The Joy and Grief of American Motherhood

All the feels about the state of mothers as we head into Mother's Day

“Madonna with Daffodils” by collage artist Joe Brainard, Met Museum of Art. In which a woman is overwhelmed by decorative artifice and a bouquet of flowers. It’s a metaphor for Mother’s Day, is what I’m saying.

Notes:

1. This is the second time I’ve written a Mother’s Day reflection/rant, the last one was an op-ed about how I felt about Mother’s Day before I had a kid—if you’re new here and are interested you can read it here. Both essays are personal but the one below is gets pretty real about my post-kid feels as an American mother at this moment. It’s one of the most vulnerable things I’ve written and I hope you like it.

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It seems American women can agree on one thing: none of us like Mother’s Day.

I was not a fan of Mother’s Day before I had a child in my 40’s, and now that I have a kid I still have mixed feelings. And I’m not alone—it seems we are all ambivalent at best.

On the one hand, I can think about my daughter on Mother’s Day and the fact of her birth and existence, and I am still in awe every day that I tore a hole in the universe and now here is this person.

Sometimes my four-year old still asks: “Where did I come from?”

Her dad will tell her that she came from the two of us, and I always happily interrupt: “But mostly me. Mostly I made you.”

And I’m not just being salty, I genuinely take pride in and wonder at the fact that I did that thing—that my body just knew how to do it with its own set of secret instructions! It has actually made me, in my 40’s, more in awe of my body, which is a gift because when do women ever get to feel good or powerful about their bodies in our culture?

But then, on the other hand, there’s (gestures to everything, everywhere, falling apart for women in the U.S. with tragic effects).

And if I’m being honest, as much as I feel awe and joy about the fact of my body’s ability to make a new life, I feel an equal part of grief.

Grief isn’t how we are “supposed” to feel on Mother’s Day. It’s definitely not the Hallmark card version. But it’s how I feel; and if you feel it too, I think it’s perfectly valid. How else should we feel?

Mothers and women and girls in the U.S. are in so many crises, (starting with the number of American women dying in the maternal mortality rate crisis) that it’s hard to keep track and keep up. I started making a list of what I thought might be a kind of lyrical imagery collage of my impressions of motherhood, like a Joe Brainard collage about mothers. But it got so heavy that I had to stop.

It became overwhelming. Thinking about the state of motherhood in the U.S. is overwhelming.

The other day a neighborhood friend told me that she feels furious because she was raised in a white religious household and her parents were financially comfortable, and she was taught her entire life to trust that (male) church leaders and politicians were looking out for our best interests and that everything would be taken care of. "We should have been questioning them the entire time!” she said, her voice shaking.

Now, in her thirties, she finds that her kids aren’t safe in school, the planet they are inheriting is sick, and there’s no promise that her daughter will have a choice if, or when, to have children. And she feels like it happened on her watch—because she believed the comfortable Hallmark version she was fed.

I feel like this is happening to a lot of women right now, women who are “waking up” to how, for lack of a better term, fucked we are.

And part of my grief is acknowledging all the women and children that never had this comfortable delusion at all. I think about the mother of Ruby Bridges, Lucille Bridges, icon and a mother of the Civil Rights movement who walked her six-year old little girl through a crowd of angry white parents and braved death threats to accompany her to an all-white school in New Orleans, desegregating the school. (Fact: I can’t see pictures like this of Ruby Bridges without tearing up, especially because she has an uncanny resemblance to my own daughter.)

Icon and a Mother of Civil Rights Lucille Bridges escorting her 6-year old Ruby Bridges to school flanked by U.S. Marshals, while angry white parents protested. Bridges integrated an all-white elementary school in New Orleans on November 14, 1960.

I think about Emmett Till’s mother, Mamie Elizabeth Till, one of America’s bravest mothers and activists whose 14-year-old boy was murdered in Mississippi on August 28, 1955, after being accused of whistling at a white woman. I think of all the moms of murdered Black children in the U.S., where to this day Black children and people continue to be murdered.

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I have also found myself reflecting on the precise moments when I became aware, in my personal experience, that the Hallmark version of American Motherhood was all wrong.

Some of those moments of awareness came when I was a full-time reporter and having to take a hard look for the first time at the ways that the U.S. polices and punishes women and children.

I think about the time I called a family court judge for a series I was doing on sex work and trafficking, and she told me about a 19-year old new mother who poured herself into doting on her baby. That baby was her pride and joy. But the young mother didn’t make enough money waitressing to pay for rent and food, so she supplemented with higher-paying sex work that let her support her baby and gave her time to be with her.

