Less than two years ago and a mere handful weeks after our
son was born, my partner and I took our new baby to a faculty potluck. As
might be expected, we were tired, we were struggling to figure out all the
surprises of first-time parenthood, and we were learning daily the strange ways
of being a same-sex couple with a baby in a very conservative small town in a
very conservative state. This is a place that doesn’t recognize our marriage of
nearly eight years and it is certainly not a place that recognizes my partner’s
status as a parent, much less a mother (without the biological ‘connection’),
or would consider granting her a second-parent adoption, which she should never
have to seek in the first place as the only other parent our son has had since
conception (and even before). So leaving that hostile environment outside for a
safe faculty space inside seemed like a good idea. My partner strapped on our
baby carrier, we loaded up the diaper bag, and we headed out for our first
social function since our baby was born.
We had not been at the party five minutes when my partner
ended up in a conversation with another female faculty member who had had a
baby a few months before ours arrived and who also had her child nestled in a
sling around her that evening. I went away to get us some food and came back to
find my partner with a strained (and pained) look on her face and clearly eager
for any excuse to leave the conversation. Part of me is glad now that I was not
there to hear this other female faculty member turn to my partner as she got
out our bottle of expressed milk and gasp in self-righteous indignation, “You
aren’t breastfeeding?!” This might seem like a small statement (or
accusation, to be more precise), but behind it lies a whole sea of nastiness
and judgment and petty abuse from other mothers like this one. I have since
daydreamed of having been there at that moment and punching this entitled,
obnoxious woman in the face. No, my partner isn’t breastfeeding. She can’t. And
thank you for reminding her of this fact when she is told every day by
our culture, by our parents, by a tiny voice in her head that she isn’t really
a mother without that biological tie. Of course, I’ve imagined many (what I
think of as) biting comeback lines since this incident: “I know, why do you
take your pre-Oedipal bliss and shove it up your tightly wound ass!” or perhaps
the more direct, “I’ve got an idea; let’s say you mind your own fucking
business.”
It boggles my mind to think of all the reasons why a new
mother might not be breastfeeding and, therefore, might need you to keep your
fucking mouth shut. Maybe she got an infection and can’t breastfeed because of
the pain. Maybe she’s not producing enough milk and has to supplement with
formula. Maybe her baby rejected her breast for whatever reason. Maybe she’s a
single working mother who either cannot or chooses not to breastfeed and pump
because of the incredible constraints on her time. Maybe (if you can wrap your
tiny head around this) she’s an adoptive mother and is bonding with her baby
though bottle feedings. All of these reasons and more cause so many women whom
I know personally or have met through their writings to feel incredible sorrow,
shame, and self-loathing. They feel less than women, less than mothers, or
failures at the very start of the long, challenging road of parenthood. Many of
them are professional women and/or academics who waited because of career goals
to have a baby and who struggled just to conceive in the first place, much less
take the baby to term. I know many academic women who wanted to have children
and have lost their chance or who are still waiting, hoping. And now to top it
all off, they have to listen to your blind ignorance, your ridiculous
insensitivity, and your just plain cruel, self-involved bullshit. Maybe this
new mother just didn’t want to breastfeed or pump and is giving her child
perfectly good formula. Isn’t that her decision to make? I can’t believe I’m
saying this in 2013, but isn’t it her body to do with as she sees fit?
In the short time I’ve been a parent, I have gotten
unsolicited and, frankly, unnecessary advice on breastfeeding, on car carriers,
on what I eat, on what the baby eats, on when the baby should sleep, on when I
should sleep, on how to carry the baby, on where to send the baby to school.
And all of it, I mean all of it, is meant to discipline me
through shame, senseless competition, and insidious ‘well-meaning’ disapproval.
Is the woman who said this to my partner and who has since offered innumerable
pieces of unwanted ‘advice’ and ‘expertise’ an academic? Yes. Is she an avowed
feminist? Yes. Was she, in that moment, more of a harm and antagonist to me and
my partner than any person we have met on the streets or in the doctor’s
offices and shops of our small, conservative town? Yes.
Somewhere, somehow, they have managed to divide us yet again
with this bankrupt and many times deconstructed myth of motherhood. Mother and
child union. The perfect bliss that only a mother can know. An attachment that
is more important than your partner, than your job, than you. It’s like not
being able to wake up from some patriarchal wet dream of the ‘appropriate’
relationship between mother and child with a voiceover narration by a supposed
female ally. Or, someone’s cast me unwillingly in the role of Steinbeck’s Rose
of Sharon and my director is one of these hellish, arrogant sanctimommies. How
did this essentialist nonsense come back with such a vengeance? And shouldn’t
we be committed with every atom inside us to destroy it once again. For my
partner. For my friends. For women, period.
BIO:
Barbara Jane Brickman teaches at the University of Alabama
where she will begin an assistant professorship in Media and Gender Studies
this fall. Her book, New American Teenagers: The Lost Generation of Youth in
1970s Film, was published by Continuum Press in 2012.
