The new motherhood starts to come out of the closet – 05/15/2023 – Vera Iaconelli

The posts alluding to Mother’s Day were divided between bouquets of flowers and sugary words, denunciations about the inhumane conditions to which women and their children are subjected, and priceless memes on the subject. Flowers and sweet words are as true and welcome as snitching and jokes. In fact, it only works if we can face it as a combination of these factors.

Motherhood is one of those experiences that demands no less than anything else: physical, mental and emotional commitment without the right to vacation —much less remuneration. It is a project that aims at time beyond our existence. It carries our name forever and leaves marks that will be trodden on fairly and unfairly in endless conversations with friends, siblings, children and analysts. The wonderful side exists and shouldn’t be denied, it’s just not the only one.

Rousseau was the main herald of the suffering model of compulsory motherhood. He served as an inspiration for all succeeding generations and for psychoanalysis, especially since the beginning of the 20th century. Psychoanalysis did not shy away from raising motherhood to the heights of idealization. Less because he considered mothers to be infallible —their faults were told in verse and psychoanalytic prose— but for other reasons. For the centrality she gave to motherhood in caring for children and for the level of expectation she placed on her role. Something that could be summarized as a paradox: mothers are everything to the psyche, but they are never up to the task.

There was no lack of warning about the mistakes of reducing the woman to the mother or idealizing the latter. In 1911, the physician and psychoanalyst Margarete Hilferding already denounced the bullshit of the maternal instinct.

Women who don’t want to have children, who had them and regretted it, and all the others who discover on a daily basis that love for them is an arduous construction are there to prove her right.

To begin with, mothers are not everything in the subjective constitution and upbringing of children. Second, we are what we are long before we become mothers. No one becomes “evolved pokémon” by giving birth or adopting. At most we struggle to appear mature enough for our children to believe in us while we learn how to care for them. When the attempt is successful, we come to believe that we were cut out for the role of adults. But not always, not all the time.

About the mother not being everything, there is an issue that cannot be ignored. Half of the mothers in Brazil are single mothers, that is, they have become “everything” due to the lack of option of having someone to share the immense responsibility with. Since human reproduction still needs two, the absence of someone else responsible for children’s existence is, to say the least, symptomatic.

The time of mothers thought of as a homogeneous group of a homogeneous experience has its days numbered. And it’s not about believing that our model of motherhood has recently become unsustainable. In fact, it was never a big deal, becoming execrable with industrialization. From there to here it was just downhill.

There are a few reasons why we can talk today about the elephant that has been in the room for centuries. Among them, I would say that the threads that pull our Rousseauian guilt are increasingly frayed, another concerns the position of women, especially black women. The exponents of this generation have denounced the place of black motherhood, the most exploited and vulnerable in our society. Giving themselves a voice, they end up opening up all the maternal imagination that has its days numbered.

Happy Mother’s Day with treats, some debauchery, but not without a fight.

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