The Myth of the Selfish Woman

I've been thinking a lot lately about the paradoxical feelings of motherhood, like selfish vs. sacrificing, and love for others vs. loss of self.  We are all supposed to have stable, monolithic feelings about mothering, and if we dare veer from that one acceptable feeling-- unconditional, self-sacrificing love-- then the world seems to fall apart.

Forget adultery. In this age, it seems the worst thing a woman can do is be Selfish, branded with the scarlet letter S in a world that relies on women seeing their only value in terms of the love they give others. Indeed, the root of "martyr" is of course, mother.

So many women I know feel ashamed to share that they feel anything negative about mothering, as if those negative feelings would somehow counteract or negate the positive they also feel. They are to feel complete and fulfilled by manifesting their destiny as mothers, and when they express doubt or resistance to this notion of motherhood, they're damned.

Can't we feel opposing things equally and simultaneously? Doubt and certainty? Fear and adoration? Anguish and intimacy?  Can we not desire intimacy with our own selves as much as we desire intimacy with those around us?  Why is it so abhorrent to think of mothers as as much internal as they are external in their attentions?

The problem with this approach to mothers is that it actually hurts all women, not to mention the kids and the partners and everybody else around them.  This expectation that women should feel ultimate fulfillment and love by mothering is destructive for mothers and non-mothers alike.  It creates a situation where women who choose to mother are shocked to find they miss themselves and struggle for years to figure out how to find themselves again--all in isolation because of the shame they feel for daring to have any other feelings besides love. It makes women who do not mother-- for whatever reasons, intentional or not-- subject to suspicion.  Rebecca Solnit writes about this in her book, The Mother of All Questions (which of course is, "why did you choose not to have kids?"), for example.  It marks women who want but can't have, or who lost, children as walking embodiments of Tragedy.

The lack of open discussion about the complexity of women's feelings about themselves and about their desires or lack thereof to procreate, and stigmatizing all feelings non-loving around motherhood,  eats away at us.

I see so many of my mother friends suffer from this. Many of our partners add to the shame. And it's easy to see why. The notion that a mother would have complex feelings about motherhood is quite a threat. If mothering isn't totally fulfilling to my partner, will she leave us? Have an affair? Damage the children for life? I have yet to meet a mother who feels her partner can allow the space for negative feelings about mothering. That pressure, too, especially from one's most intimate partner and supporter, amplifies the sense of isolation and shame tenfold.

I feel both fully fulfilled in some profound existential way by the experience of having and raising kids. And I am also feel profoundly claustrophobic because of the inescapability of the daily demands on me, and anxious about the alternative paths I'd also like to be exploring.

It's truly a practice in surrender, and even if there is something appealing about this assault on my desiring ego in a kind of Buddhist way, I don't like it.  I feel both daily explosions of love for my kids and family life, and also daily pangs of resentment about the obligations they put on me. I feel both intense desire to spend more time with my kids and also an intense desire to do a million other things--alone-- that I feel I was put on the planet to do.

It's no surprise to me at all, given the current arrangement of American family life, where there is no village to help me raise my kids, that many women would choose not to have children.  Structurally, it's hard to imagine mothering and also pursuing any other thing fully, except perhaps in sequence (phase two of life = raising kids, phase three = becoming a monk, running for president, starting your own commune, what have you).

These "other loves" as Solnit writes about them, are not compatible with having children.  Her book is all about either/or: women who don't have children devote their loves elsewhere (which is awesome), while women who have children devote their love to their children.  So much for "having it all," right?  I certainly think of myself as devoting myself in many directions, but have been called on multiple occasions,  "selfish", implicitly or explicitly, for doing so.

The ways that married and parenting life curtails self-actualization are a constant source of angst for me.  And yes, perhaps some really brilliant women can self-actualize while mothering.  Every moment with my kids is heavy, full of life, vitality, and profound sense of immediacy and intention.  I also love that, even as I want to focus that way on other things too.  These bonds are both oppressive and fulfilling. Isn't this the paradox of relation?

