Motherhood, As Performance
I guess before we get going here, we need to acknowledge the large elephant in the room, which anyone who has read a bunch of my stuff might know about — is that I’ve been trying to get my wife pregnant, via science and organic methods (that means sex) for a while now, and it hasn’t worked, and it’s probably my issue. I’m also a dude. You combine those two elements — “can’t impregnate wife” and “a dude” — and it’s easy to think anything I say about motherhood is inherently resentful. If you want to take that angle on this, you absolutely can and I would understand why. Let’s now move on.
First I think we need to acknowledge that multiple children has long since ceased to be an economic necessity (“work the farm”) and is now an economic luxury and/or even a burden, especially given inflation, child care costs, how we re-contextualized the role of schools during COVID, etc. I still know plenty of people with five and six kids, and some of them are good friends of mine. I also know people who dreamed of 3–4 and stopped at one via economic constraints. I think we all know that global warming is a thing, climate change is a thing, food production is a thing, overpopulation is a thing, and automation is a thing. All these “things” are going to change what the future looks like for a current newborn. We don’t always admit that stuff, but I think most of us know it. The argument women had to other women for years was that it was selfish to not have a kid. Now I think you can flip the argument and say it’s probably selfish to have one. All that said, I’d still like to have one.
Now, though, am I having one for the “right” reason? Has anyone truly defined the “right” reason to have a kid? I think some of us stammer over stuff about expanding love and moving the race forward and doing better than our parents and “a full household” and all this stuff, but in reality I think in modernity a lot of people have kids for these reasons:
On the last bullet, that’s why I get depressed about my own inabilities in that area, because I feel like now I’ve failed two women on this front, largely because I also like drinking in dive bars and talking to people about their lives, and maybe that shot my sperm to shit. I dunno. Someday, maybe. Hope dies last.
This is all a long way of getting to this idea of performative motherhood. I have an up close and personal view of this, and have had two such views, because I’ve been with two women when their friends were having kids. Some women have kids and they go about the messy business of raising the kid, including the great moments and the pastel family photos but also the shit blowouts on their dress, and that’s awesome. Some women have kids and do that, but also spend a lot of time showing photos of their children to the world, and talking about their children’s accomplishments, and generally creating a sense in the external audience that now motherhood might be all they have, and then you increasingly barely see the husband in any of these photos or emails or discussions, and you’re quite literally seeing the dog more than the husband, and you start to wonder … did the newborn/toddler kinda replace the husband at some level? Is motherhood now everything?
I can also tell ya, again from oodles of personal experience, that women who chase the performative motherhood route are some of the least-supportive people on the planet to other women when they’re going through fertility stuff, to the point of periodic snide, back-handed comments about what they have vs. what you don’t. I can personally name 12–15 people like this from the last decade of my life. Obviously I won’t. But the recurring theme on all this is that the idea of motherhood seems to be viewed as the destination, as opposed to part of the journey. Once a kid pops out, aren’t you kinda on the hook for guiding that kid for the rest of your natural life? But with performative motherhood, it almost seems like the kid has become a prop. It’s a social angle. It’s something to be part of a bigger fabric, or feel connected to your friends. I’ve sometimes heard the expression (low-key) “When I get mine, you’re swine,” which kinda means once you’ve hit your goals, you stop remembering and helping and being empathetic towards those who aren’t at that goal yet. This is often especially true of people when they take the off-ramp to BabyLand.
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Motherhood is supposedly the strongest brand in the world. It’s not a tool or a weapon or a crutch or a defense and your children are not a prop or a thing for likes or a thing to make you closer to your own mom (although ideally that will happen). Motherhood is just a natural, beautiful part of life, with amazing successes and tremendous challenges. How do you think, for example, that Mrs. Klebold feels about motherhood now?
If you really want to set the bar for motherhood high, and inspire others to do a great job with it, you need to put aside the performance aspect and focus on being a good person, a leader, someone in the community, someone your son/daughter always aspires to, someone your husband doesn’t feel like you cancelled out, and someone who realizes this is all just a part of you. Biggest part? Sure. But a part. And please, show some empathy to others who haven’t hit the gong yet. That’s beauty and grace too.
Three years ago, right before COVID, I was drinking high-ABV IPAs and eating a grilled cheese sandwich a few miles from my house. I was sitting at the bar. THAT’S HOW I DO, BABY! (Well, not as much anymore, THANK GOD.) Anyway, these two women sit down next to me. One of them just had a baby. She says to her friend, “I can’t believe my in-hospital photo got 667 likes. Fucking Allison got 1,500!” Her friend is like “I know, girl!” I stared at them and then ordered another beer, silently sobbing to myself. If you’re racking and wrecking your body for 40 weeks (or 42!) to count likes, you can go sleep in a dirt patch behind the HVAC unit. That ain’t the point of any of this.
Motherhood can’t be everything, and it also can’t be performance.
Takes?