Undo Motherhood

January 20, 2022 4:00 PM

'Brought together for a new book of the same title, Undo Motherhood is Diana Karklin's attempt to better understand why women love their children and are excellent mothers when judged according to society's standards but yet hate the oppressive "mother role" that "robbed them of their own existence and suffer through it in silence", often feeling it to be the worst mistake they have ever made.'
posted by DarlingBri (16 comments total)

From the article: "[The book] points a stern oppressive finger at the patriarchal institute of motherhood, which from a very young age pushes girls to become mothers only to abandon them when they have children, a huge life-changing event that often costs their own lives."

What a powerful piece. I have chosen not to have children, partly because I have seen so many friends go through similar stresses and regrets to those described in the article. It's difficult to see them ground down by the sheer weight of societal pressures and conflicting demands.

I have great respect and admiration for women who do choose motherhood, but frankly, I wonder how many really understand what they're getting into. And of course, many women do not even get to make the choice at all.

I hope books like Karklin's get the attention they deserve, and maybe even inspire some reflection and positive change.
posted by rpfields at 5:55 PM on January 20, 2022 [14 favorites]

Thank you for posting this, DarlingBri.
posted by Orange Dinosaur Slide at 7:04 PM on January 20, 2022 [3 favorites]

One of my mother's hissed sayings to me was, your grandmother should have never had children. It was a good double-whammy of self-loathing and emotional abuse . Obviously inherited, it meant that she should not have been born (to her mother?) and that I should not have been born to her. That she herself should not have been a mother. Both my mother and my grandmother were independent professional women before the responsibilities of motherhood consumed all the hours of more than a quarter century of their lives. Both had internalised the expectations put on 'motherhood', and the misogynistic dismissal of it. Even though both had husbands, they became the breadwinners too, subsiding under even more responsibilities.

I heard my grand/mother's lament and never had children. In Karklin's images, I see myself in a sliding-doors moment attempting to endure the interminable demands. I would fail.

Children are a crushing responsibility.
posted by Thella at 7:12 PM on January 20, 2022 [11 favorites]

I am reminded of this previous post which discussed an ad from a Japanese cosmetic company: in the ad, they pointed out the fact that in Japan, men and women take to calling each other "mama" and "papa" when they become parents, never addressing each other by their given names. So they asked 19 men to start calling their wives by their given names to see what happened.

The ad goes on to say that this experiment lead to a rise in oxytocin levels in the women - what the ad called "the beauty hormone". But if you look at the interviews with the women themselves, they are getting more jazzed out of the whole idea that "oh THANK GOD someone sees me as an individual rather than just 'a mother'."

I completely understand the whole notion of wanting to be a parent to a child, but somehow not wanting to fit in lockstep with the whole societal role of "and if you are a parent that means that you must behave in this narrowly-proscribed fashion". Women already get that kind of societal burden thrust upon them, adding "mother" to that narrows things even further.

Good GOD patriarchy has fucked us all over.
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 7:13 PM on January 20, 2022 [13 favorites]

See also Maggie Nelson’s The Argonauts.
posted by anshuman at 11:02 PM on January 20, 2022 [1 favorite]

Ooh, Empress that's really interesting. When my child (age 1.5) is doing something and I yell out "mrfeet", she knows to yell "Daddy!" too. But I'm not sure if she knows my human name. (He does call me by my name, but not often- part of that is he's a less yelly person)

Today has been an up and down day. This post is hard and yet good. Being a parent is hard- even when you have a fairly enlightened spouse who shares the emotional and physical load. Being a "mother" with all its patriarchal trappings, is just awful. I don't always feel like a mother. I do feel like a mum.

rpfields- I know what you mean about choosing- it's of course impossible to truly know what it's like to be a parent in all of it's challenges, trials and crushing beauty. And once chosen you can't go back. It's an irrevocable change. (I've even chosen to do it all again- sometimes I shake my head at myself.) I definitely gained an appreciation for those who are pro-choice, while I was pregnant. I mean, personally I'd prefer that birth control was better and more widely available, but understand that termination has a place. (/Tangent)

Regretting motherhood is interesting. If you regret a job, you can quit. A relationship, you can break up. If you regret a marriage, you can divorce. But you can never not be someone's mother.
posted by freethefeet at 12:08 AM on January 21, 2022 [2 favorites]

But you can never not be someone's mother.

You can. It's not something that tends to be particularly ideal for anyone involved, but as someone with a lot of adoptees in my family, I can assure you that you absolutely can.
posted by Dysk at 4:10 AM on January 21, 2022 [3 favorites]

My fucking village never showed up. Because we don't have a system that allows it. My constant mental image of myself when my kid was small was a woman on all fours trying to climb a mountain of rocks that kept rolling away under her. It's just cruel, how we do parenting. women get it worst, but men struggle too. It's cruel and stupid and all of us who get through it have scars and trauma.
posted by emjaybee at 6:02 AM on January 21, 2022 [7 favorites]

I really liked the top photo at the creative blooms link, of the woman sitting on the edge of the fountain looking at her child, who from our perspective is an out of focus blur in front of her.

