I used to go on long walks when I was pregnant. I’d lace up my snow boots and zip my barely-fitting winter coat over my belly and just walk for hours around the neighborhood. I loved it. I loved how I waddled, my hips expanding to accommodate the baby’s drop. I loved how my stomach strained the zipper, pocket seams bursting, as if even my clothes were excited with anticipation about my daughter’s arrival. I loved how strangers smiled and asked when I was due and told me, “Congratulations!”

I loved being a pregnant person.

It felt easy to be a “good” pregnant person. Yes, the details were hard – a screenshot of safe fish to eat lived on my phone, consulted before every sushi order that always ended in California rolls anyway; I sat on an inflatable birthing ball at work to try to encourage the baby to go into proper head-down position; I didn’t sleep on my back; I learned infant CPR; we squirreled away money for future childcare.

But overall, I was lucky. For me, moving through the world as a pregnant woman was simple. I felt so sure of my choices, so sure I was doing it right. It was the first time in my whole life I felt truly at home with my identity, that I wholly embodied within what was being projected outwardly. It was the first time I felt confident in myself.

Motherhood is not like that. Motherhood has shaken my confidence to the core, chiseled away my decision-making skills, left me puddled and wobbly. Things that had once seemed stupidly obvious stop me in my tracks. I spend a ridiculous amount of time standing in the grocery store, paralyzed at the thought of choosing the wrong baby water. I agonize over what is the proper type of onesie to put her in (Fleece? Cotton? Flannel?). Old episodes of ER play in the background as she cluster feeds and my mind hums with screen time recommendations.

Everything, every choice, every decision, every moment, is heavy with consequence.

My daughter sleeps in her bassinet next to me. I lay in bed, having checked to make sure she’s breathing. Once. Twice. Three times already. I close my eyes, satisfied.

She shifts.

Don’t do it, I reprimand myself in my head. She’s fine. Don’t do it. She just moved a little. Don’t do it. Embarrassingly, she has not one but two life-detecting monitors (a motion sensor pad under her mattress that came with the video monitor, and a Snuza clipped on her diaper that is supposed to beep should she stop breathing.) Don’t do it. Neither is going off. Don’t do it. She’s fine, she’s fine, she’s fine…

I lift my head, scootch to the side of the bed, peer over. I check on her. I watch her diaphragm move up and down. I make sure her nose and mouth are clear of anything that has the minuscule chance of blocking her airway (the sleeve of her onesie positioned in a one in a million chance in the throes of her sleep, the fitted sheet somehow coming up from the secure hugging of the mattress corner and tangled over her face in her tossing…) She is fine. I pull the covers up, I close my eyes, I wait for sleep.

She shifts again.

Motherhood has shaken my confidence to the core, chiseled away my decision-making skills, left me puddled and wobbly.
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I don’t want to be this mother. Double-checking, triple-checking that the car seat is clicked in properly (did I hear two clicks? I don’t know. Do it again). Nerves frayed after a bad night of sleep (why did I rock her to sleep, she will never learn to sleep on her own, I’ve ruined her sleep habits forever and committed my husband and me to a lifetime of interrupted nights, 2 a.m. wake ups). Thoughts from long ago, news stories of dangers lurking in every corner fill my head (infants accidentally left in hot cars, dead after their first day at daycare, stabbed by the nanny…).

I’m sorry, I didn’t get it, I want to say to the mothers of eons past. I used to think, “Why is it so hard? Why are you so worried? If your baby is hungry, she will eat. Tired, she will sleep. What are you fretting, obsessing, agonizing about?” I’m sorry I didn’t understand until now.

The love for my daughter took time to come in. We don’t talk about that much, but maybe we should, the assurance offered to new moms that their breast milk may take time to come alongside a “don’t worry, that love everyone talks about, it will come too.” It snuck up on me, weeks after she arrived, but when it came it was enough to stop the world. I would lay in bed after a middle of the night feeding and listen to her shallow breaths, listen to my husband’s deep slumber beside me, everyone at peace, and I would think if the world had to end, please God let it be now because there would never be anything more perfect than this moment.

I’m sorry, I didn’t understand how your child is everything and nothing all at once. Like Sandra Cisneros describes in her short story Eleven, how when you’re eleven you’re not just eleven, you’re also ten, and nine, and eight, and seven, and six, and five, and four, and three, and two, and one. My daughter is everything right now in the moment, but she is also nothing but potential, events yet experienced, lessons yet learned, a life yet lived.

It’s here where the anxiety nestles itself, feeds off itself, this crux of past and future.

The heat rattles to life and fills my New York City apartment with an oppressive warmth. Is she too hot in her swaddle? “Cold babies cry, hot babies die.” Pinterest notifications illuminate my phone during nighttime feedings, alerting me to pins I might like: “5 Hidden SIDS Risks” and “Newborn Safety Checklist.” Clickbait promising to make me a better mother lures me in.

“It’s because you click on them,” my husband says as I show him the ad for the weighted sleep sack that promises three more hours of sleep in just three nights, the gripe water that cures colic and stops crying, the teas and bars and cookies that will boost my dwindling supply of milk. “It’s targeting you because it wants you to buy things.”

But it doesn’t feel that way. I don’t feel targeted; I feel like I’m being sent clues to a puzzle. That writhing, wailing newborn you can’t figure out? We know how to fix it–here’s why your baby isn’t sleeping; here’s why your baby isn’t eating; here’s why your baby won’t stop crying, here’s what you’re doing wrong. You’re doing it wrong. Wrong. Wrong. Wrong.

I feel like a good mom only when I’m not responsible for her. When she is with Grandma or Dad I wash and change her crib sheets. I scrub her clothes free of spit-up stains. I sanitize her bottles and pacifiers. I organize her toys. I buy more formula. I tick off all the things she needs, stay on top of the concrete, hard details of keeping her alive and happy. But she always comes back, and with her the unknowns.

But are they unknowns, or are they just things I haven’t learned? How could I live with myself knowing the information was out there that could’ve saved us both and I was too lazy to click it? That the research existed but I was too tired to read and evaluate it thoroughly? That I was too overwhelmed, it was four in the morning, I’d been up half the night, I knew the recommendations of flat on her back in her own space but I just needed to sleep so I put her in the swing, in the bed, in my arms, as I rocked her, rocked her, rocked her, my eyes snapping open in panic after dozing off, dawn light teasing the corners of the window.

The model of motherhood is there, it’s right there, I shout in my own head. In millions of mothers doing it right, doing it better.

My daughter raised the stakes too high in a game I don’t have the constitution to play. Thoughts of being younger, begging and begging to watch a scary movie and then huddling by a nightlight, every night for weeks, both terrified and ashamed, in equal measure, of the fear I’d brought on myself.

You wanted this, prayed and pleaded and cried each month when one line appeared instead of two.

Now she’s here. You protect her. You keep her safe.

She would never exist again. This soul made of stardust. It would never form again.

It’s maddening, it’s exhausting, it feels viscerally unfair, being forced to exist like this: repeating the same mundane steps of caring for a newborn over and over, the numbing repetitiveness sliced sharp with the knowledge that if you don’t do the steps right, if you let your guard down for a moment, if you lose focus on the task at hand, if you take your eye off the ball…like the bright yellow posters in factories warning workers of the dangers on the assembly line that do nothing to break through the haze of monotony until an accident shocks everyone awake again.

