The rumblings of discontent are getting louder, more
sustained. The mainstream feminist movement is having real
trouble with the concept of motherhood. Recent articles on an
Australian web site distill the problem to its essence: you're
damned if you do, and you're damned if you don't.
If you listened to your mother and other feminists of the
60s, you burned your bra and focused on your career -- plenty of
time for having kids later. Reproductive advances would make it
easy. And now you fume as your biological clock runs down, and
you're without viable eggs, let alone a partner.
The
ache and anger consume you. You were told you could have it
all, and reality is a cold, hollow laugh right in your face.
If you ignored your mother and friends, you were a turncoat
to "the sisterhood," a traditional mom who bought into the
patriarchy and is likely still in thrall to its lure of
security. You were an obstruction to the feminists' plans of
social rebuilding for mothering, childcare, and indeed the
entire family. You're an anachronism -- and who has a need for
those?
If you were fortunate enough to win at "baby roulette" after
dogging the career track for years,
you
feel betrayed. The sweet, loving baby has colic, the happy
toddler prefers videos to "family time." Sleep is a luxury, as
is a house that's only somewhat cluttered. Is a never-ending
concern with pee and poop what you gave up a lucrative executive
position for?
Since the sixties, when women were told they could "have it
all," the rush has been to have it all, whether we really wanted
it or not. Did anybody ask what "it all" was? What about the
price? It certainly seems that not many asked what the price
might be for having it all. And now we begin to see the full
backlash of the lie of having it all.
Much of that backlash seems directed specifically at
motherhood. When the dreams of family and house and "happily
ever after" don't come true -- which is happening for women with
and without children -- women talk about it. And, predictably,
write about it. If the aforementioned Aussie articles are
typical (and in my experience, they are) of mainstream
collectivist feminism, the negative emotions of "having been
lied to" appear to be all these unhappy women focus upon.
Were we lied to by our feminist mothers? I don't think so. At
least, I wasn't. My mother was in turns warm and distant,
nurturing and withdrawn, yielding in me both a confused sense of
worth and an independent individualist streak. It took quite a
while for the one to win over the other, but she helped me
realize the strength to accomplish that, as well. More
explicitly, she told me to go after whatever I wanted, that I
could succeed if I was willing to work hard enough. She believed
in me. That was enough for me.
What she also unwittingly (in my opinion) gave me was the
knowledge that I was free to pursue whatever path I wanted with
my life. I had the power to decide what I valued, and how to
achieve my goals in support of those values. Because she got
married young and had a family instead of a career, she seemed
to want me to pursue career options. But it was never pushed,
nor did she turn her back on my sister when she unexpectedly
became a single mother. I suppose if I were to look back in
anger, or depression, or seeking victimhood, I could find
something to quibble about. But such negativity is
self-defeating, as these whining feminists demonstrate so well.
The backlash of mainstream feminism against motherhood
perpetuates another unhealthy element of their feminism: someone
must pay. Despite all the advances in reproductive technology
that give women greater reproductive freedom and choices, the
growth of the day care industry, and legislation providing paid
maternal leave, it isn't enough for these unhappy women. The
system still "has inequality at its core."
Their solution to this inequality? It's to go beyond
either-or choices between children and career, or juggling the
weighty demands of both. It's to imagine a world that allows
women to fulfill the "need to nurture" without forfeiting
creative and intellectual outlets. It's to -- yes, that again --
"create
a society that values mothering." The way to do this, when
you ask these women, is to follow socialist Europe and pay
mothers for being mothers.
Can anyone explain to me -- coherently and rationally --
how paying a woman money for bearing and raising a child will
make these miserable feminist mothers feel less stressed, less
harried, and more valued?
The pain such women feel is real, I've no doubt of that. Yet,
it's all self-inflicted. It's the result of the choices each
woman has made, and is making.
Choosing a "mommy track" or "career path" because others
expect it is going to result in unhappiness; the individual
hasn't put any thought into what she wants, and what is best for
her. Making a choice without deliberately, consciously
considering the consequences is similarly irresponsible -- and
when some of those consequences are negative, it's not
surprising that those get the most attention. Even so, the
demands of motherhood are very hard to fathom prior to becoming
one -- but still, there are ways to gain information and assess
it, and make a sound decision. Choosing to focus on the bright
spots of motherhood -- no matter how few and far between they
might be -- is a way to ward off the depression and anger that
are frequent companions to new and burnt-out mothers.
In
an economics book I read recently, I came across a
fundamental wisdom that I knew intellectually, but hadn't taken
fully into me. Simply put, it's this: actions trump everything.
A person can talk about what her values are, what she's going to
do and how, but what she chooses to do -- her action -- fully
reveals what she values.
If mothers are calling for their state governments to pay
them as an expression of "valuing mothers," what does that say?
To me it says that those women have been so deluded by
feminism-as-victimism that they have no reality-based concept of
value any more. It demonstrates the lie behind their claims that
"creat[ing] a society that values mothering is to create a world
in which human beings matter more than money," again from an
Australian
commentary. If human beings mattered more to them than
money, why aren't they choosing to see the intrinsic value in
creating and nurturing human life, and celebrating that, instead
of calling for more government handouts?
What seems to matter most to these women is having it all,
even if they don't value any of it. How sad that they value
their children so little that they feel they must be paid by
Sugar Daddy government for raising their children. I certainly
wouldn't want to be a child of such a mother. No, I would rather
be without a mother at all -- or have one who valued me so much
that her
last actions involved getting me to a place where I'd have
more freedom to choose.
A mother is a woman who values her children as individuals --
for what they are, and what they can become. She works to create
in her children the belief that they can succeed, if they choose
to work hard at their goals. I feel more kinship with those
Mexican mothers than I do all the mainstream feminist, whining,
women-who've-borne-children who apparently don't see value
unless a collective grants it to them.
Sunni Maravillosa is a psychologist, web mistress, writer,
and editor of Free-Market.Net's
Freedom
Book of the Month. Her writing is scattered across many web
sites, but you can find much of it at
Doing Freedom!
and the Liberty
Round Table.
