Invisible Mothers

Yesterday was Mothers' Day here in Aotearoa New Zealand*, and you could hardly have missed the commercial onslaught of the last month even if you lacked any sense but smell.

I've been thinking recently about many of the assumptions that we make about who is, and who isn't, a mother. In the last two years I've had several friends lose pregnancies, and I've become aware of other miscarriages and still births that happened in times past, which I never knew about until recently.

Each one breaks my heart, especially because often they have been a physical trauma and an emotional grief that has been experienced in secret, hidden away and invisible. Those women, and no doubt many of the partners too, may feel as if they did have a child but then suddenly they didn't, and no one knows that for a little while there they were thinking of themselves as a Mum or a Dad.

When thinking about two of my friends in particular, I've become quite hyper-sensitive to how hard occasions like Mothers' Day must be for them - for those who have lost children, yet are publicly seen as "Not Mums" because there's no Exhibit A in the form of a baby, toddler, teen or adult child. Similar emotional turmoil must ensue for those who couldn't conceive, but wanted to, or are currently secretly trying.

That hurt must surely be exacerbated when people assume that you never wanted to be a mother or a father - that you didn't want to have a child; you put your career first; you were too selfish to consider bringing a dear ickle baby into the world in case it stained your white carpets, etc etc. Many seem to see an absence of offspring in another's life and make the astounding mental leap that that person is somehow deeply emotionally flawed because obviously only someone without a heart would not have kids. Quite apart from the fact that choosing not to have children is a perfectly sane and rational decision to make, some people will no doubt be making a virtue out of a necessity.

I've written about this before - about the inappropriateness of pressuring others to
procreate, or not to, and about the senseless harm in judging others for their infertility. It's all a world of needless pain that we inflict on others - often on people we love dearly, but we blunder in none the less, and we hurt them even more because of the level of intimacy we have shared in the past. Once you've read a friend's harrowing recount of their miscarriage, posted on an internet bulletin board because their partner was away and no one else knew about the pregnancy, it's a mistake you won't make again.

I imagine for many women yesterday was pretty hard when they said "Happy Mothers' Day" to someone else but no one said it back to them. Please keep that in mind next time you encounter someone without children** and find yourself tending towards judgement. You can't tell who the invisible parents are just by looking, so let's just assume everyone is one and then no one gets hurt.




* And I think also in the USA, judging by some of the posts on the American feminist blogs I follow.
** Or indeed someone with one child. It never ceases to amaze me how some folks think other people's fertility decisions and outcomes are their business.




(Pic Via)