We know how to fix it–here’s why your baby isn’t sleeping; here’s why your baby isn’t eating; here’s why your baby won’t stop crying, here’s what you’re doing wrong.
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My daughter grows. She reaches developmental milestones. At five months she scoots forward on her knees and elbows in a combat crawl and I lay out circus-colored safety mats to cushion the hardwood. At seven months, I turn around to see she’s pulled herself up on the side of her crib — that night we drop her mattress to the lowest setting. Now, at nine months, the mats have been replaced with carpet because she cruises along any furniture she can reach, legs shaking when she lets go to test her limits. She gobbles down the food we put on her highchair tray, bits of cheese and mashed banana and bread balled as small as my fingers can make it.

The old fears lessen their grip around my heart but instead settle like a cold in my bones, and are replaced with new fears that cause the blood to rush in my ears each time she stumbles while she learns to walk or chokes as she learns to eat. I doubt they’ll ever go away completely. This is parenting, I think, your breath always one moment away from being knocked out of you.  

A grape not cut small enough. A dresser not properly secured.

My mind remembers, listening to a news brief when I was so young I was standing on a chair to reach something in the kitchen cabinets. The grandmother had wanted to surprise her infant grandchild with a stuffed bunny for Easter. She put it in the crib next to the girl while she slept. The tape holding the wrapping paper somehow came unstuck, the paper somehow covered her mouth and nose in the night.

Everything would be nothing.

I raise my head, peak over the side of the crib. Check to make sure my daughter is still breathing.

I pretty much always planned to breastfeed. It seemed like a given—not even a choice, really, but something I had to do. I knew that breast was best, because that message is everywhere from billboards, to magazines, to social media, to the posters on the wall of my doctor’s office. When the nurses asked me, “how do you plan to feed your baby?” I told them I was breastfeeding. Their smiles made it clear I had answered correctly.

When she was born, the first thing I did was nurse her. As a “Baby-Friendly” hospital, they encouraged all new moms to breastfeed exclusively. I carefully logged her feeding sessions on the chart they provided—30 minutes, 45 minutes, 15 minutes. When the nurses came to check on me, they said things like, “you’re doing such a good job, mama” and “everything looks great.”

After the first 24 hours of motherhood, I felt like a rock star. Everything was going exactly as planned. Then the next 24 hours were brutal. My daughter alternated between nursing and screaming. She couldn’t stay awake to nurse, but wouldn’t stay asleep if I put her down. She cried; I cried. I was too exhausted to think.

The next morning, I called the La Leche League. They told me to “just keep breastfeeding.” Everything would work out, and my baby was fine. Then I called the hospital lactation consultant, who said the exact same thing. My milk likely hadn’t come in yet, the baby was fine, and I shouldn’t worry as long as I kept nursing. She scheduled an appointment for me to come in the next day.

I didn’t want to fail at breastfeeding. It was not an option. As I reread my worn copy of The Womanly Art of Breastfeeding, I started to panic. I knew deep down something was wrong, and she wasn’t getting enough milk, but I was doing everything right, and I wanted it to work so badly.

Everyone said that breast was best. My friends, family, midwife, and the brochure they gave me at the hospital. When I had my baby, I worked for a women’s health provider, where we talked about breastfeeding with our clients, as if it was the easiest thing in the world. Public agencies like the Centers for Disease Control promote exclusive breastfeeding, as if it’s a simple problem of awareness. The truth is breastfeeding is hard, and sometimes not even close to possible. This pressure is not only unfair, and misguided, but parents and babies end up getting harmed in the process.

At the time though, I thought I just had to try harder to make breastfeeding work. I mean, obviously the problem was me. I met with the lactation consultant. She pressed my breasts into hamburger shapes, and squeezed my nipples to produce drops of milk. I felt my daughter’s tiny mouth latch on like a snake. I felt pressure in my chest, as I saw that the number on the baby scale had dropped. My daughter was starving. I was starving her.

My baby was admitted to the hospital for jaundice and dehydration. As I watched her gulp down formula, I felt like a failure. I told myself that I would just have to try harder, to do anything it took. There was a “breast is best” sign on the NICU wall. I asked for a breast pump and left her lying there under blue lights. When I returned with less than an ounce of breast milk, the nurse said, “is that all?” I felt the weight of her disappointed gaze.

I didn’t want to fail at breastfeeding. It was not an option.
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When my daughter was discharged, I started the impossible routine of breastfeeding, supplementing, and pumping 10 times a day, to boost my supply. I don’t really remember much about the next few weeks, aside from the pressure and pain of trying to make breastfeeding work. I should have spent the so-called fourth trimester loving my baby and learning how to be a mom. Instead, I was so preoccupied with breastfeeding, that I didn’t get a chance to really be her mom. I don’t really remember things like her first smile or laugh. I just remember the pumping.

I felt so much pressure, not just to breastfeed, but to breastfeed exclusively, as though my entire existence depended on increasing my supply. My midwife secretly prescribed me expensive prescription drugs that aren’t approved in the U.S.  I drank breastfeeding tea, took herbal supplements, and ate food reputed to increase supply. My nipples bled and cracked. My supply increased, only to dip again, and never became enough for my baby. I continued for months, not taking time to sleep, eat, or bond with my baby.

I felt shame. Rather than be seen in public giving her a bottle, I would hide in the bathroom to feed her. My identity was so wrapped up in how much milk I was making. I thought I was selfish, lazy, and a bad mother. Other people thought this too—the woman in the formula aisle said, “don’t you know that breast is best. The relative at my grandpa’s funeral said, “oh, you stopped breastfeeding? That’s so sad. My breastfeeding friend said, “you should just try harder.” Strangers on the Internet went so far as to tell me that formula was like feeding my baby McDonald’s or that it would make her sick. Hell, even the can of formula has the phrase Breast Is Best on the side.

As a woman, I’d spent my life under pressure—to be pretty and thin, to be pleasant, to succeed, to get married and have babies. I had been molded by society and myself into a perfection-seeking missile, never wanting to miss the mark. After 30 years of living up to expectations, there was no way I was going to fail to provide the best for my baby.

Eventually, I cracked under the pressure. I started to think my daughter would be better off without me. I made plans for her, once I was gone. I figured that my husband would be fine. He would have help from my parents. Or maybe someone else could care for her. A breastfeeding mom could nurse her. I wasn’t able to think straight, to really process what I was feeling or how the pressure to breastfeed was making me hate myself. My daughter was thriving on a combination of formula and breast milk, but I still thought I was not enough.  

Hell, even the can of formula has the phrase Breast Is Best on the side.
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Now, I have breastfed and formula-fed three babies to varying degrees, and I learned there are so many more important parts of being a mom. The constant refrain of “breast is best” made me hinge my success as a mother on something I couldn’t control—the physical ability to exclusively breastfeed—which I later learned was never going to be possible for me. It actually isn’t possible for a lot of new moms.

As human milk researcher Shannon Kelleher, PhD notes on themomvist.com, between 10 and 15 percent of moms can’t produce milk, and many more cite supply issues as the reason they stopped breastfeeding. While organizations like the World Health Organization and the Baby Friendly Hospital Initiative (BFHI) recommend exclusive breastfeeding for at least six months, only 22 percent of moms in the U.S. meet that goal.

Recommendations like this sound awesome, but fail to acknowledge how physically challenging breastfeeding is. Not to mention other pressures moms face in our society to “do it all”—working jobs with no parental leave, and not having enough support to raise babies, let alone exclusively feed them with our bodies. For many of us, the pressure to breastfeed contributes to postpartum depression, which impacts an astonishing one in seven new moms.

