"To be a witch means to choose the ways that you will and won't care for others"
Notes on freedom, control and so-called "choice"
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The week before last, the writer
wrote a gorgeous essay for us on having children, and not having children, and all the ways that freedom or lack thereof are tied to those things.I have had the feeling of “being jealous” when I read something really good many times, but this is the first time as a writer I’ve had the feeling of “being jealous” of something that I’ve published. It’s an awesome feeling, really.
I’m obsessed with questions about the freedom of bodies of women and girls and birthing people, and how unjust control of our bodies impacts everyone. To see these ideas rendered with new sharpness and tenderness in the images and vignettes that Kat captures is so satisfying and powerful.
Here’s how I described the essay in my intro: Kat mines her own history and observes the women and children around her— there are children who are mothers, and mothers who are ghosts; there is trauma, the myth of the American dream, the realities of debt and bodies and the ways that queerness can still make you a witch.
(You can read Kat’s whole, lovely piece below. If you haven’t, you really should rn. You’re welcome.)
Read the full story
Since Kat’s piece went out, I keep thinking about the ways outside forces shape how much freedom we have—even in the most intimate decisions of our lives.
The phrase “children who are mothers, and mothers who are ghosts” keeps running through my mind.
I have been reading the fantastic new book “Touched Out: Motherhood, Misogyny, Consent and Control” by
and I’m kind of sad that I have almost reached the end. I’ve been reading it on the subway and before bed and any time I can steal to bury myself in it because I feel seen in those pages, too.Montei shares her experience of grappling with entering motherhood, and the financial precarity and physical overwhelm that comes crashing in with it. This reaches a fever pitch during the pandemic when she becomes the default stay-at-home parent trapped with small children who require around-the-clock care and a partner who, no matter how overwhelmed she gets, expects his sexual and bodily needs to be met regularly by her too. She describes dissociating from her body, like a shell that has no agency and exists only as a resource for others.
She quotes writer Kim Brooks, who writes that for many women staying at home “is more of a response to circumstance and lack of alternatives.”
As an adjunct professor and grad student, Montei and her partner didn’t qualify for any government support. If she was a citizen of one of the forty-one other industrialized countries that offer months or even years of family leave, subsidized daycare, quality early childhood education, she muses, she would have had a real choice about how she comprised a life after childbirth.
One of my favorite things about Montei’s book is that she rips into the notion that her situation is a “choice” that she—or most people—can make out of free will.
The “isolation, emotional and physical devastation, and economic precarity—just some of the struggles that people experience they become parents, each compounded by intersections of race, class, and gender identity—are not inherent conditions of parenthood,” writes Montei. “They are the ongoing and premeditated disaster of care in patriarchal capitalist America.”
We are sold a narrative that women have “choice” now—maybe even “too many choices,” lol.
In reality we have inherited conditions that restrict options for our bodies, our children, our aging parents, our loved ones, and restrict our hopes for ourselves.
I didn’t have to leave my job when I had a baby, which I was glad for, but my partner and I have done many things in survival mode trying to fill childcare gaps. This was especially the case the first year after my maternity leave was up but we couldn’t begin to afford the cost of a private nanny (i.e. taking on a full-time or mostly full-time employee for your family), and we couldn’t yet enroll in daycare because most daycares don’t take children under the age of one.
Looking back, we resorted to things that were sometimes comical, and sometimes dreadful and unsafe. There was the time I ran to meet my partner on a subway platform so that he could throw our sleeping infant at me while he dashed to work and I took the baby back to the office to attend a long meeting. At the meeting, my baby slept beside me while milk leaked through my shirt because I had no time to nurse or pump.
There was the time we left her with a total stranger from Care.com because it was our birthdays, and for twenty-four hours a day for almost 3 months no other human had held or cared for our colicky infant besides the two of us. And we needed to go to dinner and be free for just a few hours so, so badly.
There was the babysitter that I hired last minute from a rec on a mom group chat when our regular sitters fell through, who texted while I was at work to ask if she could take the baby on a bus trip to Rockefeller Center, far from our apartment. I imagined the mere possibility of my baby disappearing with someone I didn’t really know well, and never getting her back, and had to lie down in my office to fend off a panic attack. I took the rest of the day off and went home.
