Motherhood is the oldest profession-not prostitution. We blame mothers for all our defeats, mothers are our shortfalls. They hold this blame-guilty or not. Father’s remain somehow in the shadows. The standard and margin of error with fathers is not equal to the accountability we hold for our mothers. It’s not a competition, but it feels that way, and if it was, I wouldn’t win any mothering awards. I feel shameful, believing this to be true of my own mother. At any moment, we all just do the best we can. She survived, and raised us, loves us best she could, wants us to have the world while she toils through it. Her mother did the same. She toiled through a broken marriage, a daughter dying of asphyxiation, my grandfather’s perversions and loss of memory. Being a mother alienates you like a pillar. You are instantly responsible to prop up, hold firm. It automatically puts you in a special class of people. Where you become secondary to the structure you support. In the outside spaces, there is no way of being helped. You cannot prepare for the breaking away that happens. Becoming a mother is a death. The process of mothering while your children are young is like managing a chronic illness, you are never the same and require total overhaul of the way you relate and engage with the world. As an artist, this is a particularly painful process. You become split and no longer who you once were. As a young woman in college I was autonomous, second class as a woman, but free to choose. My artistic practice was my lived experience and a deconstruction of those events. It was angst filled, socially engaged. I was critical of capitalism, main stream culture, and power structures that prey on women and children. My voice was subversive and uncensored calling out a culture that looks away at sexual violence and abuse. After all, this is the value of a work of art: to challenge and call out what we see as in need of repair. These attributes and the process of inquiry required to think about them is not a “safe” endeavor while attempting to parent. This is a dirty business, which leaks and spills over, like noxious gas. To ignore the creative practice, through subjugating these concerns, causes a slow suffocating death. To cut off the creative supply completely would certainly kill me. There needs to be an exhaust vent. I need a synonym for sacrifice that does not carry with it the connotations of martyrdom. Motherhood is not Holy or God like. Artists who attempt to mother, do they serve their children well, or just well-enough? Can they be “good” mothers; protect and foster resilient, emotionally stable people? It is awfully hard. It is hard work for anyone to be sure. However, I think non-artists have better results, but then again, maybe we are too hard on mothers? Expect more from them than anyone else? I am guilty of this as I mentioned before. It’s a shame to be pulled into this mass cultural phenomenon that expects more from woman while not supplying her with the same incentives. I yell, I yell a lot.
1 Comment
Maggie
8/5/2016 05:51:48 am
This is beautiful Rebecca. Well said. I wish you were here so we could talk about it!
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