In July, Trump Administration rejected a breastfeeding resolution at the World Health Assembly in Geneva to promote exclusive breastfeeding worldwide and fund initiatives like the BFHI. And while people largely dismissed this move as patently bad, I had a moment of relief. As a culture, we’ve set the bar so high, and put new moms under so much pressure to achieve the impossible, that they are literally dying.

When you consider that in the U.S., babies do just as well on formula as breast milk, it’s time to take a step back from the “breast is best” rhetoric, to support all new parents in choosing to feed their babies in a way that works for them, and relieve some of the pressure of new motherhood, which is hard enough as it is.

As a culture, we’ve set the bar so high, and put new moms under so much pressure to achieve the impossible, that they are literally dying.
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I still remember the day the pressure started to dissipate for me. In the middle of my panic over breastfeeding my first child, I called a friend, the only formula-feeding mom I knew. I don’t know why I called her that day, but she came over. She sat with me, while I called my doctor to schedule an appointment. She held space for me to cry and vent all of the worries, and fears I had about formula, and all of the shame I felt about not breastfeeding. She offered no pressure, just support.

Most importantly, she told me about how her kids had done well on formula when breastfeeding didn’t work out for her. As we watched our beautiful children smile and coo from a blanket on the floor, I knew that she was right. Breastfeeding or not, I was enough. Formula was enough, or maybe even best for us. It was like being reborn as a new mom, without the crushing pressure to breastfeed. Slowly, but surely, I began to thrive, and my baby thrived, too, without another ounce of breastmilk.

Violet* is at home with her daughter and boyfriend when she hears a knock at the door. She opens it to find five police officers and a social worker. “They went through our laundry, our bag of adult toys, all of our cupboards,” she tells me over the phone. “They said that my mom called and told them that I am a prostitute and that I am subjecting my daughter to it.”

Violet does work in the sex industry, but she isn’t a prostitute; she is a cam girl. And, though this work may be highly stigmatized, it is legal. So, she was shocked when the judge granted Violet’s mother full custody of her daughter. She says, “It blows my mind that you can lose a child like this. I haven’t been charged with anything. I’ve never been arrested.”

Violet’s story stands out to me because, as an online sex worker who is also a mother, this is my worst fear. I started doing a mix of phone sex, cam modeling, and clip production when I was going through a divorce. Online sex work offered a flexible schedule that allowed me to take care of my kids. Divorce, as it turns out, is time consuming and expensive. Sex work was a good fit for the circumstances. It was also a good fit in many other ways that I didn’t anticipate: The work, while challenging, can be interesting, rewarding, and meaningful. But beginning a sex work career while in the midst of a divorce made me particularly attuned to, and afraid of, custody issues such as Violet’s.

This fear is not unfounded. Sex workers who are mothers often find themselves in the middle of such battles, even if they’re engaging in perfectly legal behavior. Juniper Fitzgerald, a former erotic dancer, and author of How Mamas Love Their Babies, understands this all too well, having faced her own custody battle related to sex work. “Not a day goes by that I don’t hear of a sex working mother crowdsourcing funds for a custody lawyer. It’s heartbreaking,” she said.

Your Guide To Surviving In Society As A Wannabe Sex Worker
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The fact that sex workers who engage in legal work face these challenges points to something important regarding attitudes toward sex work: Our fitness to parent is seen through a lens of the stigma that surrounds sex work. Mothers who engage in sex work are perceived to lack the judgement and boundaries needed to be good parents. This stigma is injected into our legal system. While the law may not forbid stripping or cam work, judges have a lot of discretion, and if doing stigmatized work leads them to believe that we have poor judgment, they can slap us with consequences that, for mothers, can feel worse than being arrested.

Fitzgerald notes that she has it easier than most in her position. “I have a great deal of privilege as a white woman with a PhD,” she said. However, “Even given those privileges, the court wanted detailed explanation of my work and a good faith testament that I was no longer engaged in sex work.” This becomes an even bigger problem for those who do not carry such privilege. suprihmbé, an online sex worker and artist, observes, “As a Black woman who has run into many problems with the law, I avoid the court.” And in the case of prostitution, Bella Robinson, executive director of COYOTE, a sex workers’ rights organization, remarks in a phone conversation, “You are more likely to go to jail for prostitution than you are for drugs.”

Our fitness to parent is seen through a lens of the stigma that surrounds sex work.
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And yet, despite the fact that society portrays motherhood as incongruent with sex work — scrutinizing our judgement and credibility — sex working mothers continue to parent our kids in a way that is not only appropriate, but radical in its power to destabilize these narratives and destigmatize our work for future generations. In other words, sex working mothers are at the front lines of a radical sexual politics, as these front lines begin in our own homes. Because we occupy professions that are highly stigmatized, sex working mothers are pushed to parent with a thoughtfulness and a courage that undermines the perceptions of unfit motherhood that society wants to insist upon.

For myself and the other mothers I spoke with, this begins with figuring out how to talk to our kids in an age appropriate way about both sexuality and sex work. But more than this, we also have to talk to them about the stigma we — and, they, by extension — face. This is never simple. suprihmbé notes that while she is not secretive about what she does, her son is only 5 and she hasn’t yet decided how much she will tell him. Part of her worry is that other parents aren’t having the same conversations with their children about the nuances of sex work. She says, “Probably once he’s a little older we will discuss it more, but I don’t know how in depth I want to be? Because I’m a single mom, and I don’t want him running off at the mouth to other kids’ moms and dealing with their bigotry.”

Fitzgerald describes the way in which she has talked to her 4-year-old daughter about sex work. “I have told her many times that I used to dance naked for a job. My former work is very normalized in our household.” Porn performer Lotus Lain hasn’t yet told her children what she does for work, but is laying the groundwork for these conversations. “My kid is still elementary age, but they have a healthy view of sex, they know what sex is,” she says. “They’re not judgmental at all. I’ve talked to them about different types of sexuality and gender and they’ve completely understood without challenging the concepts.” She hopes this will set them up to be understanding when they’re old enough to learn more.“I know that once they’re high school age they will be able to fully understand the type of sex work I have done and why.”

Why We Must Protect Sex Workers At All Costs During The #MeToo Era
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Yin Q, a dominatrix, writer, and educator, says that she is also preparing her kids to understand sex work as they grow older. “My kids are too young to understand sex work at this point,” she said, “but I raise them to be accepting of different sexual lifestyles and orientations and am already very careful not to slut shame.” Yin Q has also written and produced a series based on her career called Mercy Mistress, and her kids have seen some of the footage of the main character, a femme domme, in fetish gear. “They’ve asked me what she does, and I answered that she helps people face their darkness. ‘So she’s a superhero?’ they said. ‘Yes,’ I answered, ‘Sex workers are superheroes.’”

This conversation seems to capture what many sex worker mothers are doing in their parenting. Because I have older children, I was able to have very direct conversations with them about my work, and this became more urgent when I started doing sex work writing and local activism. When I explained to my pre-teen what phone sex is and why people call phone sex lines, he responded with, “So you are like an online therapist but you talk to people mostly about sex.” I laughed, because it is closer to the truth of what this kind of sex work looks like than what most people realize. I was proud to have raised a kid who could see past the sensationalism of the sex in sex work (unlike most adults) and see the bigger picture. But for this to happen, a foundation had to be laid: a sex positive foundation which included a respect for personal autonomy and for women, including those who have made choices that fall outside of cultural norms.