These and a million other things made it much harder to entertain the notion of a second child. If we lived in another place where none of those scenarios were necessary, we might have chosen differently. I know that my circumstances were and are much, much better than many families’, and I think about that often when I feel like I’m being stretched at the seams. How is everyone doing this?
Like Montei, I don’t regret having a child. I resent the circumstances that make the experience grinding and fraught—or make it impossible altogether, as the cost of raising children in the U.S. becomes unattainable for many Americans.
Of course, the language of “choice” is also often weaponized against women and girls and anyone with a uterus in regards to the right to choose not to give birth. And, as Montei notes, in rape culture. The right to “choice” for “unborn children” (really in many cases clots of cells that are so small that they are microscopic), is used to force women and children into giving birth against their will, or continue pregnancies that are are not viable.
And the thought experiment of the “promising life” that a young rapist might have if only a woman or child might not have accused him, Montei points out, gives rapists more choice and freedom than women and children who have been violated.
A culture where children become mothers, and mothers become ghosts, is not free.
And the toxic combination of the two is the origin of much of the suffering in this country. As
wrote this week, in states that have restricted abortion, more children wind up in foster care. States that restrict abortion saw an 11% increase in the number of children placed in foster care—which amounts to thousands and thousands of children.And as we have written about before, our failed foster care system (i.e., our shameful failure to adequately care for un-parented children or those separated from their families) is the source of many of our worst problems, from child trafficking, to child abuse, to drug use, to homelessness.
“It’s not a coincidence that these [so called] “pro-life” states were the quickest to destroy families—particularly Black families—and simply take children from their parents rather than supporting parents to build the families they want with the resources they need,” wrote Fillipovic.
What would it look like if we chose to give people and families what they need, instead?
“I sometimes envision a utopia, even the lowest bar of one,” Kat wrote in her essay. “In the lowest bar utopia, we all have free healthcare and free daycare that is excellent. We aren’t carrying debts from education or just from trying to make the ends meet when we just have a few scraps.
“We all have a community composed of those who have children and those who don’t; we care not only for our children, but also for each other since so many of us are healing from some form of trauma that make it hard to just be a person, not to mention a parent.”
Kat writes about how as a queer woman who has chosen not to have kids, she sometimes feels that she is “standing outside a circle,” not because she wants to be “apart” but because she longs for a circle that has enough to hold all of us—parents, children, the elderly. “To be a witch means to choose the ways that you will and won't care for others," she writes. I love that line.
What would it look like if we chose to give people the lowest bar of what they need? It would look like real choices. It would look like freedom.
Being able to choose the way that way you will and won’t care for others might be what makes you a witch.
But being able to choose the way that you will and won’t care for others is also what makes you free.
And now for some recs and links:
Here’s some excellent news—states with abortion on the ballet this last week OVERWHELMINGLY voted to give people with uteruses the right to refuse forced birth. Or, as the great
put it:
Likewise, this meme from
is giving me life.
You can find Amanda Montei here at
and her fantastic book, TOUCHED OUT, here.
Here’s the full piece by
that does a fantastic job of breaking down the new JAMA study showing the devastating effects of forced birth post-Roe: “When States Restrict Abortion, More Kids Wind up in Foster Care”We would love your feedback on Matriarchy Report! Tell us what you think in this short survey. (Bonus: Your participation in the survey instantly enters you in our raffle where you can win a $50 gift card to Bookshop.org!)
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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 lives in New York City with her partner and young daughter.
Allison Lichter is the Associate Dean at the Newmark School of Journalism at the City University of New York. She has been a writer, producer and editor for radio and print, covering the arts, politics, and the workplace. She was born and raised in Queens, and lives in Brooklyn with her partner and daughter.
I watched wife-and-motherhood kill my aunt, nearly kill my mother, and leave about half of us cousins twisting in the wind as kids. I just couldn't ever bring myself to trust a dude to stick around, couldn't gin up the belief that having a baby, or two, wouldn't bankrupt and kill me. And so, I don't have kids. I was a fabulous auntie, a great nanny, and pretty much raised a bunch of younger cousins. I would have liked to have had kids. I love my life, but as with my writing career that stalled out, as with academia which I left -- actual financial stability via proper government support would have made all the difference.
This was so good!