Michelangelo’s Pietà, Wikimedia Commons
In 2013, the U.S. CDC ran a campaign called “Show Your Love” that encouraged women to prioritize their pre-conception health — that is, their health before ever becoming pregnant. In so doing, the CDC said, the women could create better health outcomes for future offspring — “showing their love” through this virtuous investment in their wellbeing. In the past, the CDC has also recommended that women with the capability to get pregnant who are not currently on contraception should not drink alcohol. I read about “Show Your Love” in the book The Zero Trimester by Miranda Waggoner. She writes that the campaign implied “self-care and self-love have utility — that, in a way, selfishness is acceptable if it helps to improve the health of others. Self-love, then, is only understood within the discourse of anticipatory motherhood. Self-love becomes a form of self-sacrifice.”
My mother tells me love is about sacrifice. We’re walking to Grocery Outlet, past the squat cinderblock bank building and a parking lot, still damp and petrichor-redolent. My mother says, I need to buy lunch for Daddy, he gets stressed out by having to make it, it takes me one minute what would take him ten.
Why do mothers insist on being martyrs? It’s a question I ask, a little drunk, in a shouted conversation with a blonde writer by a fire pit. We may never end up as friend-friends but we’re good Party Friends — very happy to see each other at a backyard gathering after meeting once. Maybe because we’re peripheral in the same way here: the WAGs from other schools in a troupe of English PhDs and their swirling shibboleths, names of professors whose classes we’ll never take. The writer and I have started talking about our mothers because that’s what you do, right, what’s the point of meeting anyone if you don’t immediately go to the hardest questions from the NYTimes 36? We’re both frustrated with our moms, for all the work they do and pretend they don’t resent doing but do resent, because they should resent it, and they keep doing the work anyway.
An aside: my mother subscribes to this newsletter. She recently told me, very kindly, that she admires I can draft and send something of this length each week, that her favorite thus far is “Stages of Economic Growth” because it seemed the most researched, and that she didn’t know what the 中心思想, or central idea, of “Fight Club” was. There are always too many ideas in my head and so there are too many ideas in my writing. What am I trying to say?
Anticipatory motherhood is championed as normative for women within our society — in the media, within our families, and by public health institutions.
We both live in our presents and imagine our futures differently as mothers-in-waiting. (There’s the “lean in/lean out” discourse a la Sheryl Sandberg, deservedly critiqued to the ends of the earth: women don’t so much “lean out” from work outside the home as get shoved out because of state failures to provide support for reproduction and care work. But Sandberg’s remark that you, as a woman, might “leave before you leave” expresses how anticipatory motherhood can insidiously constrain what it touches — ambitions as wide as our wombs.)
Does anticipatory motherhood have to be bad? It makes sense to think about having a family, if you want that one day. It’s made bad by two things.
One is that it’s anticipatory motherhood and not parenthood — that distribution of this mental load is unequal along gender lines. This is rooted in the submission of women in our society.
The second bad thing is how mothers-to-be, at least in the “Show Your Love” vision, are positioned as these perfect neoliberal subjects, hermetically sealed individuals who optimize their inputs to optimize their outputs. What might it be like to envision parenthood if we thought of parenthood as less optimizable, less possessive and propertarian?
中心思想: ???
The philosopher Manon Garcia writes in her book We Are Not Born Submissive that we think too much about domination by men while eliding consideration of why women who are formally equal subjects under law choose conditions of submission in interpersonal life. Garcia challenges simplistic notions of which types of women submit, rejecting the idea that submission is the experience only of homemakers or abuse victims; “many women [...] experience submission by the very fact of being women. There is submission in ‘dieting’ or starving oneself in order to fit into a size 0. There is submission in the behavior of wives of academics or writers who are participating in the research and are not credited as coauthors. There is submission in taking up the entire mental load of the family. There is submission in accepting that men don’t do their fair share of domestic work or parenting. Contrary to our first intuition about submission, most women are submissive in certain respects, and what distinguishes women from each other is more the degree of their submission than the fact that some women are submissive and others are not.”
She ends the book by saying:
“Men and women grow up in a world organized by gendered social norms that prescribe independence and courage to men, and care and submission to women. It is thus not surprising that some women have a hard time saying ‘no’ to men or that some men have a sense of entitlement to women’s care and sexual services. It is now clear that one of the great enemies of an equal concord between men, women, and all the people who do not identify with this binarity is women’s consent to their own submission.”