Sex working mothers are at the front lines of a radical sexual politics, because these front lines begin in our own homes.
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Indeed, Ramona Flour, an art model and sex worker whose mother also worked in the industry, exemplifies this, tweeting, “I have been advocating for sex workers my whole life because my my mother has been a sex worker my whole life.” On the phone, she expands, “The thing I want people to understand is that there are a lot of single mothers [in sex work], mothers who are struggling to take care of their children.” Of her own mother she says, “I am thankful, above everything else, that she was so selfless and provided for me and took care of me. She used sex work to take care of her kid and that is so commendable.”

While the image that we have of sex work activists is that of the most public and most visible sex workers — those who march on the streets and stand at the forefront of political action — sex working mothers are also engaged in a radical activism at home. They are teaching their children to see sex workers through their own lens, and not through the filter of shame and stigma. This is important political work. “We need more representations of sex workers that are authentic, complex, and generous,” says Yin Q. “Culture change happens before policy change.”

*Name has been changed to protect privacy since this custody case is still open.

By Jennifer Neal

When I hear the term “baby fever,” a certain image comes to mind. A baby — literally having a fever — which finds me in the emergency room in the middle of the night right before the deadline of a career-making article is due.

Another vision of “baby fever” is being vomited all over after my child has drunk a large blueberry milkshake. Other visions involve broken bones, infections, antibiotics and allergic reactions, sleepless nights, and living in the twilight stages of permanent anxiety, while my partner is sound asleep dreaming of solid food intake.

Basically, “baby fever” is anything except the desire to have a child.

The concept of motherhood is terrifying to me. Yet my social media feed is inundated with Twitter post after Facebook album after Instagram story of people who may have, once upon a time, tried to convince me to participate in a variety of threesomes — but who now seem to occupy their time with appeals to the public on the consistency of their kids’ bowel movements, and the incomprehensible joy they feel when being vomited all over after their kid has consumed a blueberry milkshake.

So I’ve concluded that, at the very least, the prerequisites to being a good parent have been somewhat sanitized in mass media — meaning, if I want to become a mother, not particularly liking (knowing how to take care of or even currently enjoying the company of) children now doesn’t exclude me from being maternal later. It’s not an urge that needs to claw at my uterus. It can just be a decision.

In fact, there is one thing that gives me comfort in the road ahead to motherhood: Not a single one of us has a maternal instinct.

It simply, plainly does not exist. Just ask Dr. Gillian Ragsdale, a biological anthropologist who teaches psychology with the Open University in the United Kingdom. She says that the word “instinct” is being misused time and again in the context of parenting, because it’s often confused with a “drive.”

Not particularly liking (knowing how to take care of or even currently enjoying the company of) children now doesn’t exclude me from being maternal later.
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“Instinct is hard wired. You don’t really think about it. A drive is motivating, it gives behavior direction, but it’s not an irresistible force,” she tells me during a Skype interview. In that sense, human beings have very few instincts — even the instinct to eat can be denied (just look at dangerous mainstream diets). If a woman chooses not to become a mother, then the biological changes that happen during motherhood won’t happen either, because there is no need for a maternal drive, something that Dr. Ragsdale attributes to hormones.

“The maternal drive can be hormonally influenced, for example by pregnancy. This is the same in other mammals. Once the offspring is there in front of them, that’s when the maternal drive generally kicks in — but not always even then.”

In fact, pregnancy itself is a common way to cultivate that “maternal drive.”

That’s what happened to my friend of the past 20 years, Amy Spears. We met on America Online when I was 14 and she was 18, and we’ve been internet stalking each other ever since. She says she never planned or wanted to be a mother, but it happened anyway. “I cried for three days when I found out I was pregnant, and another three once I decided to keep him.”

Like most of the women I spoke to, she was worried about how having a child would impact her autonomy and her social life. But unlike others, she walked into the decision knowing that she would be a single mom, because the father had begged her to have an abortion, something which at first, she wanted too. Everything changed when she went to the clinic with her old roommate.

“I saw the ultrasound and something just clicked. It was like, ‘We’re having a baby.’”

Amy says that her maternal drive didn’t really kick in until a year after her baby son was born. “I remember crying while he was crying for no reason one night, and I actually said ‘Who let me bring this baby home? They gave it to me and let me just leave the hospital?’”

Undoubtedly a wonderful mother, Amy nonetheless couldn’t help from scrutinizing herself to the point of exhaustion — constantly comparing her experience with pre-conceived notions surrounding motherhood.

“I never questioned having him. I just remember thinking that something must be wrong with me for not having that overwhelming ‘motherly’ feeling.”

It was through what she calls “going through the motions” (what Dr. Ragsdale calls “grooming”) that this eventually changed, but it still took time. “I did all the things I was supposed to do, but I felt like I was an imposter sometimes. I didn’t get the full on ‘mom love’ until months after.”

The “maternal instinct” casts women as natural care givers, when in fact mothering is not something that comes very naturally for a lot of people. As a result, stories like Amy’s are often excluded from the narrative. There is, of course, a distinctly gendered component to this; for both women and men, parenting requires a lot of work, but society feels more comfortable imposing a standard of innate parental ability onto women — perpetuating gender roles that ultimately support a patriarchal society.

According to the 2012 research paper Emotional Regulation of Fertility Decision Making: What Is the Nature and Structure of “Baby Fever”? by Gary L. Brase and Sandra L. Brase, “Feelings about babies and decisions about fertility could be based on the extent to which people have (or have not) internalized general gender norms of their ambient society.”

In that sense, “baby fever” is an effective marketing tool for baby showers, and a popular (albeit trite) plot for Hollywood rom-coms, but little more. “The ‘maternal instinct’ concept pathologizes women who don’t want to have children,” says Dr. Ragsdale. “We have a problem with patriarchy. It’s advantageous to portray women as natural caregivers so that they feel it’s a duty.”

According to the 2012 paper Fertility Preference Inversely Related to ‘Legacy Drive’ in Women, But Not in Men: Interpreting the Evolutionary Roots, and Future, of the ‘Childfree’ Culture by Lonnie W. Aarssen and Stephanie T. Altman, that’s exactly what it was.

They posit that most of reproductive psychology throughout history has revolved around the idea that “men had children because they wanted to have sex or leave a legacy, but that women had sex because men wanted to have sex or leave a legacy (regardless of whether or not it was indeed what women wanted).”

The ‘maternal instinct’ concept pathologizes women who don’t want to have children.
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Very little has changed. Western societies may support the idea of parenting in theory, but often fall short in practice when it comes to supporting women during and after pregnancy. In places like the U.S., where motherhood is often a career death sentence, categorizing women into those who are “maternal” and those who are not hinders a society from looking at ways to make motherhood more attractive, while also punishing women for becoming mothers by stripping them of financial income, and reducing them to antiquated roles that were never a proper fit to begin with.

Contradictions like these are difficult to navigate when a woman decides that she wants both children and a career, and compounds with fears of being unable to meet unrealistic expectations of motherhood.

“Women who preferred to be ‘childfree’ could rarely exercise that choice throughout countless generations of patriarchal dominance over the course of human evolution,” say Aarssen and Altman. There was simply no significant historical precedent for women to develop a “strong parenting drive,” because they were not afforded a choice in the matter.

Dr. Ragsdale believes that, in combination with these strong historical precedents, motherhood has become less attractive because society has replaced supportive, nurturing communities with the internet — an endless list of URLs offering conflicting advice, evangelical mommy blogs, and all the judgment that money can buy. She explains:

“The social isolation of mothers is a relatively new development in human evolution — where women live in small nuclear families and raise their children alone. If you look at other places around the world, children are raised in communities and you’ll find lower levels of depression and anxiety after childbirth as a result.”

