Certain subjects bring probing insights that defy partisanship or cultural divides. One such subject is motherhood. Even for the thorough-going progressive, the experience of pregnancy and giving birth to a baby can be so astonishing that voluble reflections on motherhood—not “parenthood”—flow forth.
Experience is the best teacher
Writing for The New Yorker, Jia Tolentino offers meditative reflections on what is distinctive about motherhood and how the experience shapes women. Ostensibly a book review of Angela Garbes’ book Essential Labor, Tolentino’s essay is much more. Titled “Can Motherhood Be a Mode of Rebellion?” Tolentino recounts her experience of her daughter’s first weeks and the shock, as so many post-moderns experience, of encountering a baby outside the confines of idle abstraction.
Tolentino writes that she found caring for a baby to be “a kind of work that I’d been shocked to find intimately rewarding but also far harder than anything I’d ever tried to do for eight hours straight.” In her customary eloquence, Tolentino describes motherhood as “a job so crucial and difficult that it seems objectively holy: to clean excrement off a body, to hold a person while they are crying, to cherish them because of and not despite their vulnerability.”
Consumed by the political
From this place of individual and personal relationship, the maternal meditations take a political turn. Reflecting on the many people—almost exclusively women—who care for our nation’s young while mothers work, Tolentino quotes Angela Garbes in her new book, “Essential Labor: Mothering as Social Change.” Raising kids, Garbes writes, is “not a private hobby, not an individual duty. It is a social responsibility, one that requires robust community support. The pandemic revealed that mothering is some of the only truly essential work humans do.”
Garbes, who previously wrote about pregnancy, now has two children. Caring for them and feeling inferior, she wondered how caring for children “came to be seen as naturally female, which is to say invisible and undervalued,” and why it’s viewed as “low-wage labor, rather than highly skilled work that is essential, creative, and influential.”
The description of “female” as “invisible and undervalued” is an interesting one. What is feminine, perhaps a more helpful word than “female,” is indeed often that which goes unnoticed. But this is not because it is undervalued but simply because it is the air we breath in our homes, the reassuring substance of our lives that we don’t notice until it is gone.
Pearl S. Buck includes a poignant example of this “invisible” women’s work in the long-suffering character of O-Lan. Buck wrote, “All through the long months of winter she lay dying and upon her bed, and for the first time Wang Lung and his children knew what she had been in the house, and how she made comfort for them all and they had not known it.” This is not some patriarchal conspiracy contrived to oppress women but a natural inclination of many women toward the care of individuals, the important puttering about the house that makes such a difference in the daily functioning and comfort of all the people there.
Not so, say Garbes and her fans. Not content to sit with her smallness, Garbes sought to make the personal political, as every activist loves to do. She wanted to tap into the frustrations of other “caregivers” to unleash a revolution on the polis.
In laying out her vision for revolutionary change, Garbes discloses details about her own children’s countercultural upbringing. Eschewing material success, Garbes prefers living on modest means (Her and the Dave Ramsey crowd but for very different reasons). Unhappy with maternal exclusivity, Garbes seems to want to make us all into “mothers,” raving that her children have “more than ten grown-ups in their life whom they love and trust, who see them fully, and whom I would let discipline them without a thought.”
Certainly, children benefit from having many adults in their lives. These other, non-biologically-related adults, however, do not “see them fully”; that is not their role to fill. Inviting in an increasingly widening circle of concerned and involved adults frankly seems like a great way to invite chaos. Other people simply are not as invested in the well-being of your child as you are. As much as the activists want to get around it, it just is.
Motherhood and the private sphere
Not content with reality, the activists insist on demonizing the “privatized vision of motherhood” put forth by that evil, hyper-individual “upper-middle-class parenting.” According to Jacqueline Rose, there could be some mythic land in which “everyone, whatever the impulses driving them hard and fast in the opposite direction, would be capable of thinking of themselves as mothers.” Likewise, Alexis Pauline Gumbs “argues that ‘mother’ should be less a gendered identity and more a ‘possible action, a technology of transformation.’”
