these stories as legitimate and important, we are sharing - we are making public, we are lifting the veil on - the experience of motherhood and demanding that it be taken seriously as something that contributes to - that is, arguably, the backbone of - civil society. Not every one of these stories will be interesting to everyone; many will be interesting only to a very few. But they are our stories, the stories of our parenthood. And we are, in telling these stories, telling each other - telling other mothers, telling fathers, telling future mothers and fathers - that there is no need to be (and every harm in being) isolated in one's experience of parenthood. We are telling each other that there is community in parenthood, and that such community should be sought out and embraced.

Cooke summarizes her argument with this statement: "all this droning on about baby and toddler world is not, in the long run, doing any of us any good. For me, and many other women, it's boring and selfish, and it implicitly casts judgment on the way we choose to live our lives." I'm sorry that she feels that way. I, for one, am quite capable of listening to my husband's colleagues drone on about the TV industry without feeling like I'm being judged for not being in that industry. I am also, for that matter, quite capable of listening to childless friends talk about their careers and their active social lives and their travel adventures without feeling as though they pity me for always having a baby strapped to my chest. If she feels judged, that's her issue, not a larger social problem that needs to be nipped in the bud. Indeed, as I've said above, this compulsion to silence mothers, to insist to them that their stories are not worthy of sharing in public spaces, to demand that they just shut up already about their silly children and their silly fascination with organic baby food and sleep training and post-partum depression - this is the larger social problem. It's a terrible social problem. It does more to keep women silenced and isolated than pretty much anything else I can think of.

So if anyone should just shut up already and stop complaining and judging and holding women back with her need to control what women talk about... well, you know who you are.

/rant.

(Thanks to Karen for the tip on the story. Funny how she knew just exactly what would make my head explode.)