Some Mothers
I bought a Chatelaine recently, just to check in with it after the retirement of Rona Maynard, former editor, and there were a series of articles in it about women wanting to become mothers so badly that they would try any and all available reproductive technologies, women who went to adoption fairs in order to find a child to mother, and women who had had children, easily, and regretted it later.
It was sort of a mixed bag motherhood issue, I guess.
Now, I had so little trouble conceiving, that, although I understand how wanting children can become pretty obsessive, I feel a little guilty pronouncing on what some women are willing to put their bodies and minds through in order to conceive - when it doesn't happen naturally and in fairly short order, I might add, judgmentally. Interestingly, too, there is a case study in the issue where one of the women who does resort to quite extraordinary lengths to have a child (surrogacy) ends up conceiving naturally. So yeah, speaking of judgment calls, I really thought some of the "trying" times were a little short on patience. Only a year? I don't know. It's your choice, obviously, but it would seem that reproductive technology is pretty invasive to resort to it after just a year of "trying" to have a baby naturally.
I'm sorry, but there is a really good question simply begging to be asked here: Where the hell are the doctors in all this invasive and often harmful medicine, anyway?
The fact that we even have adoption "fairs" tells us, sadly, all we need to know about how desperate both children AND prospective mothers can be in the desire to make happy complete families. (There is one story by a woman who gives up trying to have a child, altogether, and it all just sounds so... failed, almost as if there had been a child and she died, that I found really sad. It was like her marriage was doomed to a state of mourning because of her failure to conceive, that she and her husband weren't a real family because they couldn't have a child, that it was now her lot in life to be incomplete.)
Then there was the piece by a mother (Cecily Ross, Leah McLaren's mother, as it turns out) about mothers who regretted becoming mothers after all was said and done.
Again, I wanted children and was very lucky in the children I got and have never looked back - BUT - I have never had much in the way of professional aspirations, either. AND my children have been the self-raising kind, too. People think I'm just being modest when I say that, but I'm not. Unless I forgot to do some really hard parenting task and am coasting on thin air, I'm pretty sure I just lucked out.
Besides, I don't think these women who are claiming to be honest and admit to regretting having had children actually mean they regret the children - I think, believe, know they just regret the impact they had on their lives because of the responsibility they entail. And sometimes that responsibility is just love - the burden of love most mothers feel because that's often how a mother feels about her children. It's pretty scary. I mean, children can weigh on the best of mothers because, well, they're a big, huge, awesome worry.
AND they take up the rest of your life in one way or another. I welcomed that, but I didn't really have much of a life on my own. Or with their Dad. Who didn't really have much of a life of his own, either. Or with me.
To be honest, that's probably why we had children. To give us a life. And I suspect there are millions and millions upon millions of couples just like us all over North America - where we have to have adoption fairs to find families for mothers and babies alike.
(I hope this entry isn't too loaded with judgment. As a disclaimer I'd like to just say that after I had children, I realized that there is no such thing as having your "own" children - that as soon as they're born they're separate whole beings. I just wish I could impart that "knowing" to women who think they need to have their "own" baby, instead of adopting one that's already here - a procedure so insanely difficult in this country, that, well, maybe it's just easier to go through all that invasive medical technology to have your "own".)
But back to Ms. Ross. She mentions an Ann Landers survey of some years ago in which, apparently, scads of women claimed to regret having had children, which prompted scads more women to write in and say that those women should not have been allowed to become mothers.
Women.
Personally, I doubt there are a whole lot of women d'une certaine age who had much choice in whether or not they had scads of children, so I'm not sure how relevant that is to women of my generation. Birth control changed a lot in terms of child regrets, I'm pretty sure. I mean, who the hell really wants 8 children? C'mon. Sorry if you're number 8, but... chances are your Mom wasn't thrilled with your birth. Sure, she'll tell YOU she was, but... I bet she told Ann Landers otherwise.
Anyway, I'm going to end this entry with a reference to a piece I read in the Utne Reader a while back. It concerns a black woman who had, through just a fluke of genetics and a bi-racial husband, a little boy with dusky brown skin and dark eyes and then, eight years later, a little girl with pearly white skin and light blue eyes. It was very interesting because, well, think of it. When, other than when she's a nanny, do you see a black mother with a white baby?
That's right - never.
And I guess that tells us where we're at in terms of motherhood in North America, really, if you stop and think about it.
