As A Mother
As a mother.
It’s an easy expression to use.
It’d roll off the tongue nicely, if I had children. But I don’t. If I did, I imagine I would probably use it from time to time. I wonder why I would use it, though. I wonder what the real reason would be, underneath it all, when I could just as easily start a sentence without it.
As a marketing manager, I find it annoying that brands rely heavily on discounts and promotions on Mother’s Day, even though they’re not selling flowers, chocolates or cards. It’s lazy marketing, in my eyes, to clutch onto these gifting days and persuade people to part with their money with the promise of bigger, better gifting ideas.
Why do I say all of that as a marketing manager, with that specific hat on? I could have the same opinion, could I not, if I were a teacher or a cleaner or a shop assistant? I say it, probably, because I feel it adds more weight to my opinion, validates my perspective. I want the listener or the reader to understand that I know what I am talking about. Perhaps I want their respect. My ego is definitely at play. I can fluff it up using this expression.
Everything shifts when I put a different hat on and say that, as a childless woman, I find it annoying that brands rely heavily on discounts and promotions on Mother’s Day. You probably interpret it differently, too? Perhaps I sound bitter to you now or full of envy. The truth is, that with this statement I am not fluffing my ego. Instead I am berating myself because I feel a failure for not bringing my children into the world. And I am trying to protect myself because my body is full of grief and all the discounts and promotions that land in my inbox prod at a hornets’ nest of sadness that my children are not alive in this world, that I do not get to be their mother even though I feel that I am.
When my sister’s baby was around three months old, she and I were outside in the garden, planting herbs while the baby slept in the pram. Our two dogs were sniffing around with us, sticking their snouts into the holes that we dug in the soil.
We ran out of space for the lavender and my sister moved a large stone slab to make more room. To her surprise, underneath it was a nest of mice. The dogs were in like a shot. One dog caught the mother mouse, the other went for one of the babies as its siblings, still bald and blind squeaked and crawled helplessly.
My sister dropped the stone, shouting at the dogs and clutching her hands to her head in despair. I could see that she felt in her body that she was the mother mouse that had just been killed, that she had abandoned her child, that she was seeing her own baby crawling helplessly and motherless. She had just imagined death coming between her and her child, and she felt it viscerally in her body.
I don’t believe she would have had the same reaction one year beforehand, before her baby was a part of her life. And I don’t believe I would have been able to do what needed to be done had I not already faced the loss of my own not-ever-even-conceived babies, had I not faced childlessness. I contained the surge of pressure that arose in my chest, the one that had been a feature in my life for over three years, and I told my sister to walk away before I lifted the stone to let the dogs finish what they had started.
“It’s for the best,” I said, “They’re too young to survive without their mother.”
As a mother, my sister felt all of that and she let a few tears escape.
As a childless woman, I felt all of that and I held my tears back.
Watching the news about a toddler that was attacked by a dog has really affected me.
As a woman, watching the news about a toddler that was attacked by a dog has really affected me.
As a woman who doesn’t have children, watching the news about a toddler that was attacked by a dog has really affected me.
As a woman who always wanted to have children, watching the news about a toddler that was attacked by a dog has really affected me.
As a woman who has always imagined being a mother, watching the news about a toddler that was attacked by a dog has really affected me.
As a mother, watching the news about a toddler that was attacked by a dog has really affected me.
Do any of these sentences really carry more weight or meaning than another? And what happens if we throw in this wild card:
As a woman who never wanted to have children herself, watching the news about a toddler that was attacked by a dog has really affected me.
Within the childless not by choice community, the expression ‘as a mother’ grates heavily. It can serve to dismiss someone’s own empathy and feelings. It can serve to belittle their position in society. A mother can use the expression ‘as a mother’ to remind the world that she outranks a non-mother in status. It can serve to bolster her opinion of herself.
As a mother, perhaps you read this and think, “No, that’s not what I mean when I say it!”
I’d ask you to interrogate that. Really interrogate it. Go in deep and find what it is that lies underneath those three words.
We all, too easily, use expressions and cliches as shorthand to say something else. The problem with that is that our shorthand is unique to us. When one person uses ‘as a mother’ it might mean something very different to, say, an MP who uses it as shorthand to say that those who don’t have children have got no heart. But how is the listener to know?
Our words matter. We must choose them carefully.
Before a woman who comes to use the expression ‘as a mother’ actually becomes a mother, she is not a mother. She was younger then, too. I imagine she remembers a time when her younger self would have watched that news story and been less affected.
I remember a time when my younger self would have watched that news story and been less affected, too.
Most adults will remember a time when they felt things less vividly.
A time when they were younger.
A time when they felt untouchable.
As we get older, we begin to realise that bad things happen, and we start to feel into that.
I think that happens to us all, regardless of whether or not we have children.
Before I became childless, I hadn’t really met grief or loss. I’d brushed it away by hiding my heartache and hurt. I never used to cry much, not unless I was drunk.
My unborn children broke me open. They introduced me to grief and they showed me where loss was hidden.
Everywhere.
It was hidden in the poppies that were just coming into flower when my neighbour accidentally strimmed them and killed them. That made me cry.
It was hidden in my friend’s face when she told me how her accident had upended her life, how she could no longer work, no longer socialise, no longer be who she was before. That made me cry.
It was hidden in my father’s increasing immobility and the way he could no longer walk from his chair to the table. That made me cry.
By not coming into the world, the children I only ever dreamed of broke my heart open. I believe they would have done the same if they had been born. If I had become a mother.
As a childless woman, I feel more than I used to.
As a mother, I would have felt more than I used to.
Some people don’t need to have or not have children for their hearts to be broken open, to feel more. They have always felt everything deeply anyway.
I smirk inwardly when someone says, ‘as a mother’ and then goes on to express how deeply they care about climate change. It always makes me think of my own mother who, when we were discussing what might happen to the land around us in the future, the land we have called home for over forty years, said, ‘It doesn’t really matter to me, I’ll be dead.”
As a mother, she wasn’t too bothered about it all.
As a childless woman, I was.
When a friend phoned to tell me that her young dog had been hit by a car and killed, I was horrified. I said what I hoped were all the right things, which were probably the wrong things. Then I hung up the phone and instinctively reached out to stroke my dog’s ears.
As a dog owner, I could easily imagine my friend’s pain and I wished I could take it away for her. Stunned by her news, I held my breath and tried not to feel her pain too deeply. I spoke to my dog, telling him aloud to “always, always come back when I call you,” whilst silently begging some greater power not to ever let him run out in front of a car, to let him live his full life.
As a dog owner, my thoughts went straight from the unexpected loss my friend had just experienced to the unexpected loss that might await me. I thought how much I wanted to avoid the pain that she was going through and how I didn’t want to lose my dog in the way she had lost hers.
It’s hard to admit it, but my heart didn’t quite stay with her in the way it might have done before I’d had my own dog. I was too busy imagining that her loss was my own.
As a childless woman, I don’t truly understand what meaning lies behind these words that so many women utter. I probably never will know. I just know how it makes me feel when someone starts their sentence with the words, “as a mother.”
It makes me feel less than.
It makes me feel dismissed.
It makes me feel that my own empathy, wisdom and compassion do not count.
As a mother, is this what you intend? I hope it isn’t. I like to believe it isn’t.
This is a beautiful meditation on the use of this phrase, this pre-fix, that can be so troubling and feel so pointed. Thank you for your careful and tender considerations x
Henri, you took me on a rhythmic journey through your thoughts, lulled by the repetition and the questions. I found this such an elegant piece, not trying to have all the answers, a meditation with its mantra 'as a mother'. I feel grateful to have read it, thank you.