That’s right: after establishing through personal experience tied to the real world how individual and specific motherhood is, the politically minded believe that motherhood should be exploded into a nondescript “caring” for all people everywhere.
You just don’t find people who are not really, personally mothers going into ecstasies over cleaning earwax and the marvels of caring for the helpless and pitiable, as Garbes does. Motherhood will never be a means of mass mobilization and largescale equity-building, upending class order and revolutionizing human society writ large. Precisely because it is individual.
The one-income family
Because of this, there is wisdom in allocating resources for mothers to spend their time raising their own children. Not exclusively and not without help but, shall we say, primarily. In some Southern environs, they say that in a married partnership, one person “does well” so that the other person can “do good.” By this is meant that the lingering aristocracy of the Old South has evolved pragmatically to ensure that one person makes extravagant wealth—through fracking, financial services, massive medical enterprise—and the other devotes her time to charitable causes and not-for-profit initiatives, or perhaps more modestly “staying home” to raise the children.
Strangely, one can find some slight agreement with Elizabeth Warren in her oft-cited 2004 book, The Two-Income Trap: Why Middle-Class Parents Are Going Broke. Another arena in which progressives suddenly find momentary common ground with conservatives, Warren’s book makes the argument for the injustice of an economy that penalizes families for having a single income.
The only possible solution is not necessarily top-down government intervention and the option to live on one income is not only available to the tremendously wealthy. Just as Garbes chooses to let her children wear threadbare clothing in order to have a life that she finds more meaningful and relationship-rich, so many Christian families make financial sacrifices so that mothers can be available to their children throughout the day and make a home that serves the physical and spiritual needs of the family.
The invisible and unnoticed quality of this work does not mean that the women who choose it seek to be erased. Rather, the bedrock of the family is the desire to improve the life of another. Iris Murdoch, in her essay “The Sublime and the Good,” wrote, “Love is the extremely difficult realization that something other than oneself is real.” Mothers who care for their children out of guilt and self-loathing leave a legacy of pain. But mothers who are inspired to cast aside thoughts of herself in the service of the people she loves most is the altruistic core on which civilization rests.
A failed experiment
Attempting to wrench motherhood from the private sphere where it belongs is to rob it of its incredible power. Motherhood is transformative, but only as individual. It cannot be channeled and coopted to serve political ends because it is not political. Back to the initial question, “Can Motherhood Be a Mode of Rebellion?” the answer appears to be, “yes.” Not as a destabilizing political theatrical stunt in which all people are capable of “mothering” by suddenly radically caring for people they do not know and therefore cannot love.
Rather, motherhood has become an act of rebellion when a woman insists that her child is hers in a direct and individual way and chooses to care for that child as such. Motherhood does not in healthy circumstances encompass her entire identity. She and the child do not exist in a hermetically sealed world of exclusivity. But it is specific. And essential.
But what about mothers not being paid for their work? What about people who cannot be part of this privileged class of rebellious individualists? To assume that what is valued should be what is paid most for is a strangely reductive view. C.S. Lewis rightly stated, “The homemaker has the ultimate career. All other careers exist for one purpose only – and that is to support the ultimate career.” The trajectory of all economic activity is the storing up of resources for eating, sheltering, educating, entertaining, and living. The homemaker may not get a paycheck, but the economy exists to serve her.
While there may not be direct compensation and the lifestyle may not be possible for many, the world is not made better by women who can care for the children they brought into the world choosing not to out of a misplaced sense that other people should be made to care. Community is necessary and good, but do not let the progressives diffuse and confuse motherhood. It means something specific; it is individual; it is essential. We all know because we relied on a mother.
In the age of increasingly mainstream surrogacy, we still haven’t gotten around to inviting people into being without a mother. Surely we are more than mere bodies. Our minds and spirits also flourish under the nourishing care of a mother. Saying so is rather rebellious these days.
Caring for young children should clarify the extent of our aims and convince us how modest even our most radical efforts will be.
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