By comparison, being at the mercy of the World Wide Web is a nightmare for new parents. Amara White knows this feeling all too well. She had her first baby in Canada with her husband, far away from their homes in New Zealand and Australia.

“There is so much information on the internet about parenting…if you read parenting blogs and forums before having a baby, it is truly enough to put you off the idea,” Ragsdale says.

Not surprisingly, what helped was surrounding herself with the right people during pregnancy, which she spent worrying about everything from sudden infant death syndrome to her daughter one day developing an eating disorder.

“I overcame these irrational fears by steadfastly building my community…building a community of mothers and fathers who parented similarly to me,” says Amara.

How Parenting Became A Full-Time Job, And Why That’s Bad For Women

“Those same women I surrounded myself with were there for me when my daughter was sick, when I just needed some adult ‘before we were moms’ alcohol time…they made life so much easier to deal with, especially as I had zero family around for support.”

Amara was nurturing the maternal drive by consciously seeking out the kind of environment that was most conducive to raising a child — something without which she believes would have made motherhood agonizing.

“Cultivating a maternal drive is bit like learning language,” posits Ragsdale. “Children are exposed to that early on and learn language from the people who are speaking it. If children were conditioned to be more ‘maternal’ from an early age then the drive might be stronger as adults.”

While some women appear to have a stronger maternal drive, it’s often because they’ve been cultivating that behavior from a very early age, from toy dolls and games to babysitting for neighbors, a job rarely asked of or imposed upon boys. But for many women, like an ex-colleague of mine, it’s okay if the first question that pops into your mind during pregnancy is “Can I ever have wine again?!”

“Maternal drive can definitely be cultivated in women, but I’d like to see it cultivated more in men,” says Ragsdale. “I think we should be introducing the idea to men at an early age. We have sex education, but no parenting education.”

Perhaps that’s why I have more confidence that motherhood can be a logical decision and still be a beautiful, unique experience where my “maternal drive” can be a journey rather than a destination. But I’ll have to reserve my judgment until, as Dr. Ragsdale would say, my offspring is sitting right in front of me, begging to be held. I will do this — until she starts to regurgitate that blueberry milkshake, and I hand her over to her father.

By Amy Monticello

About a week after my daughter was born, I was nursing her on the couch for the literal 11th hour in a row. She had weight gain issues at the beginning of her life, had lost about 15% of her birth weight, and so I fed her and fed her, a basket of granola bars on the floor beside me, a two-liter bottle of water on the coffee table. Finally, in a fit of frustration, I grabbed my phone. Using my one free hand, I thumbed out a post that said something to the effect of, People wondering if having a baby has made me more pro-life: Absolutely not. Nobody should be forced to do this.

I stand by that statement. I didn’t think it was possible for me to be more pro-choice, but having a kid made me so. Since then, I’ve been thrilled to see a movement of women celebrating the choice not to have kids, discussing their ambivalence or regret about having them, and calling for privacy because asking a woman whether or not she wants them is intrusive, judgmental, and sometimes extremely painful (see: fertility struggles). It makes many problematic assumptions that ultimately underscore a dangerous premise: that a woman’s life without kids lacks in meaning.

I didn’t think it was possible for me to be more pro-choice, but having a kid made me so.
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My life was plenty complete before I had my daughter. I had a teaching job, a robust circle of friends both local and long-distance, a husband with whom I loved going to restaurants and hosting parties that went late into the night, an extended family I adored, spinning classes at my gym to which I was seriously dedicated, and an ambitious writing career. My husband and I got married without having the question of kids resolved — we made no agreements except that we wanted to be together, though in fact I leaned more heavily toward not wanting children.

I changed my mind for complicated reasons that are none of anybody’s business. But I did not proceed into pregnancy with unchecked confidence in my decision. Actually, the sight of my positive pregnancy test made me lightheaded with fear that I’d chosen wrong. I shoved the test at my husband and took an hour-long shower where I sobbed over the chance that I’d made a terrible mistake. For the most part, I kept my fear to myself. I wish I hadn’t. I’m sure I would have found lots of company in my doubt.

So, reading articles like many that have appeared on this site is refreshing. In a political climate of renewed, even inventive oppression, it’s essential that women push back mightily against having their desires, expectations, and choices about having children legislated by others, including the law. These pieces have been some of the funniest I’ve read in recent years, as well, pointing out the absurdity of treating women’s bodies like stone monuments in a park for every living creature to sit, shit, and piss on. Her body, her choice. It’s painfully logical, right?

I live in a big, diverse city and travel in the kinds of educated, mostly progressive circles where not having children is common and celebrated. At least half of my close friends do not have kids, and I love having relationships with people where the subject of children isn’t central to our connection, reinforcing the other parts of my identity and value in the world. I also love my mom friends, who nurture and buoy me through the complicated role of caregiving. What I love most are the friends who do both — those who don’t treat me only as a mother, and yet aren’t afraid to show me support in my parenting, no matter if they have kids themselves or not.

I know mainstream society has been way more terrible about judging women without kids than the other way around. But in America, we have a tendency to answer extremism with extremism, and I don’t want to see calls for the rightful honoring of women who choose not to have kids become implications of women who do.

The other day, a dear friend shared this New York Times article where author Anna Goldfarb suggests some smart responses for women whose privacy gets regularly invaded with The Question: “When are you going to pop out a kid?” Oh, ugh. (Also, no woman “pops” out a kid, or else we’d have a more comforting maternal survival rate in childbirth.) But such a question, nearly ubiquitous for women to hear at some point in their lives, is rude, presumptuous, and implicitly judging motherhood as the single most important thing women can do. We don’t ask women when they’re going to travel to New Zealand, or learn Muay Thai, or cure AIDS.

My Mother And The Ambiguity Of Abuse

Goldfarb’s suggested responses are wonderful exercises in retaining autonomy through such awkward, awful moments. I was with her entirely until the end of the piece. To close, Goldfarb advises childfree women to honor their chosen path. “Sometimes I picture another version of me with children living in a parallel universe,” Goldfarb writes. “She juggles play dates, organizes nap schedules and indulges requests to screen Moana several times in a row. I imagine this woman in a quiet moment wondering what her life would’ve been like if she’d never had kids.”

Whoa. That’s kind of a sad, paltry vision of motherhood. I’m not saying that I haven’t done all of those things for my daughter, but that describes about one-tenth of my life as a mom. Goldfarb has reduced my life as a mother to one of toil and self-sacrifice, which is just as problematic as a vision of childfree women as self-absorbed, privileged, and shallow. Just as children should never be painted as the singular pathway to personal fulfillment, neither should having them be painted as an abdication of other interests and ambitions. My daughter is now 3, and since her birth, I’ve taken a new job with more responsibilities, written a chapbook that will be published this fall, and given six talks at academic conferences. I’m at work on another book, and I still go to spinning classes.

When I expressed frustration at Goldfarb’s less-than-complex imagined motherhood, my friend who originally shared the article thoughtfully suggested that the fixation on motherhood’s responsibilities by those without children might just be an acknowledgement of the most crucial ways a woman’s life is changed by having kids. That’s a fair point. Not acknowledging those shifts would be a different sort of erasure of the very real work of parenting that too often gets undervalued or outright ignored (leading to the U.S.’s terrible international scores on issues like parental leave, affordable childcare, and other areas related to parenting).