Her attention is on her child - it has to be, to a large extent, when your child is small - but our focus is on her. She's a unique person, and her motherhood is one aspect of her life, not the only focus.

I think it works well as a thesis photo.
posted by the primroses were over at 6:40 AM on January 21, 2022 [1 favorite]

Excellent stuff. This is a topic that isn’t discussed enough, in my opinion. There’s just so much to it. (Tangentially, I recommend Recreating Motherhood by Barbara Katz-Rothman for a meaty text-based exploration of the “so much.”)
posted by scratch at 6:57 AM on January 21, 2022

I (a person who has chosen not to have children) remember my mother talking to me about something related to this. "I think if your Aunt Pseudonym had had a child, she might have more understanding and patience around how Grandma treated us. I remember when the doctors put you in my arms, and the overwhelming sense of 'this is the most amazing, most perfect creation of the Universe' and simultaneously 'YOU. WILL. FUCK. THIS. UP.'"
posted by Lexica at 3:44 PM on January 21, 2022 [2 favorites]

Once my mom and I were sitting in a restaurant when a kid at a nearby table started screaming his head off. "Don't you feel lucky you never had children?" she asked. Which of course was a hilarious thing to say to your own daughter. But also amazing.
posted by HotToddy at 4:01 PM on January 21, 2022 [1 favorite]

I feel profound irritation at work and articles in this theme, that goes along this line--"women feel pressurized/persuaded into having children, afterwards feel regret. Why." I'm antinatalist and feel that no one should be having children in this world. But I also know that antinatalism or childfree is an OLD and increasingly popular idea/lifestyle. So, to see childfree be paraded around (by an artist/photographer/person who wants to sell her work) as an unconventional, taboo idea is like seeing someone do the old "stealing confusion", where you take a popular idea and say, "its unpopular and I'm brave for saying it." Childfree is one of those ideas where some people are strongly against, others are strongly for, its just not universally embraced but what is? It's not even controversial. So, this woman is being terribly disingenuous, stealing confusion and all that. It just really grinds my gears. Just, like ... go talk about something else.
posted by Didnt_do_enough at 2:10 AM on January 22, 2022 [1 favorite]

So, to see childfree be paraded around (by an artist/photographer/person who wants to sell her work) as an unconventional, taboo idea is like seeing someone do the old "stealing confusion",

She's not advocating for childfree, she's examining women who have children and regret it. Those are two very different things.

It's not even controversial.

Regretting motherhood, particularly while mothing your offspring, is controversial.
posted by DarlingBri at 7:10 AM on January 22, 2022 [9 favorites]

My fucking village never showed up. Because we don't have a system that allows it.

I have a neighbor with kids near my kids' ages, all teens and young adults. When our kids were young, we were both home full time, with part-time work. I don't know how either of us would have gotten through those years without each other. We took care of each other's kids both when scheduling (as when I took care of hers every week while she went to therapy) but also on no notice at all ("I need to take the dog to the vet but the twins are both still sleeping. Can you come down to my house while I'm gone?").

I think few of us are prepared for how isolating motherhood can be. I think my friends who suffered the worst with this were those working full-time, and didn't have the time or energy to seek out connections that might be available.

I was a mother by choice, and generally enjoyed it a lot. My mother didn't want kids, and didn't appreciate the effect they'd had on her life, including leaving a line of work she'd been in for over a decade and had done well at (this was the early 60s). I could have done without the scapegoating and emotional abuse, but I remember at some point when my kids were still small, thinking to myself, "This is really really hard even if you chose it and still want it. How hard must it have been when you hadn't wanted it, and weren't getting any satisfaction from it?"

Solving this problem of leaving mothers isolated and unsupported so that the children they love are also a huge burden—or represent a period in a woman's life when she has almost no control over how she lives and spends her time—requires being honest about the experience. I admit, this kind of work can make me defensive, so I have to be pretty disciplined to remind myself that women need to be able to talk honestly about motherhood, and that nobody is asking me to defend my own experience or compare theirs to mine.
posted by Well I never at 10:10 AM on January 22, 2022 [4 favorites]

to see childfree be paraded around... as an unconventional, taboo idea

One of the interesting things about discussions like this is how different people can see different things in the same piece.

Women are strongly encouraged to choose motherhood, but once they have done so, they are left on their own with the most of the consequences of that choice. Even women who don't want to be mothers are told that they will fall in love with their children, and by extension, their roles. If that feel-good narrative doesn't unfold, the (often implicit) response is "well, you made your bed, now you can lie in it. You could have chosen otherwise." The idea of being childfree is not seen as unconventional or taboo in those conversations.

What is new in the artist's project is the exploration of what happens afterward, when abandoning motherhood is not seen as a viable option in most cases (although it does happen, as one commenter above noted). I realize that as a childfree person myself, I am not steeped in discussions on this subject, but I have seen relatively little of this kind of discussion, at least in North American culture, and I think we need to see more.
posted by rpfields at 12:21 PM on January 22, 2022 [2 favorites]