So here I am again, standing in a small group of mothers ten to fifteen years younger than me, smiling and nodding and going "Oooh," and "Ouch!" and "Oh my god" at appropriate times as they swap stories of pregnancy, labor, and childbirth. The five of us mothers have children in nursery school together; we are getting to know each other, trying to connect around our kids; and so we are engaged in one of the chief bonding rituals of young mothers: swapping reproduction war stories. Everyone in the little circle knows that my daughter was adopted from Russia, but no one opens a conversational door for me, says, "So, tell us about your trip," or, "Tell us about the first time you saw her picture." And I don't seize an opportunity to shoehorn my experience into the conversation, either. I feel that it would be awkward - that, all of a sudden, intensely polite attention would be focused on me, and questions would be directed at me instead of stories shared, and people would be a little worried about hurting me somehow, a little unsure about what was and was not OK to say or ask; and no one would know when or how to disengage from the adoption story and go back to their real topic, childbirth. I feel that the attention would be just slightly tinged with pity (disavowed) about my inability to experience the joys of pregnancy, my inability to know my baby's first minutes and days and weeks, my advanced age. So I don't jump in; I listen, murmur, ask for more details, laugh, and float away.
Adoptive mothers can't do, of course, lots of things - can't share the reproduction war stories, can't know our babies from birth, can't breast feed (without heroic and slightly, it seems to me, weird preoccupation and preparation), can't be younger again. But I knew all of that before I became an adoptive mom, and the only thing I really mind is that I didn't have my baby from the get-go, couldn't protect her from all the harms the world threw her way in her first months (and, in the case of my younger daughter, years) of life. That hurts.
What I didn't know, however, before I adopted, was that I also couldn't complain about my kids the way bio moms can. I can't freely air ambivalence about my kids in public. I know that many bio moms still feel constrained in airing their darkest feelings about the realities of motherhood. The motherhood mystique is still alive and well in America - all the paeans to motherhood, soppy as wet diapers; all the gauzy images of mothers and babies; all the reverence for the unbreakable organic bonds between mothers and their children. There is truth, of course, in all of these elements of the motherhood mystique. But the fact that there are darker truths, too - that the glibbest lip service is supposed to compensate us for our work; that children can make us insane with fury; that child care is filled with tedium; that mothers have hours and days when we wonder why in God's name we decided to parent - has been well aired in sociological studies and in testimony from the trenches.
For baby-shocked bio moms who want to testify to the dark underbelly of mothering, the sound barrier has been broken: it's really only the willfully bland who mistake maternal testimony about the travails of parenting for a lack of love for their children.
But adoptive mothers do not always enjoy the same kind of leeway. When adoptive moms complain about motherhood the way bio moms do, certain basic questions are raised in some people's minds. I learned this the hard way when my oldest was around four, and I was venting to a friend about her spiritedness. If you have a spirited child, you know what I mean. This child (Natalie) knew very early on where all my buttons were, and loved nothing more than pushing them all down at once and then holding them down, to see what I would do. I had a lot to vent about, and I was proceeding apace on the phone with my friend. When I paused for breath, he said, "Well, but . . . you're glad you adopted her, right?"
Am I glad I adopted her? She's my baby!
Maybe I'm overreacting. But I just don't think he would have checked in on my core commitment to a biological child on the basis of one rant. By questioning my commitment to Natalie, he revealed to me the truth of what I'd felt paranoid for feeling: that people - lots of people - think that I love my kids less because they're adopted.
Almost no one will admit any more to harboring this belief. Everybody knows somebody who has adopted, or has been adopted, or who has placed a baby for adoption. Admitting that you think adoptive family ties are weaker than bio family ties is almost - not quite, but almost - as socially inept as blurting out racist thoughts. But, like racism, doubts about adoptive families are much more widespread than anyone wants to acknowledge.
We adoptive moms know this prejudice is ubiquitous - we can feel it - even though people are starting to make us think we're crazy by saying it's all in our heads. But all we need do to confirm our suspicions is quietly observe the tens of thousands of couples who spend millions of dollars annually and endure extraordinary physical and emotional pain feeding the biotech-reproduction industry rather than - gulp - adopt. Another way we can tell is by watching how the media handle stories of bio-family reunions. Not one of these stories has been presented without misty-eyed approval - often with no mention of those pesky interlopers, the adoptive parents, and never revealing that most adopted adults end up spending little time with their newly-found biological families. Reunion stories are presented uncritically as the heart-warming fulfillment of what, deep down, we "all" "know": it's blood that counts.
