I Should Have Made the Tag "Mothering," Not "Parenting"

My favorite magazine, Brain, Child: The Magazine for Thinking Mothers runs a debate in each issue. Usually I am intrigued by the topic but frustrated by the actual “debate,” because the authors tend to construe the question so differently that they talk past each other rather than with each other. But the debate in the current issue comes out of a long-standing colloquy between the co-editors and for once offers a true binary: should they change the subtitle to include “parents” more broadly, or should they stick with “mothers”?

            I am a longstanding equality feminist, rather than a difference feminist, so I was surprised to find myself coming down on the side of keeping mothers in the title.

            As I thought it through, however, I realized that in recent years I have often told myself that it is motherhood, rather than my experience as a woman in American society, that is the source of my mid-life radicalism. Before I had children, I could function socially as a man. I was the ideal worker (granted, in a profession I love and feel privileged to participate in). With a few notable exceptions that ended up mostly harmless (and which I was privileged to be able to see as exceptions), I have been able to dodge sexual harassment and sexual violence. I benefited from the changes in laws and social norms in the last quarter of the twentieth century that enabled me to be taken seriously for what my hard work and talents produced.

            Motherhood, however, reminded me of my deep animal nature. I put my body on the line—twice—with pregnancy and childbirth (and in another era would not have survived the effort to bear a baby who weighed almost 11 pounds). My thinking brain went on a short hiatus as I coped with the demands of a sleepless child. My schedule revolves around the needs of my children. The topics I think about—personally and professionally—are deeply different from what they used to be. People who don’t know me—and some who do—call me “mom,” though they never would have called me “babe” (not that I was ever a babe). I struggle to remain even a good worker while I aspire to be a good mother, hitting neither target most days. My husband, who is involved with the children, has not appeared to have his fundamental relationships in the world changed, as I have. I am unconvinced that American fathers do experience the sorts of transformations that American mothers do. My experience of gender, in short, has broken over the lines of motherhood. Biology did not make me a woman, but motherhood has.

            One of science fiction writer Sheri Tepper’s novels, The Gate to Women’s Country, is set in a post-apocalyptic United States (spoiler alert!). Women and young children live in gated forts, cultivating art and science. Men live in warrior groups outside the forts, doing what they do best (in Tepper’s jaded view)—fighting with other groups of men. Men and women “hook up” (to use a horrible term that actually fits this situation too well) at regular intervals to allow for reproduction. Boys live with their mothers for a while after birth, then they go live with the men. As they hit puberty, they choose: run the gauntlet back to their mothers’ homes in Women’s Country, or stay with the men? Most stay with the men. But increasing numbers return to Women’s Country, scorned by most men but enjoying the company of a heterosocial society that the women are cultivating. The kicker? The spoiler—it turns out that the men who live outside Women’s Country are not actually the fathers of the boys they welcome to Men’s Country, nor of the girls who stay with their mothers. The women have preserved reproductive science and technology, and while they allow the warriors to believe that they continue to father children, only those men who have returned to Women’s Country are enabled to become fathers—either through trickery on the women who foolishly fall for the warrior men, or the old fashioned way with women in on the secret. In a bit of nastiness that is classic Tepper, the women in fact periodically provoke wars with other forts of women, in order to cull the numbers of aggressive men. The leaders of Women’s Country are carefully breeding violence out of humans, cultivating a society in which womanhood is the norm, and cherishing the men who are willing to prioritize art, science, and community life over patriarchal manhood.

            This turns out to be how I feel about changing Brain, Child’s subtitle. They are doing some really important work at that magazine, excavating with care, honesty, and wicked funny humor what motherhood implies in the twenty-first century US. Some men are brave enough to cross through the gauntlet, read the magazine, and even write for it. Even though the title seems to set it aside as Women’s Country. We want those men, and we need to hear from them. But let them preserve the space where motherhood—which remains a different experience from fatherhood—sets the norm.