As a new mother at the onset of the pandemic, staying home and binging on media and information came pretty naturally. Pregnancy was prime practice. Every natural process felt foreign, sometimes like a super power, and other times parasitic, gassy, or at the very least tinkering with organs—gradually pressing up against each other, and so invariably compelling to google. The whole range of the rabbit hole accrued in my search history: childhood development psychology, growth curves, trashy comments sections, euphemistic terminology for parenting styles from suffocating to negligent, gender reveal parties gone eco-disaster level wrong, the binary spreading wildfire in dry California etc. The dominant theme that recurred in the narratives of motherhood was utter alienation. The village was absent. Hearing this a thousand times over couldn’t possibly prepare me for the actuality.
The deep-seated sense of alienation began early on, during pregnancy. This came as a surprise, considering the intrinsic physicality of oneness with a fetus. In what was considered a medically and overall uncomplicated pregnancy, it still did not feel like a symbiotic relationship. I was a reluctant host. The initial weeks went by uneventfully, and I began my search for doctors. Birth workers apart from hospitals and the pharmaceutical industry were scarce. Through the routine checkups, I understood rather viscerally that women’s bodies aren’t much of a priority in healthcare. Misinformation was rampant. I shopped around several clinics within a 15–kilometer radius of my home in Goa, India. Each time, I felt like a cog on a factory conveyor belt. The indelicate use of the ultrasound wands was usually a clear barometer of the gynecologist’s impatience. Or fervent Catholicism. For the religious gynecologist, the most pressing question was regarding my marital status. Needless to say, the doctors rarely asked how I felt. They never mentioned the perineum in the appointments leading up to birth, despite the likelihood of tearing. A system of care that glossed over vital information and medicalized birth as an illness only exaggerated the feeling of alienation from my own body.
In India, many hospitals do not allow partners in the room during childbirth, the rule hinging on a mix of shame around the female body and a long tradition of birth as primarily a female sphere. This, compounded by covid safety protocols of social distancing at hospitals, led me towards a birthing plan that eliminated the mainstream healthcare system altogether. I began making plans to birth naturally and unmedicated, with a midwife. The prospect of having my partner and mother beside me drove much of my decision-making. The birthing center operates out of a Portuguese style Goan home, with a swimming pool and a jungle in the backyard. The main birthing room had a spa-like vibe and none of the apparatus of a hospital. It included a large tub, suited for water births, a king size bed, a bathroom, and props such as a birthing stool and exercise ball. Although women across the world have had natural, unmedicated births for centuries, my choice felt unnerving and radical. Unlike the community surrounding the birth center, my decision was more a consequence of circumstance than ideology. After all, maternal mortality was not just a thing of history. Somehow, I scrap together encouragement from the hope that some animalistic reserve of bodily wisdom will lead the way.
As the last trimester approached, my physical and emotional discomforts were heightened. The Sylvia Plath’s poem titled ‘Metaphors’ comes to mind: I’m a means, a stage, a cow in calf / I’ve eaten a bag of green apples / Boarded the train there’s no getting off. With labor impending, I was filled with apprehension. I had no role models and there was only one way off this train. Pop culture representations of birth were nearly useless, often a mix of inaccurate and evangelical lobbying for having kids, without compromising on climbing the capitalist ladder. In countless movies, a woman’s water breaking stirs urgent, panicky action. After a brief soundscape of out-of-control pain groans and rigorous pushing, the finale showcases a plump 6-month-old looking baby that holds its head up, handed over by a nurse. The next scene cuts to a neat house, nanny, everyone back to work, and an ideal mother who enjoys motherhood. This over simplified and rosy narrative was ubiquitous. Meanwhile, the real, uncut version seemed like a dirty secret between mothers. It was as though the miracle of childbirth and motherhood somehow precluded the deep loss of identity and grief that new mothers experience.
Birth is often referred to as a traumatic experience. C-sections are a major surgery with an incision about six inches into the mother’s lower abdomen and a second one to open the uterus. Human vaginal birth, thanks to our sizable brains and heads, is more dangerous than other mammals. So much so that our young are born premature, nearly incapable, before the head becomes too large to fit through the mother’s pelvis. In either case, the mother must function nearly immediately to provide for a newborn. She is fundamentally and biologically alone.
Hours after giving birth, I limped home a stranger, a wounded soldier, unfamiliar in my own body. Overnight, the word mother had become a verb. The baby felt a bit like an intruder, a guest that never left. And I was in a Stockholm syndrome type hex; closed loop of breastfeeding and bleeding out remnants of the placenta. I remember feeling weak and clumsy, like my first time on skis, plopped onto a slope off the ski lift. Where is the landing area? Who is operating the lift? Suddenly, I had to waddle though the mucky waters of self and societal pressure to be the ideal mother that loves motherhood. This is multi-pronged, beginning with birth.
