Some of us rage. Some of us weep. Some make themselves small. Some go blank. Some can’t shake the intrusive thoughts. Some wonder if they will ever go back to who they were. Some wonder if they will ever recognize themselves again. There is nuance and ambivalence in Motherhood that is not often given voice. Words build worlds — they are a pathway to discovery, understanding and, often, healing. As American novelist, Ursula K. Le Guin, put it: “We are volcanoes… When we women offer our experience as our truth, as human truth, all the maps change. There are new mountains.” Let us come together and find that place that the world has asked us, or perhaps forced us, to hide away. Let us share with one another. Release the shackles of individualized trauma and find collective healing. Let us remember our inherent worth and power. Let us erupt! “You young Mount St. Helenses… I want to hear you. I want to listen to you talking to each other and to us all: whether you're writing an article or a poem or a letter or teaching a class or talking with friends or reading a novel or making a speech or proposing a law or giving a judgment or singing the baby to sleep or discussing the fate of nations, I want to hear you.”
The rigged system at work…
With more than 100 years of feminism behind us and 50 years of second-wave feminism, it seems motherhood has mostly been forgotten. It’s still relegated to the private sphere. That very gendered place of home, hearth and bonbons. Mothers are underpaid, exploited, undervalued, overlooked, isolated, and made to feel as if they are to blame for all of this. Add on layers of marginalization and it’s even worse.
Any grievances about these conditions are likely to be met with criticism of you, the mother. Evidence that you’re just not good enough. We are a society that sanctifies motherhood in its talk but abandons mothers in its action. Nothing feels more rigged.
Mothers are doing too much and society is not doing nearly enough.
We don’t get angry at the system, at our government, at the lack of support, at our workplace. We internalize. We assume no one else is experiencing this in the same way or to the same severity. When we experience the trauma of becoming a mother alone, it becomes even more traumatic. We feel guilt and shame. We try to do more. To be better. We think it’s all our fault. We silence ourselves and strive to be the perfect mother. The cult of the perfect mother has to end. It’s an impossible ideal that is meant to keep us struggling — alone, isolated from other mothers. Struggling in silence. Individualizing our own trauma. It is by design. That is the rigged system at work.
I imagine a world where mothers are free from the rigged system, put into place and upheld by our patriarchal society. I imagine a society that holds and supports mothers. I imagine a world free of the impossible to attain perfect mother myth. There is an individual and a collective shift that needs to happen in order for this world to exist. We need to stop silencing ourselves. As Sarah Menkedick says in her book, Ordinary Insanity: “Mother’s stories are a missing piece in our culture, an ache we can’t pinpoint, a void papered over with platitudes or warnings about danger and risk, a lack and ossified desire felt early in the experience of becoming a mother. Yet stories of motherhood are elemental as bone and teeth.” Let our words erupt and create new worlds. We are here to hold space for individual and collective healing. For individual and collective transformation.
As an Expressive Arts Facilitator, my work is aimed at reframing how we, as a society and individuals, see motherhood and perform mothering. I do this through poetry, movement and art therapy tools. I’ve graduated from UCLA’s Certificate Program in Social Emotional Arts; hold a Certificate in Motherhood Studies; am a certified Matrescence facilitator; and have fifteen cumulative years working in the arts.
BTW, I’m Grace…
“When we have a lack of language, and don’t know how to articulate our experience and to put into words what we’re feeling, it makes the process incredibly difficult. We need words to heal.”
— Dr. Aurélie Athan