Parenting in a milieu that persistently questions the quality of your love (and then typically denies doing it) can be destabilizing. What mother doesn't have days when she wishes she could walk away from the kids? For bio moms, such moments are considered part of the territory. For we adoptive moms, those recoil seizures can become an ominous sign affirming the culture's entrenched suspicions, a source of worry and self-consciousness, a thing to be hidden. The culture's bias puts us under pressure to prove our love, not just to ourselves and our kids, but to other parents, to the culture at large. We have to be "better than" bio moms - more saintly, more grateful, more patient. Less human. Bio moms set the standard on the mommy playing field, and adoptive moms are subtly called upon to prove that our love is just as good.
It's impossible, I know, but I sure wish this bias would disappear while my kids are still young. It would be so freeing to be able to say that I want to throttle them, and have everyone nod and smile, knowing that feelings like this are all part of a mother's love.
Linda Hirshman's argument that mothers betray feminist ideals when they leave the workforce to raise their children is far from true or accurate, but as someone whose life path was a target of her criticism, I was surprised to find how much I agreed with some of her insights. Unfortunately, Hirshman buries the kernels of a good idea inside a thick layer of incorrect assumptions and unkind judgments. She presents her case with the confidence, logic, and selective focus of a trial lawyer making a closing argument before a jury. Hirshman sets the stage, frames the debate, states her definition of what a constitutes a meaningful life, and then specifically asserts, "a life of housework and child care does not met these standards." She balks at the idea that anyone in her right mind would choose to stay at home, and in fact labels it as a false choice.
As a writer and cultural critic, I am accustomed to reading work that I don't agree with, usually finding that if I read enough varying opinions, a sense of truth emerges like the Zen concept of "a finger pointing at the moon." Hirshman's new book, Get to Work, points at a truth--unfortunately, her argument comes across like a middle finger raised in opposition to the idea that Gen X won't follow the Boomer ideals of climbing the corporate ladder. I believe that Hirshman's disagreements with younger women are as much about generational differences as they are about philosophies of feminism.
Hirshman's definition of success suffers from a profound lack of imagination, as it is built entirely on the male model that gave us the corporate ladder, the tenure track and partner track in the first place. She looks down on idealism and seems to recoil from anything that smacks of an artistic bent, whether it materializes as an impulse to be a "painter, writer or do-gooder." In her former profession, law, over half of all law school graduates are leaving the profession within six years of graduation, with men "opting out" the partner-track at almost the same rate as women. Is a lawyer turned bookstore owner less of a feminist traitor than a lawyer turned stay-at-home parent?
So what exactly is the insight I gained from Hirshman? She is on target with the key ideas that men and women need to share childrearing more equitably. I would expand this idea to include all forms of family caregiving. Hirshman's idea of moving away from "choice" as a dominant value in the feminist movement has a significant application to politics. If we look at childrearing as a purely personal choice, then there is no need to support parents with family-friendly public policies. Most Americans cannot afford to lose their jobs after adding children to their lives, and our country has been extremely negligent in creating policies to deal with these realities. Without paid family leave or health insurance, many families are living on the edge, one bad break or health crisis away from financial ruin. In my continuing work as the author of Mojo Mom, I have argued that the emerging Mothers' Movement needs to form cross-generational coalitions with all people affected by caregiving needs. Doing so will elevate the status of family needs to an issue that affects all of us, something that is more than "just a Mommy problem" or "just another lifestyle choice," if we expect our country to take caregiving seriously.
There is a tremendous opportunity to create common ground with the Boomers on this issue. The emerging wave of elder care can become a societal equalizer, as the 77 million Baby Boomers confront the need to support their elderly parents, and then face their own elder years. Framing policies as family leave takes choice out of the equation. No one chooses to have a heart attack or get Alzheimer's disease. None of us chooses our parents, just as no one chooses the challenge of having a premature or sick child. On a societal level, childrearing is not optional, as all of us will rely on the care and products provided by the next generation of workers.
Creating family-leave policies that will help each of us continue to participate in work and civic life in the face of inevitable family obligations would create a fairer distribution of total labor. Our current system is built on the model of the ideal unencumbered worker that shunts the caregiving load disproportionately to women, while men continue to work their paid jobs in overdrive. My hope is that executives who have never stopped to think about the crews who clean their offices after-hours will begin to see the world differently when they find themselves in charge of providing basic care for their parents. Childfree couples who looked down on co-workers for leaving early to pick up a sick child will learn to empathize with parents' unpredictable family obligations. Men will come to understand just how much work women have provided at home once husbands are charged with caring for ailing wives.
Caregiving in its many forms is a crucial part of what Hirshman calls "the hard work of holding society together." We need to make the invisible work visible, and then divide it fairly. This would be a victory for feminism and humanism. On that point, at least, I hope Linda Hirshman and I can agree.