Many people asked me whether I had a “normal delivery”, which is rudespeak for a vaginal birth. The subtext of most advice is to do the deed naturally, like a real woman, like a street cat. A week before I gave birth, a well-meaning neighbor shared a horror story of her uterus nearly exploding and killing her during labor. Random people felt entitled to offer advice, touch my pregnant belly and later, my baby’s cheeks. After birth, to be an ideal mother, one must also snap back to looking and feeling great. Fitting into pre-pregnancy clothes is something of a universal goal, with how-tos flooding the internet. This only scratches the surface of the pressures on new mothers.
I was listening to a podcast on secure attachment in children. The science is common sense. Securely attached caregivers tend to raise securely attached children. An experiment called ‘The Strange Situation’, devised by Mary Ainsworth in the 1970s, observes infant behavior through a one-sided glass. Baby-mother duos are introduced to a stranger, separated, and reunited. The baby’s response to the mother leaving, stress levels with the stranger, comfort level alone, and ability to be soothed by the mother upon return are observed. It wasn’t the babies that were the least stressed that were most secure, but rather the ones who could not only be soothed by the mother but also effectively return to independent play. In watching many examples of the experiment, it appears there are very fine lines between infant embodiment of independence and avoidance, anchoring and anxious clinging.
Devising a rubric to measure attachment security in adults is even more complex. Unexpectedly, secure attachment is identified not in individuals with the least trauma, but rather those who tell their life stories most coherently. For a long time after giving birth, I felt mute. Caring for a newborn looked a whole lot like doing nothing. I had internalized the capitalist sense of productivity so much that I deemed my own stories of motherhood unworthy of telling, like overtelling the banal. And I felt oddly ashamed of having a natural and unmedicated birth, fearing extrapolation of ideology by the jury, which was suddenly everybody I interacted with. If coherence in narrative is an index of our security as adults, then the experience of giving birth and motherhood left me feeling the least secure I’d ever been for the most work I’d ever done. The rupture in my narrative manifested in a myriad of ways: alienation, silence, shame, rage and exhaustion.
Telling stories of birth and motherhood, then, becomes a radical act in itself, taking back the narrative from decades of an uncomplicated, ‘single story’, repeatedly told by men. In the analogy of the ‘Strange Situation’, the village was the mother, I was an infant, and new motherhood was the strange situation. In numerous conversations with new mothers, it seemed apparent that I wasn’t alone in my feeling of alienation. Most of us did not feel cared for in a way that helped us return to independent play.
A helpful exercise in restoring independent play has been to dismantle the archetype of the ideal mother and replace it with a ‘good enough mother’, a term first conceptualized in the 1950s by pediatrician and psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott. It removes undue pressure on parents to be perfect, and encourages allowing the child to experience some amount of frustration and autonomy. It takes maternal sacrifice off a pedestal and instead emphasizes the benefits of failing sometimes, keeping in line with the nature of our imperfect world. With no internet and more family support, our foremothers mostly did this intuitively, and children were integrated into the usual lives of caregivers. Now, overparenting is rampant. Child rearing has become child-centric and involves a large amount of fragmentation, from having separate food, seats and cutlery for babies, to organized classes, play groups, toys, and exclusion of children from adult gatherings.
They say the endocrine system impacts the brain to structurally change significantly during pregnancy and childbirth—increased gray matter and new neural pathways, programmed to care. Hacked, really. Yet, in an age of individualism and social media, adopting a realistic, “good enough”, approach to parenting is often stigmatized, and mothers are ridden with feelings of inadequacy and diagnosed with having post-partum depression. My most cynical version supposes that the diagnosis, shortened sometimes to postpartum, isn’t much different from the misogyny of labeling women hysterical in the 19th century. Perhaps different only in degree, they remain qualitatively similar: a reduction of women’s health and bodies in a way that absolves family, healthcare systems and community of any real accountability and places it entirely on women. Post partum literally means the period after childbirth, but is used as an adjective, adverb, and noun, a manner of speaking about a complex metamorphosis, combined with chronic lack of sleep.