Perhaps when we accept all the feelings, normalize all the feelings so mothers and non-mothers alike feel no shame or isolation in their myriad devotions, then maybe mothers can find the sacred in the daily grind of life with kids, and see their pursuit of fulfillment as tied to that of non-mothers.

There are so many people and places to devote one's self to, it needn't always be one's children. We can make kin in so many ways, as feminist writer Donna Haraway would have it. We should also be able to retract into our own selves, turn that love inward, and replenish our reserves on occasion, without thinking we're being selfish by doing so.

When we start to see that all of our pursuits are admirable, not selfish, we know we're getting close. Because it's so easy as a woman to internalize the message that our purpose is to please others-- this message is everywhere.  And I don't want my daughters to receive this message, not the least of all from the life I model for them as their mother and as a woman with many other loves. Any woman who can transcend that message deserves a medal, not the scarlet letter S.

The Peace of Daily Things: Revising Wendell Berry for Ecofeminist Grief

I have often loved and taught Wendell Berry's poem, "The Peace of Wild Things," but struggle to really allow myself to take solace in it.

Given my recent dive into grief (see previous post, "The Vacuum"), I have continued to think about Berry's poem.

What bothers me about it is his use of nature as a crutch.  Someone I know and love often tells me that ultimately, the reason they can't dig religion is because of using God as a "crutch." But isn't Berry using nature as a crutch in this poem, in the same way? Manufacturing some idea of it, such that its sole purpose is to comfort a very human feeling of grief?  Honestly, I don't see the difference between God and Nature in so many claims.  Nature has taken over for God in a secular time, among my scientist and nature-loving friends and colleagues.

I'm not going to spend any more time right now on that issue, but would like to propose that Berry's poem doesn't work for someone like me, whose justice and feminist-oriented views of nature, much less grief, don't quite work the same way. I've been thinking about it a lot recently, and would like to offer this revision of Berry's poem, to suggest a feminist, perhaps overly domestic version that doesn't rely on an idea of nature as a thing "out there".

Rather, I hope this rings a Buddhist bell for you, regardless of the focus on motherhood, in terms of how grief has affected my sense of "the now" and my love of the things I've already spent so much effort cultivating.


____________________________

When despair for the world grows in me

And I wake in the night at the least sound

In fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be,

I go and lie down next to them

Rest in the beauty of their breathing, while the great heron feeds.

I come into the peace of daily things

That do not tax their lives with future and past

Or grief. I come into the presence of the texture of my daughter’s hair.

And I feel next to me the blinding purpose of warm skin

Content in our dark contact. For a time

I rest in the grace of Thou, and am not alone.

____________________________

If it helps to be reminded of Berry's poem:

____________________________

When despair for the world grows in me

 and I wake in the night at the least sound

 in fear of what my life and my children's lives may be,

 I go and lie down where the wood drake

 rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.

 I come into the peace of wild things

 who do not tax their lives with forethought

 of grief. I come into the presence of still water.

 And I feel above me the day-blind stars

 waiting with their light. For a time

 I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.

_________________________

I wanted to challenge Berry's notion of nature as liberating us from the human. I wanted to challenge his notion of nature as a solace from the pain of daily life. I wanted to challenge his notion of the detachedness of nature from the human, and the notion of nature as peaceful, "still" like water, or feeding beautifully, as a heron would.  These projections of nature are inconsistent with my grief, and they are certainly inconsistent with the solace I find in my own ideas of nature.

In grief, I have found that I find solace in the mundane, in the comforts of daily life, in the gratitude of knowing there is so much love connecting me to things around me, especially my kids and immediate family. I don't need nature for that, but nature does help me focus on those things, sometimes. And nature is IN those things, always. 

This exercise of rewriting in the mode of another author reminds me of an exercise I'll never forget from seventh grade-- it was called "Imitation."  We would be given pieces of literature and asked to fill in the blanks to create similar structures but with our own images and ideas. Rewriting Berry allowed me to take HIM out of the poem, and leverage this sentiment and power of his poem for my own purposes.  

I can't write a poem about grief right now, but I can meditate on his.