Kinderwunsch
The growing debates on (bad) motherhood
Hast du Kinderwunsch? (Do you want children) This is a popular question that my physicians ask me in Germany. Although I have learned to accept other aspects of German culture—their assertiveness and inclemency—I still get irritated by this question. Mostly because the query almost always gets directed to people with uteruses, with the assumption that there is some deep longing for childbearing and childrearing, or that we are racing against the invisible clock of reproduction. There are people who value parenting, who get joy from it, who form community from these kinship structures. There are people who have had families that give them support and comfort and a model for what love might be. That is not everyone’s reality. Rather than asking everyone with a womb if they want to be a parent, our societies should be figuring out better ways to create structures for people to be better parents, if they choose.
Last week, I published an article in The Baffler about the crisis in feminism, from colonialism’s legacy to gendered-based debt. The text is a review of two books which brims with history and activism yet anchors you with the fine details on what it means to take feminist approaches to challenging power and what it means to be free: two elements that I work through in my book Tending to Our Wounds respect to the racial and gendered imbalance concerning the African diaspora.
Two weeks ago, I finished Sheila Heti’s philosophical novel, Motherhood. I loved the text for its raw provocation. As Alexandra Schwartz opined in The New Yorker, the monograph is a “diary of a divided mind.” The protagonist is determined to understand why people have children, and to call into question the dynamic of constantly being asked if and when she will reproduce. What I grabbed from the text is that there is nothing instinctive about being a parent, nor is it for everyone. Heti raises heaps of questions, some brazen, some hastily, with the idea for us to question why our societies impose parenting for people with wombs. On the one hand, the characters probe the complexities and tenaciousness of motherhood, but outlines how pursuing a family unit is psychologically heavy for those carrying intergenerational trauma of collective genocide and social death--descendants of the Holocaust or enslaved Africans in the Americas. So many of us are just trying to survive and being a parent is one of the most difficult and under-appreciated jobs that go undervalued in our society. Of course, we should demand wages for housework and provide more space and support for people to flourish as parents, but for much of the world, even in Germany where there is Kindergeld, parenting can be isolating and individualised.
In December, I watched Maggie Gyllenhaal’s The Lost Daughter, loosely based on Elena Ferrante’s book of the same title. Set in Greece, we follow Leda (played by the prolific Olivia Colman), a middle-aged woman who rents a small apartment by the sea in a distant town for the summer. Instead of focusing on her academic work, she becomes obsessed with a young family she sees daily on the beach, a series of seaside encounters, a rivulet of water, verdant buildings, and some dancing. At first glance, the film expresses Leda’s present-day holiday, but over the course of the film, we see a series of startling recollections of Leda’s long-ago life as an extremely stressed young mother. Not only was this a tense film, which kept me on edge because of the various awkward and start interactions by the protagonist, but I kept wondering what’s going to happen next, where is this going to go? For its subtle and unpredictable turns, the quiet film unearths two story lines, Leda as a remorseful middle-aged woman and Leda as a stressed younger mother. It is here that we get a version of complicated motherhood not just from Leda, but also from Nina (played by Dakota Johnson), another vacationer with a young child, who on the surface, wants to be free. The intensity provides some poetic dimensions to motherhood, and the myriad of ways people embrace and refuse the identity.
In her essay on motherhood, Sophie Gilbert, cultural staff writer for The Atlantic, wrote about the strained reality of “bad” motherhood, as depicted in The Lost Daughter and Jessamine Chan’s The School for Good Mothers. In “Redemption of the Bad Mother,” Gilbert writes: “This is, it has to be said, a fairly brutal re-creation of the experience of having children. In motherhood, there is no space anymore; there are no idle stretches of time within which to ruminate or look at the sky or simply let your mind do nothing at all. There is no more catering only to yourself. Time, while precious, can be bought; space, that mental state of unfettered carelessness, cannot.”
To note, Gilbert is a mother. Although I am not a parent, her remark points to how societal pressures and other major structural issues—capitalism and patriarchy interwoven together—put time constraints on people from taking a break to be creative and just be. As I get older and see the differences between my friends with children and without, I see a tension between those of us with offspring who are bound to childrearing, and those of us with a more spontaneous existence. But even more so, there is a material question of how we divide time, money, resources, and domestic responsibilities inside and outside the home. And in some cases, domestic work, as argued by Sophie Lewis in the Boston Review, can rob women of their love.
That would mean forming fully funded communal parenting and childcare so that everyone has the capacity to pursue their creativity. Most societies do not provide the structure to collectivise child rearing. I want free childcare for everyone. My position of parenting has shifted over the past decade. Initially, I was against it, and my feelings have evolved into a hybrid between ambivalence and compunction. As I grow more comfortable in my skin, I am realising how revolutionary Black motherhood is more expansive than the nuclear family. Sadly, my exposure to Black mothers—especially in Berlin, or even in my family, is scant. Nevertheless, for the few Black mothers that I have in my life, I know that their presence and survival is a radical act.
Reading List
These are some texts that try to unpack the long history and literary representation of Black (American) motherhood and kinship at its core. In my opinion, these novelists and scholars capture some of the most pressing issues concerning Black parenting, not as a process to be loathed, or an easily packaged phenomenon, but of people illuminating their emotional depth with their relatives, community, lovers, and friends.
Revolutionary Mothering: Love on the Front Lines edited by Alexis Pauline Gumbs
Red at the Bone by Jacqueline Woodson
Motherhood So White: A Memoir of Race, Gender, and Parenting in America by Nefertiti Austin
The Mothers by Brit Bennett
What We Lose by Zinzi Clemmons
Beloved by Toni Morrison
Halsey Street by Naima Coster
All Aunt Hagar’s Children by Edward P. Jones