Literary Mama columnist Deesha Philyaw (The Girl is Mine) has written an article on tackling teasing in the Fall 2006 issue of Wondertime. The article, which features Philyaw's daughter's experiences, looks at the psychology of teasing and what parents can do to help. Wondertime is a relatively new parenting magazine that focuses on parenting young children (birth to six). The familiar voices of Sandra Tsing Loh and Catherine Newman are also featured in the magazine.
After a vacation, the Literary Mama e-zine is back up and running. If you are a subscriber, you already will have received the first of a new bi-weekly newsletter in your email box, bringing you tasty tidbits of Literary Mama's latest writing, news and more. If you aren't a subscriber and would like to be, please join us!
Tomorrow marks the release of Tracy Thompson's much anticipated book, The Ghost in the House: Motherhood, Raising Children, and Struggling with Depression. In this book, award-winning former Washington Post journalist Tracy Thompson (author of The Beast: A Journey Through Depression) explores the topic of maternal depression. She intertwines her research findings, quotes from her interviews and surveys with hundreds of mothers, and her own story of both mothering through depression and being mothered by a women suffering from the illness to create a text that is part medical journal, part self-help guide for depression sufferers and part biography. While Thompson's is not the first book on the subject (Anne Sheffield's Sorrow's Web is a very solid text about maternal depression), Thompson's up to date research and gorgeous writing style make her book one well worth reading.
The book will be of particular interest to mother writers who have struggled with depression as Thompson's experience will be familiar:
There is no end to [children's]. . . demands, and for mothers there is no end to the guilty sense that at any given moment, some need of theirs is not being met. As I write these words, it is night and I am stealing work time from what should be my daughter's bedtime ritual. She comes into my study: "Mom, you promised." My work needs me; she needs me. She needs to talk right now; I am fighting the daily battle of carving out hours to write. But do I need to be a writer? You're selfish; if your work is not somehow providing for your children's necessities or their life enrichment, you're just massaging your ego, says a voice in my head. Then comes another: No! Women are more than mommies; don't you want your daughters to know this? This mental point and counterpoint takes a tenth of a second and is of no interest to my eight-year-old; she is literally getting in my face. "You promised."
Even if you have not suffered from maternal depression a number of things she points out about the intense stress and guilt which seem to be part and parcel of mothering these days rings true.
MotherTalk is facilitating a blog tour for the book and on my personal blog, MUBAR, I take a look at the book and ask author Tracy Thompson what role society can play in helping women suffering from maternal depression. Other blogs on the tour include Woulda Coulda Shoulda, Three Kid Circus, Parent Hacks, Sweetney.com, and Dooce's Heather Armstrong at Alpha Mom.
The email we provided for applications for Literary Mama positions was not working properly, and we are afraid we have missed some of your applications. If you would like to work for LM, check out our job announcements at this previous post and resubmit. Thanks!
Literary Reflections contributor Carol Weis has published a picture book, When the Cows Got Loose (Simon & Schuster). Kirkus gave a starred review to the raucous story of one determined girl and twenty-six alphabetically-named cows.
Today's stop on the Literary Mama Blog Tour is at LM OpEd Editor Dawn Friedman's blog, This Woman's Work.
On her blog, Dawn writes about mothering, writing, and writing about mothering. In addition to writing about her two lovely children and the attempt to juggle work and family, Dawn writes about infertility, miscarriage and open adoption (her daughter Madison was brought to their family through domestic, open adoption).
In her post from August 1, she writes about her occasional jealousy towards her daughter's birth mother, Jessica:
. . . the first time I became aware of being jealous of Jessica was after we brought Madison home and one day I was examining her little body in the besotted way a new mother has and I noticed her beautiful, beautiful thumbs. Madison has very elegant thumbs; I do not. Madison gets her thumbs from Jessica, who also has very capable graceful hands with long fingers and thumbs. I have hands that look like they belong on the toddler walking doll I had as a kid. My hands have big palms and stubby little fingers. I didn’t feel like I could measure up to those thumbs. I didn’t feel capable of parenting a child with such elegant thumbs.
(I’ve tried to write essays about this but I write, “My daughter has elegant thumbs” and then stare glumly at the computer screen.)
Her thumbs represented every way that I felt I fell short of all that Madison needs and deserves. People with thumbs like that — what did I have to teach them? She would grow up beautiful and full of grace and I would remain the leaden lumpy person that I am, someone who doesn’t understand how to pick out the right shade of lipstick, how to rhumba, or how to speak fluent French. In short, someone who didn’t deserve such a daughter. And I felt jealous of Jessica, with her undeniably lovely hands that had shown up there at the ends of the arms of the person who was supposed to be my child.
Dawn has recently started up a second blog focusing on secondary infertility. At Another Child, Dawn and a number of other bloggers share their experiences, outline recent fertility developments in the news, and run a forum for parents wanting support.