There is a new wave of narratives of motherhood by women in various forms: stand-up comedians such as Ali Wang and Amy Schumer, TV shows such as ‘The Letdown’ and ‘Workin’ Moms’, and constantly evolving critical and feminist perspectives. In Maggie Nelson’s The Argonauts, she says:“Is there something inherently queer about pregnancy itself, insofar as it profoundly alters one’s ‘normal’ state, and occasions a radical intimacy with—and radical alienation from—one’s body? How can an experience so profoundly strange and wild and transformative also symbolize or enact the ultimate conformity? Or is this just another disqualification of anything tied too closely to the female animal from the privileged term (in this case, nonconformity, or radicality)?” Early in my pregnancy, a feminist friend pointed me to Nelson, and I seeped in her words slowly and intently, a few passages at a time, allowing myself for the first time, to reside in the queerness of my experience. Works such as the series titled Postpartum Normalized, by Alberta based photographer Meagan Elemans, remind us to celebrate the biological marvel of childbirth and the postpartum body. New to mainstream discourse, creators are up against pressure to represent motherhood. This is just another way in which women’s narratives are disrupted. An antidote to systemic narrative rupture, which essentially functions to divide and conquer women, is to exercise empathy, listen, nurture camaraderie with other mothers, and tell our fragmented stories with agency, resilience and dignity. This is the only way to piece together coherence in our collective story of birth and motherhood.
As with any identity-based community, befriending mothers comes with its challenges and a caveat of further alienation. I have been to play dates where I’m the only caretaker unaccompanied by a nanny. A thick air of support group lingers, like the smell of long sleep and bodily fluids, amongst dazed, under slept mothers. The mom groups can feel ideologically polarized, and full of secret self-medication, burn out and guilt. The word joy gets thrown around and the toxic positivity of the space verges on having a ‘Good vibes only’ poster. This sort of group can inadvertently burden mothers with the mental load of forming community, feeling like an added chore on top of the mounting responsibility of motherhood. It risks existing in a vacuum, without the real systemic changes necessary in community, workplaces, marriages, and healthcare, to truly support mothers financially, physically and emotionally. On an early evening in humid Goa, with its impending rains and frequent power cuts, I smell like sour milk and sweat. Since I don’t have power back up, it has worked best for me to breastfeed and avoid pumps and bottles altogether. This choice is a mix of economics and context, but in mom-group settings, I find myself trying to maintain a cool quietness about many of my mothering decisions, looking for respite from mothering, a quiet acknowledgment of our simultaneous strange situation, a return to independent play.
The Netflix show ‘Workin Moms’, gives a glimpse into an affluent, mostly white, mom club in Toronto. We see characters balancing motherhood and their jobs. The show explores the dual expectation of mothers to work as though they aren’t mothers and mother as though they don’t work. Mothering, even when performed by a male character, is painted as drudgery and at odds with having a successful career. The characters complicate the archetype of the ideal mother as we see a more nuanced portrayal of parenting and snatches of other aspects of mothers’ lives — their work places, marriages, health and female friendships. However, the show sports a kind of pop feminism that looks at the difficulties of motherhood without adequately calling out capitalism, the elephant in the room.
The 2015 film The Lobster paints a dystopian and surrealist image of a culture that aggrandizes monogamous coupling and the nuclear family system. If the characters do not find a partner in 45 days, they turn into an animal of their choice. Here, it is worthwhile considering a Marxist critique of the nuclear family as an engine of capitalism, upheld alongside values of individualism, meritocracy, competition and eternal devotion to labor, in order to support said nuclear family. Capitalism not only fails to nurture mothers and deems them inconvenient laborers, but also corners us into closed, hierarchical family units that are antithetical to community. The fragile hamster-wheel requires that the village remains absent. With unaffordable daycare costs and hardly any paid parental leave, childcare and earning a living are grimly at odds with one another. Mothers are simultaneously mourning the loss of a village and an income, forced to forgo jobs in order to be full-time mothers.
A 2018 study conducted by the company Welch’s estimates that American mothers work an average of 98 hours a week, equivalent to 2.5 full time jobs, and have roughly an hour to themselves each day. Cultures across the world have ancient systems of care for mothers and children, starting with birth and the fourth trimester, extending to years. The fourth trimester refers to the first three months of a newborn’s life, and traditions are built around mothers resting and receiving care, in the form of massages, baths and special foods to aid in recovery, milk production and bonding with the baby. In this paradigm, maternal and child care are not commodities that can be purchased only by the elite. Nowadays, mothers return from the hospital days after giving birth and post-partum care is privatized, itemized and expensive, leaving many in debt. In 2016, a hospital bill following a woman’s C-section surfaced in the media for a particularly egregious charge of $39.35 for skin-to-skin contact between mother and newborn. Even if there was a legitimate need for an extra nurse to facilitate skin to-skin under anesthesia, the crudeness of charging for such a primal act of intimacy seemed like theft. They say that a society’s treatment of its women is an index of how well it is faring. The bleak state of care for mothers is a wake-up call to radically re-imagine care in a post capitalist, non-commodified, real sense.
Photo by bady abbas on Unsplash