Because the ending line is tonally very workers of the world unite! it made me uncomfortable, considering my own submission in the form of anticipatory motherhood. Aren’t I an agentive free woman? All the choices for how to be a person in the world are flung out before me like jewels on a bazaar blanket. But before I was old enough to be a good liberal subject, I remember being at play, raiding my mom’s closet with my older sister. Sometimes stuffing a pillow, a ball, a watermelon inside my shirt and waddling around declaring, Look I’m pregnant. (Do boys do this, too?) I read parenting books before I was a teenager. There was something comforting about living between those pages — as in pop psych or self-help tomes, the authors created these imaginary universes where we fickle humans could control the outcomes of things.
Trying too hard to control the outcomes of things is how we got “Show Your Love,” the CDC telling all these young women not to drink, me sometimes idly wondering how to throw my chips for the next ten years of my life (does it make more sense to try and have a kid late in graduate school or, if I stay in academia, during the stress of a make-or-break postdoc or first few years of the tenure track or, God forbid, what is still referred to by some doctors as a “geriatric pregnancy” — post-35?)
Trying to control outcomes with a laser focus on anticipatory mothers is frustrating because the determinants of health aren’t just individual choices. You can try to eat healthy but still live in a community where industrial pollution means your children are more likely to have asthma (Richmond, CA for one). The rhetoric of anticipatory motherhood delivers propaganda of individual optimization and success: love yourself, put the right things in your body, so that your baby can pop out as one of the healthy, glowing Elect. We shouldn’t task just mothers, or just parents, just relatives, with responsibility for children’s health and welfare; these are social and political tasks, for which we need to assemble a broad constellation of both intimate and distant supporters.
Waggoner writes, “We should pay close and critical attention to the rise of anticipatory motherhood and caution against a worldview that envisions all women as pre-maternal, one in which women are charged with loving fetuses and babies that do not exist.”
But truthfully, I loved you before you were born. Not by tossing out beers and replacing them with Fiji water or eating proper breakfasts or eschewing late-night conversations for 8 hours of sleep. I loved you with a lengthy list of names that lived in my phone. I thumbed over them and thought of how you might wear each, how the world would wear on you differently. I wondered which ones might give you more freedom from — within? — gender. Maybe everything I did was in some way about how to make a home in the world for you where the things that had injured me wouldn’t injure you.
I loved you before you were born and knowing you might never be. I never felt entitled to you as a birthright or a deed. Might we be no property to each other.
I loved you before I knew you, I visited you in my dreams. You reaching a chubby fist out, opening and closing, gurgling, wobbling about. I’m awkward with kids sometimes, I talk to them like homunculi, but with you, it’s OK.
Is this anticipation just acquiescence to how I was socialized, did these dreams take the shape of you because they were the dreams I was supposed to have? I don’t know. Maybe I don’t need to. What I want to know is: do I need to suffer to love you?
Does anyone wound themselves, take smaller steps, to breathe in air, to bask in sun?
中心思想: May you feel as inevitable, as needed, as free.
what are your baby names??? email them to me
or send a haiku about what you’ve eaten this week
& let me know if I can share your contribution!
a random sheila heti quote i thought about recently for no particular reason, from her book motherhood. (have you noticed every one of these is named for a book?)
something that happened today…….all names have been changed to protect the innocent.
SEXY BABY MANIFESTO
There's a new adaptation of Persuasion coming out with Dakota Johnson.
I say I've only seen Dakota Johnson in Fifty Shades and I wonder if she speaks like that all the time. Like her vocal cords have been engineered in a lab for the male gaze. Oh yeah, she does that throaty baby thing, Nina says. That's exactly it! I shout. The sexy baby!
Then we start talking about feminism and un-egalitarian divisions of labor.
I share how my soc friend has just fatalistically acquiesced to doing all the housework for her male partner even though they don't even live together, she just visits him on the weekend, and I comment, This is what feminism has done wrong, it's told us that we can do anything...
So we end up doing everything, Nina finishes my sentence.
Right.
We should be sexy babies, Nina says. Sexy babies can't cook and clean.
Well I can tell a story about equal division of labor, Marian says, and then she tells us about how she clogged Dev’s toilet and it took 50 minutes of them working together to plunge it. We discuss how hard it is to shit in other people's houses and how fucked up this is as a gendered phenomenon. Nina didn't find it hard until high school when the uppity girls on her field hockey team walked into a bathroom at an away game and someone said "Ewww, who pooped?" like it was disgusting and beyond the pale to poop when you need to before a game.
We should be more ok with pooping everywhere. You know, SEXY BABIES poop everywhere, Nina says.
Without further ado, here is the SEXY BABY MANIFESTO for women's liberation. Send it to someone you know. I’m sorry if I set feminism back 70000 years.
