FYP: To Mother [Excerpt]

1.2 Patriarchal Motherhood 

This form of motherhood that has been moulded to serve the patriarchs is coined as ‘Patriarchal Motherhood’, an ideology that exploits the female biological capabilities to reproduce and thus, suppresses the role of women to that only of a caretaker. Martha Fineman calls it “[a] colonized [concept] … an event physically practised and experienced by women, but occupied and defined, given content and value, by core concepts of patriarchal ideology” (Fineman, 289). Society has, in fact, created two separate spheres of influence for these two separate sexes: where the men are to occupy the economic and financial aspect, allowing themselves a space in the public sphere whilst the women are given the private space at home. Motherhood became a form of relief from the exploitation they experience, compensated by mere ideological ‘rewards’ of mothering rather than economic remuneration or the opportunity to be an agent of their cause. This cult of domesticity is used to legitimise the restriction of women by defining them as naturally suited for motherhood because biology had said so. Thus, they are unfit to be anything but mothers. 

New mothers may then find themselves disoriented when the rewards that they were expecting, come in a different form or they do not appear altogether. Their abilities and moral standing as a mother will then come into question, the only form of identity that the patriarchal society would allow is in doubt. Not only are they expected to have self-sacrificial tendencies, but they are expected to be supermothers. There is a certain inclination to recognise only certain types of motherhood and romanticise a mother’s struggle,  allowing almost no space for mistakes. 

This environment is, in reality, more unforgiving than it appears to be, for mothers are now accountable for not only themselves but also their children. A new category has been recently realised, ‘women-and-children’, where the child is seen to be an extension of the woman’s body and soul. Not only does this perpetuate the stereotype that a mother has to be caring and nurturing, it gives them another responsibility that further shackles them in the private sphere, not letting them cross that boundary with ease if they wish to do so. Seeing as mothers are supposed to be naturally nurturing and caring, the woman’s identity as an agent is further stripped away for she is no longer a sole individual. This is not a mere social phenomenon, but it has been harped on even in scholastic findings. Post-Freudian psychology and sociology have provided rationales for these idealisations and their enforcement, emphasising the importance of a mother-child relationship for the child’s development. This has, of course, been debunked by recent studies. Not only have these post-Freudian findings misconstrued the mother’s role, but they also dismiss the roles of caregivers that do not necessarily conform to the traditional sense of being nurturers: a father, gay parents, single parents and more.

In research dated more than a decade ago, it has been found that in fact, mothers and fathers in the newborn period yielded no significant differences in parenting behaviours (Lamb, 1997). The idea that a woman is far more natural in childcare is a cyclical response — when women are obliged to spend more time with their children as compared to their counterparts due to societal expectations, they are more likely to be more intuned with their children’s biological rhythm, behavioural patterns and more. Over time, mothering gets slightly easier, if not familiar. Caretaking is a mere practice of observation and adapting, not necessarily biased to any sex or gender. 

1.3 Mother as a Verb

Motherhood, or caretaking in general, is thus best understood as a verb. It is a practice that gets better over time. However, “mothering is not a singular practice, and mother is not best understood as a monolithic identity,” because even similar mothers “practices vary significantly,” (Chandler 2007, 273). Thus, often new mothers do not have a full grasp on the concept of parenting as the information they gathered, if any, is often biased. Not only is this information imbued with misconceptions, but it is also only applicable to the children that experienced mothers have raised, children who ultimately have their own sets of idiosyncrasies.

When my mother became a single parent, she also took up the role of a ‘father’ who works to bring income into the new and fragile household. Thus not only does she have to bear the economic responsibility all by herself, she also does not have the means to ‘ mother’. To help out with her volatile circumstances, she had to rely on a handful of other women who were willing to care for me. Whilst this managed to aid in my physical management, emotional attachments between myself and my caregivers, much less with my mother, were very minimal. Understandably so, for the constant change in caregivers did not permit it. The stresses that weighed my mother also gave birth to high-strung and volatile emotions that may not necessarily be regarded as commendable. When it finally came to a point when both my mother and I had the opportunity to understand our views of the world and of ourselves, we were both adults whose worlds were very much apart. Not only was our relationship precarious, but so was my relationship with myself. There was no sole constant person whom I could emulate a certain set of values and perspectives to form an ideal. The only person whom I truly tried to reach out to make sense of my own self was the only kin that I recognised, my mother who was also hardly there for the most part. Thus, it was no wonder why it took more than a decade to create a foundation for my emotional intelligence and idiosyncratic ideologies and perspectives to strive.