I take issue with a narrative that reduces my life as a mother to one of toil and self-sacrifice, which is just as problematic as a vision of childfree women as self-absorbed, privileged, and shallow.
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But a vision of motherhood in which a woman leaves a life of autonomy for one of service could, I think, contribute to the “baby tax” already applied to professional women with children who are hired and promoted at abysmal rates compared with their childfree colleagues. And for women who stay home? That vision of their lives renders them in the grayest, most depressing, and even dehumanizing terms. It’s akin to the shallow, uncomplicated pity with which we (also wrongly) view people with disabilities.

But Goldfarb’s article thankfully avoids the claim I’ve seen in other articles toasting the choice not to have kids, and expressed by other commenters on my friend’s thread: That the world is just too terrible to bring children into. Citing issues like overpopulation (a myth, by the way), environmental collapse, the rise of political authoritarianism, and the floundering economy, these claims turn the choice not to have kids into one of moral superiority. No, they aren’t outright calling people who procreate irresponsible, but the implication is built into those justifications.

I’m not here to scream from the other side of my parenting choice. I love my daughter fiercely, in part because the job of raising her is hard, like meaningful activities usually are. The rewards of our lives are almost always in their efforts, no matter if those efforts are applied to a child, or a mountain, or a book, or a painting, or a cure. I love my daughter, and I also know that I would have a meaningful life if I’d never had her. (And here’s something else to remember: Women don’t always choose once. I chose to have a child, and now I am choosing not to have any more children.

I know women who have had abortions, and then had babies, and I know women who have had babies, and then had abortions.) What I want is for women’s choices regarding fertility to be supported, full stop. I want our privacy respected. I want us all to carefully consider the terms in which we describe our choices to others in order to pare them from implicit value judgments on other women’s choices.

I want us all to carefully consider the terms in which we describe our choices to others in order to pare them from implicit value judgments on other women’s choices.
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In her advice column “Dear Sugar,” Cheryl Strayed once wrote of the decision to have or not have kids, “I’ll never know and neither will you of the life you don’t choose. We’ll only know that whatever that sister life was, it was important and beautiful and not ours. It was the ghost ship that didn’t carry us. There’s nothing to do but salute it from the shore.”

Sisters, I salute you. I salute the lives you chose and the ones you didn’t. No matter what course you took, I know this for sure: It hasn’t been easy.

Bad Advice On Acting Rude To Bigots And Racists

Welcome to our latest Bad Advice column! Stay tuned every Tuesday for more terrible guidance based on actual letters.

By The Bad Advisor

“I recently called a friend to see whether her college-age daughter, ‘Tiffany,’ could baby-sit for my 1 1/2-year-old granddaughter from 6 to 8 p.m. on a Saturday so I could attend a reception at a local club. I didn’t hear back at first, but three days before the event, I finally talked with Tiffany, and she said that she would be available. We discussed exact times, and I asked what she would charge. She didn’t have a set rate but thought $10 per hour would be fine. Having not paid a baby sitter for many years (I’m a new grandmother), I said that I thought the rate should be $5 per hour but that I would check with my daughter to see what she pays. My daughter confirmed that the average rate today is between $10 and $15 an hour. Thus, I planned to pay the $10 per hour (and thought I would probably give a tip, too), but I did not have a chance to call the sitter back until the morning of the event.

Her mother answered the phone and said that other plans had come up for her daughter, and the mother had told her to go with the ‘other plans’ because I had not gotten back to her on the rate. I was hurt and in total shock, not only because our families are very good friends but also because I did not think that the rate was a deciding factor. My husband is in an assisted living facility, and I spend a great deal of time with him, which ties up most of my days, which they knew. The mother is forever telling me to take time off and have some time to myself, which I thought that I was doing.

My questions to you are: Who is wrong? Should I feel hurt? Was I wrong to not get back to her until the morning of the event about the rate? I was disappointed and hurt that the mother had not advised her daughter to call me, because she is forever saying that she tries to teach her children how to be responsible. I feel that I was let down and can no longer trust this family.”

—From “Heartbroken and Hurt Grandmother” via “Annie’s Mailbox,” Creators.com, 13 July 2017

Dear Heartbroken and Hurt Grandmother,

There’s so much going on here! First there’s this young woman’s bizarre prioritizing of her own social calendar over that of her mom’s friend, then there’s her reluctance to agree to work for literally any rate of pay, plus her failure to wait by the phone for your summons — not to mention the fact that the woman seemed so cavalier about your needs that she failed to telephone you multiple times to ask how she could be of service.

To answer your questions: This young woman is wrong, but more than that, her entire family is wrong and to be frank, everything you ever thought you knew about this clan is wrong. This woman’s behavior has exposed the depravity of every member of this detestable group, none of whom have a reliable bone in their genetically deceitful bodies. Should you feel hurt? Absolutely.

This woman’s behavior has exposed the depravity of every member of this detestable group.

This woman’s belief that you were not in need of her services was based on fragile evidence indeed. Incredibly, this Janus-faced schemer assumed that you were not interested in hiring her only because you dropped off the face of the earth following her request to receive a reasonable rate for work! The only logical conclusion is that her decision not to clear her schedule in perpetuity for the chance to make twenty dollars was a personal slight against you directly.

You did nothing wrong in calling this duplicitous harridan to engage her services mere hours in advance; she is the one who failed to make herself available at your beck and call despite the fact that she is the only babysitter on earth and you the only person in need of her services, and so the need for her immediate availability should have been obvious to all involved. Sadly, it was not, and you should take these scheduling shenanigans in the spirit they were shenanigan’d: as a direct personal slight against you, a reliable and dependable person.

“I don’t appreciate it when you call people ‘bigoted’ or ‘prejudiced.’

I expect more respectful language from you.”

— From “Upset” via “Ask Amy,” Washington Post, 24 June 2017

Dear Upset,

It is the height of disrespect to use words to describe things, and no apology can adequately repair the damage these terms cause to the delicate and important feelings of people who believe others are subhuman piles of garbage bones who should be oppressed and abused on both an interpersonal and systemic level because they failed to have the good sense to be born white, heterosexual, cisgender, English-speaking, able-bodied, male, and American, like all the strong and great members of a master race whose very existence is threatened by the use of adjectives.

Bad Advice On Family Bigots And Ivy League Jerks

“I work in a solo physician’s office — doctor and 12 employees. We have all worked for him a long time and our office is casual, informal, and friendly. We (the staff) are all friendly outside of work as well. The doctor is quite outgoing and friendly, and his wife is more reserved and quiet (though nice enough when you get to know her, but none of us know her very well).

The doctor had us (staff and spouses) over to a casual dinner at his home. During this dinner, I was in the dining room with the boss’s wife and several of my coworkers, including one I’ll call Jane, who is a young woman in her early 20s. The doctor was in the kitchen with the other half of the guests.

In the course of the conversation, the concept of online dating / Tinder came up. Several of us (including the boss’s wife) were curious — we’ve heard of Tinder, but we’re not in the dating scene — how does it work? So Jane pulled out her phone and demonstrated the app — what you see of someone’s profile, how you swipe, etc. As she swiped, she pulled up a young man who was of Chinese descent and said, ‘I’d never go out with him. He’s a f****** (racial slur).’

Boss’s wife instantly turned frosty and said firmly and directly, ‘I’m sorry, but that kind of language is completely unacceptable in my house. Completely. We don’t talk like that about people under my roof.’ Jane seemed kind of taken aback and mumbled what seemed to me a half-hearted apology. Boss’s wife then redirected the conversation to a different topic and we all followed suit, but she was noticeably chilly towards Jane the rest of the evening. Later on, boss’s wife said quietly to me, ‘It is a good thing I don’t work in the office, because Jane is not winning any points with me.’ I could tell she was still steamed.