But then she got busted for doing sex work, so the state was threatening to take her baby away.

I remember how the judge’s voice caught when she told me this story, and while she paused to gather herself I heard the silent grief she had for the unfairness and injustice that overwhelmed the mothers and babies that ended up at her bench.

In my reporting I came to learn that many sex workers are mothers with dependent children whose minimum wage jobs don’t keep them and their kids afloat.

I thought about the anti-abortion activists from my church as a kid, who peddled the idea that adoption was the more humane alternative.

Then I did a series on homeless youth and found that by far most of the homeless children in the U.S. come from the foster care system and children running away from abuse. The youth shelter that I spoke to in L.A. said that they made over 100 phone calls to place just one child.

I thought about how covering those stories introduced me to so many horrors that I thought maybe we should start having orphanages again. I wept in cafes while I filed those stories.

I think about how this also made me heart-wrenchingly, vigorously pro-abortion. “If a woman says that she won’t be able to care for a child BELIEVE HER” I wrote to my editor.

I think about my own daughter, just four years old, who has recently learned that babies come from inside women’s tummies. Lately she has been telling me and her dad that she “wants to be a boy” because “she doesn’t want to have a baby in her body.”

And I think about how even a four-year old grasps the horror of being forced to grow something in your body when you don’t want to.

I think of all the women and girls going through that horror in the U.S. right now. I promise my daughter that she will be able to choose, that she won’t ever have to have a baby if she doesn’t want to. But I feel a pit in my stomach wondering if that’s really true.

I think about learning that most abortions happen when there’s nothing but a microscopic piece of tissue to remove, and that it can be done safely at home with nothing but a pill, vs. all the lies that I was told when I was young. I think about the cruelty of taking away that option, and all the horror for women and children that result from forced birth and forced motherhood.

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As with many of us, my neighborhood friend said she is sickened most by the fact that America has made it legal and easy to buy weapons that are used to kill children.

We are living in a society where women are forced to give birth to babies that can be used as targets. It’s grim to say—but it’s where we are at.

And if we are feeling grief over this, it’s because that’s exactly how we should feel. This is the State of American Motherhood.

But there’s this, too: I think all the beauty and wonder of the fact of bodies giving birth is not disconnected from the violence and control.

The older I get, I keep thinking how this power that I feel so much joy about—the amazing, wonderful power of people who can make a human life—is so powerful that it’s threatening to those in power. It’s threatening to those who want to dominate.

I think about patriarchal myths and stories of male creation: a male god who created a man and used a rib from him to create a woman—as though men are the ones who create and give life instead of the other way around. And this although every single body that has ever been on this earth came from a woman, never a man! Not one time!

But it’s so powerful to make a body that it’s irresistible not to try to claim it for men somehow, despite all of the evidence ever since the beginning of time that it’s female bodies that hold creative power.

I used to not understand what people meant when they said that abortion and other patriarchal policies are meant to “control women.” But now I do. They are meant to control women’s bodies and their power—their incredible life-giving power, and their powerful role as the gatekeepers to when and whether life happens, or not.

And as I go into another Mother’s Day of fraught feelings, I hope that in our ambivalence this is what we hold onto—our power. A power that transcends science and technology and religion and is the source, the very beginning, of love and care. It is the literal source of humanity.

And if we celebrate it or grieve for it or both—it’s worth honoring, it’s worth marveling at, and it’s worth fighting for.

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What we are reading:

TWO TRUTHS is a newsletter written by two moms and parenting journalists Cassie Shortsleeve and Kelsey Lucas. They write about the duality of motherhood, the concept that often two things can be true at the same time and parenting is rarely either/or, but rather both/and. Subscribe below to follow updates on news in the maternal health space, and for interviews with some of the biggest voices changing the conversation on parenting right now, or use this link.

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MATRIARCHY REPORT is written by Lane Anderson and Allison Lichter.

Lane Anderson is a writer, journalist, and Clinical Associate Professor at NYU who has won several awards for her writing on inequality and family social issues. She has an MFA from Columbia University. She was raised in Utah and is based in New York City with her partner and young daughter.

Allison Lichter is a journalism professor at The New School and worked for many years at New York Public Radio and at the Wall Street Journal as a producer and editor. She was born and raised in Queens, and lives in Brooklyn with her partner and daughter.