The Cord that Cuts Both Ways

on where parenting lives

My mom’s favorite fancy restaurant is closed on Sundays -- yes even Mother’s Day -- so we took her to dinner on Saturday instead, and had a very nice evening. But what, then, would I do on the official day for celebrating the work of mothers (besides be drenched with stories of how all the moms got their sweet Sunday due; besides ponder where the concepts of Mom stitch me together)? I would text and call some others – close friends with kids I know, my beloved stepmom. I might get a text from my grown stepdaughter, who was only my full-time dependent for three years and who I have hardly seen in the last ten, but who still some years sends love.

I would certainly not get a ribbon-tied spray of daisies, a card or a spa certificate, dinner out, breakfast in bed, or the special gift of some hours cordoned off for Me to do-whatever-I-want. Because I have given myself — intentionally or not — the permanent gift of all the hours for Me, theoretically none of them ever required for the care and feeding of other people. We know how selfish and sad the conservative view finds that concept, and we in turn find that view pathetically, impotently, unable to see the complex realities of any “childless” woman’s existence. It’s a triumph to disrupt a discriminatory social imperative.

A biological one is stickier, though.

On Mother’s Days I walk a dog, maybe see a movie, and yep, work (nurturing the multitude of offspring enrolled in my classes); and lately ponder where the stitches are coming loose, picture the cut end of the thread knotted to nothing.

While not everyone is a bona fide parent, everyone has a bona fide parent (even if they are a memory or an absentee or a total failure). So everyone gets to celebrate and cope with having and/or losing parents, to support and seek shelter together in this universal condition. But the narrative gap between that identity stitch and the other end of the thread is sometimes a glacial crevasse, perhaps uncrossable.

In my little bubble I don’t know any mothers who don’t want to work for someone other than their family. Most have postgraduate degrees, and with all the debt or at least the years of other living sidelined for that learning, it makes sense to want to prioritize the work it leads to. When it’s not Mother's or Father’s Day, we are usually identified by our job; it’s the first question at the party and near the top of so many forms: accountant, electrician, teacher, designer… influencer. But is being good at your paid vocation ever as important an achievement as raising from scratch a good human? Perhaps not in the USA. Motherhood has always been a political question here, and in the current ideological war it’s found a winning lane. Whether you belong to this womanoshpere or not, you probably live in a country that does not guarantee maternity leave, because you’re not supposed to be working, just parenting. Which means that somebody else must be working, not parenting. If the capitalist machine needs only males working and females parenting, something is surely going to be out of balance, someone is going to be lost in the gaps.

It is increasingly less clear why the imperative is to ensure population growth and guarantee that your genes go on after you’re gone and can no longer help, rather than to do all you can for whoever is here with you now while you have some sentient agency. It seems like male-run industry and technology have finally evolved some of us into a new imperative: stop mass reproducing until you can ensure a resilient nest for the offspring, a home/a planet that can actually sustain them.

Along with the people I love whom I do actually provide all kinds of care and feeding for, I endeavor (at work) to help hundreds of children each year grow good brains and hearts. Why doesn’t the government want me to do that, or only that? Why, in fact, doesn’t society want me to do only that? In my relatively progressive little bubble, working (outside the home) parents get both penalties* and allowances** that — intentionally or not — default additional labor to their childless peers.

*Less than half of higher ed institutions offer paid parental leave; and when they do offer it, it ranges from a few weeks to at most a few months, depending whether you’re faculty or staff.

** All my parenting colleagues have a shameless pass to be present for work only on days when primary and secondary schools are in session, only between drop-off and pick-up hours, in spite of contractual expectations.

And many people in my little bubble now are not seeding or raising children, for many reasons. I wonder how far we are from the tipping point, when “today we celebrate fur moms and all these alternate motherings” is not the woke nod, not like the 2 “plus-size” models in the 200-page magazine, but rather the genuinely accepted, openly-dreamed-of aspiration, or even the norm. If having babies was the uncommon choice, the road less taken, would this loose end of the thread feel less potentially dreadful; would someday being left without mother or child be a less bleak fate to ponder?

Seven million years of human biology is a lot to counterbalance. Maybe just no more identity-based holidays is a more reasonable revision. Maybe I could fill with enough signatures a petition to celebrate everything we do for each other any day we want, turning all the card aisles into craft tables where we build shelters of gratitude big and small.