I am quite sure that she told her husband, but knowing my boss, he’s not the kind to say anything to anybody. Boss’s wife has come into the office a few times (which is standard; sometimes she’ll pick up and drop off something for her husband) and she is always appropriately professionally cordial to all of us, but still a little cool to Jane. Nothing you could really call her on, but she greets Jane more perfunctorily and is a little warmer towards the rest of us.

Should I say something to the doctor that his wife is being cool to an employee (though to be honest, she has limited contact with us)? Should I urge the doctor to address the office generally about inappropriate racial slurs and remind the entire office that it’s not acceptable? Should I say something to the wife that I’ve noticed that she’s being cool? Should I say something to Jane that she might be well served by apologizing again to the wife for her inappropriate behavior? Or should I just keep my nose out of it?”

— Via “Ask A Manager,” 1 June 2017

Dear Reader,

With today’s “PC” culture, it can be so hard to know what action to take when someone is not being unfailingly kind to your local workplace racist in a manner that has absolutely nothing to do with you or your work whatsoever. Everybody makes mistakes, but sooner or later, the boss’s wife’s unfriendly treatment of this racist is going to catch up to her, and only you can save her from the inevitable consequences, such as continuing to not be super warm to this racist.

For the sake of everyone involved, let her know that you’ve picked up on the fact that she seems not to be enthusiastic about building a long-term friendship with her husband’s racist employee; that way she’ll know that you know that she is not 100000% wild about being extra nice to a racist. That’ll go a long way toward the boss’s opinion of you, his office’s lone protector of the fragile social standing of racists.

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]]> https://theestablishment.co/my-disfiguring-condition-is-genetic-here-s-why-i-want-a-child-anyway-e49a51b0ad30/ Thu, 08 Sep 2016 16:19:53 +0000 https://theestablishment.co/?p=7501 Read more]]>

By Ariel Henley

When I was a child, I wanted to be two things when I grew up: an anesthesiologist and a mother. My ambition to pursue a career in the medical field faded, but my desire to be a mother did not. I imagined myself picking out baby clothes, admiring my baby’s little fingers and toes, packing lunches, walking them to school, and always attending every soccer game and dance recital. I imagined a life that was normal. But my life was anything but normal, and I knew there was a chance that my child’s life wouldn’t be either. I was born with Crouzon syndrome, a rare craniofacial disorder that causes facial disfigurements and has required too many surgeries to count. And any child I conceive will have a 50% chance of inheriting my disease.

Crouzon syndrome, which occurs in roughly one out of every 60,000 births, causes the bones in the head to fuse prematurely, before a child is finished growing. Because the bones of the skull and the face fuse early, they do not develop normally; the mid-face is underdeveloped and the eye sockets do not form correctly. Treating the visible results of this condition requires numerous surgeries to expand the skull and the mid-face, and repair facial abnormalities.

I had my first surgery to expand my skull when I was eight months old. Doctors cut my scalp from ear to ear and moved the bones in my head to where they needed to be. A few years later, they did it again. After I healed, surgeons would go back and advance my mid-face: breaking the bones in my face, shifting them forward. These procedures were performed periodically as I grew. After my skull and face were expanded, I would have additional surgeries to correct my appearance. I had bone from my hip implanted in my cheeks to give me cheekbones. The shape of my nose was corrected and my eyes were straightened — as much as they could be, anyway. The surgeries continued until I reached my early twenties.

When my boyfriend and I talk about the future, about marriage and kids, I tell him we could always adopt. It’s expensive, and deep down I truly want to make a child with the man I adore, but I know my condition complicates things. One night over dinner I told him that when the time came, we could find an egg donor, because I would want a child that resembles him. He put his fork down and looked at me in a way I had never seen before. “I just love you so much,” he told me. “I can’t imagine having a child that didn’t have your personality.”

He knows a child with my personality might also have my disease and the struggles it’s caused me, and still he’s open to it. I want it too, even though I know firsthand how difficult this disease can be. Despite the difficulties of facial disfigurement, my life has been worth living and my future child’s will be, too.

I recently stumbled on a Reddit thread about a picture of an infant with Crouzon syndrome. The girl in the image was lying on her back, wearing a floral dress that hugged her small body. I imagined her mother picking out her outfit that morning. The girl’s eyes protruded from her head in a way that is characteristic of the disease; I recognized it, because there was a time when my eyes looked like that too. There were over 700 comments on the image.

“This may sound harsh but put her out of her fucking misery,” the first comment read. “We should be euthanizing children born with these kinds of horrendous defects, and cutting them from the gene pool,” said another. “It’s easily treatable,” someone else responded, “with fire.” I scrolled through the Reddit feed, looking for someone to say something, anything to contradict this stream of hatred.

It was like viewing a diary of everyone’s secret thoughts about individuals with this disease — about people like me. Each comment was seemingly crueler than the last. “There’s a name for this? That means someone had to study this long enough to decide it needed a name. How do you look at that for more than half a second?” Other users wrote things like, “What ‘doctor’ allowed that to be born?” and “This is why Eugenics isn’t a bad idea.” To make matters worse, the post was tagged, “NSFW — Not Safe for Work” as though an image of a child with this condition was so horrific it should only be viewed with caution.

As I read through the almost seven hundred comments, I could not understand how casual the discourse and the cruelty seemed. There was talk of eugenics and sterilization, as if people with this condition were not human. As if people with this condition did not deserve to live.

I already knew what people thought about my appearance — I could tell by the way people stared and by the way children always seemed to point and whisper whenever I walked by. But by talking about “allowing” a child with Crouzons to be born, these hateful strangers were challenging not only my looks and my worth, but my right to make decisions about my body and my family.

People with Crouzon Syndrome have a 50% chance of passing on the disease to their children. Even if a child didn’t inherit the disease, they would still be a carrier. Reading the thread made me realize that many people would find my desire to have a child selfish, even cruel. And worse, it reminded me that if I do have a child with Crouzon, they’ll be born into a world that says spiteful, disgusting things behind their back, or to their face. Still, I believe the only thing that needs to be eliminated from our society is the repulsive sense of entitlement bullies feel when they’re sitting anonymously behind a computer screen.

As a person born with Crouzon syndrome, it has taken me years to value the person I am — not because I didn’t like myself, but because the world around me told me I shouldn’t like myself. Though it took dozens of reconstructive surgeries, both for my appearance and to keep me alive, it was the years of subhuman treatment every time I left my house that made bearing the weight of the condition a challenge. Often, in an effort to comfort me, my family and friends would deny the existence of these prejudices. “Those kids are just staring, because they’re admiring how beautiful you are,” they would tell me. But I knew better.

Growing up, I compartmentalized my experiences. There were two versions of me: my hospital self and my healthy self. During surgeries and recovery periods, I gave myself permission to really be in those experiences, but as soon as they were over, I did my best to pretend they never happened. Once I recovered, I would go back to school and to my friends, play sports, join school club — just generally try to do the same things as other people my age. I had the idea that if I pretended to be the same as everyone else, soon enough people would start to believe it. And most of the time, they did. It got easier as I got older. The more surgery I had, the less noticeable my physical differences became.

Within my family, my condition and the fact that I had surgery was just accepted as normal. From the beginning, the doctors told my parents: Treat her like she’s sick, and she’ll act sick. I don’t know if this is true for everyone, but it worked for me; when I wasn’t actively recovering from surgery, I never felt like a sick person. In fact, I think this mentality forced me to grow up with a sense of strength. Yes, I had to face more physically challenging experiences than most people my age, but I didn’t feel diminished by them — I felt stronger for surviving them. I did what I had to do: I had surgery, I recovered, and then I went on with my life.

