Is Motherhood Relevant?

In her classic 1988 examination of women and economics, Counting for Nothing, New Zealand economist, Marilyn Waring, references the word ‘economy’ from Xenophon’s use of the word “oikonomikos,’ the management or rule of a house or household. The raising of children most often arises in the context of the family. Value it or not, the position of mother sets the tone. That tone is elusive and infinitely varying.

Why?

Motherhood is a kind of fantasy of love and hope that curtains other realities. (Fantasy because the imagination is large and impressionable. Hope because we can imagine better things.) The drapes are drawn (or peeked through or thrown open) but to mother is to wrap bats’ wings around, to hover, to fly hungry at dusk, to nurse, sometimes upside down.

My mother entered a Catholic marriage in 1954. By 1965 that marriage was annulled and she was raising her six children alone. NOW, the National Organization of Women, was founded in 1966. By 1970 memories were forming in my pre-adolescent mind - recollections of small women’s meetings in our home merge with a rousing awareness of things so much weightier than my wide and eager eyes could comprehend. Childhood innocence and wonder caught a glimpse of the responsibility and possibilities emerging out of simply being female.

That those inklings arose in me, in a large university town in an idyllic mountain landscape, intensified the experiences and the memories that sustained.

Less than thirty years later I gave birth to my first child. It fit well with the beginnings of my part time yoga teaching career - a word I was reluctant to apply for most of the decades my work transpired. My outside teaching focus was on seniors and adaptive yoga and I could teach through all three of my pregnancies - and the stages that unfolded.

One of the perks of teaching senior yoga to adults my senior was the uninvited advice to younger me. “How can you stand to be alone at home with your children?” asked Wilma, a student, a woman in her late seventies, married to a psychiatrist; she obviously lived through that same 1960s era but half a generation older than my own mother and with different circumstances. She mothered in New York City, her husband focused on his career in psychiatry and she seemed to have remembered that experience as one of being abandoned at home with her two girls. I gathered that marital relationship entertained explorations that left the unhappy mother further isolated and resentful.

Wilma was genuinely perplexed, even incredulous at my response. “I love being pregnant and being a mother,” spoken with asserted tone I could not hide as I was equally offended and surprised by her disbelief. Indeed, I felt defensive. I remember her asking me this when I had one child, then piercingly three years later when I had two, and then again with extra irritation, when I was pregnant with my third.

It did not stop with pregnancy. Those kids, the three of them, three years apart, they grew. Like caterpillars. Or like George the runt, a pig we raised, who would eat anything. And mothering meant feeding - feeding hunger-for-learning which rages in the young.

Hunger-for-learning. But learning feeds itself, will grab at anything. And mothering meant teaching, meant seeing what comes next, meant adjusting to each new stage. Mothering meant figuring out and quickly concluding what kind of a world presented itself so as to determine what to serve.

We’re all a bunch of copy cats. And without some reflection on what we had consumed to make us who we were, as new parents, we’d be passing that along too, almost as true as the color of our eyes.

But really there was no time for that.

As it was for me, for us, mothering was parenting – shared with a husband who cared - a man who made it possible to hold the family in the center.

Other circumstances also allowed for an intact family, even though we had both come from ‘broken homes.’ Like the plot of land we could live on the first six years with our two trailers joined by a craftily constructed shed of used plywood and sheet metal with woodstove for heat in the winter. Somehow we kept the mice out of the house though we heard their scampering in the walls. Our trailer/shed home featured a stained clawfoot tub next to a picture window at the sole entrance from which we could view a small garden where we grew corn ready to barbecue not just on the cob, but on the stalk. Sure we did not entertain much, mostly family, but life was dear and intimate. Life was tender. It was possible to relish the cocoon of parenting, which in turn, morphed into all kinds of learning inclusive of homeschooling.

Leaping along, thirty years upon another thirty years, still grappling with the illusive nature of mothering which almost defines nature. Plans – futures - much wondered about but not counted on, are now in place. Yet we still hang in the sidelines, wondering how to be of service. Ready to serve. And ready, also, to stay out of the way. Do we call this sacrifice? Did we make an exchange? What, exactly, did we give up?