But not everyone subscribes to that belief. For a lot of the world, people like me are sick all the time. People with Crouzon syndrome and other conditions that result in disfigurements often have to deal with discrimination in every area of their lives. I am judged by my appearance when I apply for jobs. I am judged when I go to dinner with my boyfriend. I am judged every time I walk down the street. Still, there has never been a time when I’ve regretted my life or wished my mother had an abortion. Sure, there were years that were easier than others, procedures that were easier than others, but I’m surrounded by family and friends who value me exactly as I am, and that has made all the difference.

Growing up with Crouzon Syndrome has shaped everything about me. It has made me more compassionate, more aware of the people around me, more able to practice and appreciate kindness. It has taught me to disregard superficial standards, and instead value people — all people. I would not be who I am today without my experiences, and given the option to live a life without Crouzon Syndrome, I wouldn’t do it. Having this condition has allowed me to rely on my personality to make friends and form relationships — and to surround myself with people who value that personality. I wouldn’t want to spend time with the kind of people who can only care about someone with perfectly symmetrical eyes.

When I don’t think about the surgeries I went through as a kid, I tend to forget that I have Crouzon Syndrome at all. I have a job, friends, a great family, and a wonderful boyfriend. I love my life — my, for the most part, completely ordinary life. I’ve had hardship — we’ve all had hardships. But just because one person’s trials in life do not match your own, does not mean that they are not worthy of life.

Maybe one day I’ll change my mind. Perhaps by the time I’m ready to start a family, I’ll decide that having biological children is not the path that was meant for me, but that is my prerogative. My desire to one day bring a child into the world isn’t the problem. Society’s desire to judge me for it is. But there’s one thing I can promise my future child, whether they’re biological or not: a supportive, understanding, unconditionally loving mother. And with that, we should both be able to make it through, no matter what society throws at us.

“Hold still.”

“Mom, you’re hurting me!”

“I am not. Hold still or your headwrap won’t look right.”

“I don’t want to wear the headwrap. It looks weird. Everyone will laugh at me!”

“What kind of African are you??”

I looked up at my white mom as she tugged on the gele around my head, and tried very hard not to roll my eyes.

We had the same arguments throughout my childhood, my mother and I, whether it was about geles to school, the black power afro pick she was hoping I’d wear in my hair, the afro that I wouldn’t wear to hold the pick, or the locs that I wouldn’t grow instead. While technically mixed race, my brother and I did not have the light beige skin and loose curls of the few other mixed race kids in town who passed as mildly exotic with their golden eyes and permanent suntans. We were black kids — lighter-skinned, yes, but black kids with black colored Nigerian hair and dark eyes. We had names that prevented any fantasy of passing — Ijeoma and Ahamefule. We were black kids. In our poor suburb of Seattle, we were the only black kids throughout all of elementary school.

And so, the last thing I wanted to do was show up in a gele to “Heritage Day.” But I had to, and my mom came along with giant plates of jollof rice, mai mai, and fried plantains for the kids, trying to get her Kansas tongue to say the words in the Ibo accent she had been taught. This scenario was repeated every year whenever my mom thought that our African-ness or blackness would be a fitting part of the school curriculum. Black History Month, the Olympics, Martin Luther King Jr.’s Birthday, Kwanzaa, Nigerian Independence Day — my mother looked forward to these days like they were Christmas.

My mother loved our actual blackness and African-ness, not just the artistic representations of them — the hair and the clothing and the food. She loved the history, the music, the language. And she wanted it for us. My mom took us to cultural events, begged black mothers to invite us over for playdates with their kids, took us to every black movie, and talked at length and with pride of black history. With our father gone, Mom’s greatest fear was that she would be a white woman who didn’t know how to raise black kids; that we would be lost, adrift with no culture, no community, and struggle hair.

We had names that prevented any fantasy of passing — Ijeoma and Ahamefule.
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But despite her best efforts, for many years, we were lost. As much as my mother loved our blackness, she was (and is still) a white woman. A very white woman. Susan Jane Hawley from Wichita, Kansas. And while steeped in love, my mother’s idea of blackness was very much a white person’s idea of blackness. She was worried that we wouldn’t know the proper handshakes, that we wouldn’t be able to dance “black enough,” that we wouldn’t know the “slang” of blackness. She was worried not that these things would prevent us from being black (she’d always reminded us that we were black, absolutely and completely), but that there was a secret code to being accepted in the black community that we needed to know in order to not be rejected by our own when we finally went to find “our people.”

And we felt that difference between the expectations of the type of black we were supposed to be, and the type of black we were — which was black nerds raised by a white woman in a poor white neighborhood. And when middle school came around and suddenly there were a few dozen black kids — real black kids — we compared outfits and attitudes and knew that we, my brother and I, just didn’t measure up. I stayed invisible to both black and white kids while my brother was teased mercilessly for “acting white” with his love of jazz music. My mom would console him, saying, “They just don’t understand yet sweetie — jazz is black. It’s real black.” We would roll our eyes at her. What did she know?

We spent our adolescent years alone, my brother and I. It was hard, and it was sad. My brother barely made it through — depression and anxiety causing him to drop out of high school. But music got him through, motivating him to get a GED and a scholarship to a prestigious art school. Meanwhile, I stayed invisible — or as invisible as a 6-foot-tall chubby black woman could be. I got a boring cubicle job. I got boring friends, and cringed while my blackness became the butt of every “friendly” joke. I only thought critically of my race when I was being pulled over by cops or filling out a census form. My mom gave up on trying to get me to stop relaxing my hair. I was determined to be . . . safe.

But, like my mom said, jazz is black, and as my brother became an adult, he found himself immersed in blackness in a way that life in the white suburbs simply could not allow. He settled calmly and quietly into his blackness, and it became as much a part of him as his music.

As for me, I just got tired. I got tired of laughing at jokes that weren’t funny. I got tired of explaining my hair, of celebrating other people’s holidays, of swallowing microagressions, of pretending to believe lies. I got tired and one day I just stopped.

I started speaking up and speaking out, I stopped compromising, and suddenly — I was myself.

And it turns out I’m black. Hella black.

I’m blacker than my mom had ever imagined, and yet just as black as she always knew — because she knew that no matter what we wore, how we talked, who we loved, or what we did — we were black and we were beautiful. But she didn’t know my blackness would be like this.

It was a bit disconcerting for her at first, to see that my blackness was outside of her preconceived notions. It was hard for her to see that my blackness was so complete that I couldn’t take her with me. She didn’t understand my conversations anymore, and she didn’t understand why my blackness wasn’t bringing more blackness into her life.

“I mean, I think I know what it’s like to be black,” she said to me once.

“No, you don’t,” I emphatically replied.

“But . . . I raised you,” she argued.

“So you know what it’s like to be a white woman who raised black kids,” I replied, “But mom, you are not black, and will never know what that’s like.”

I started speaking up and speaking out, I stopped compromising, and suddenly — I was myself. And it turns out I’m black. Hella black.
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She paused for a minute and then tearfully asked, “How come you never identify as white, too? I mean, you’re half white.”

I was flabbergasted. Here was the woman who had spent our entire lives telling my siblings and I that we were black — black black blackety black — and she wanted to know why we didn’t identify as white?

But I knew what she was asking — she was asking where she belonged, she was asking what part of our life and our culture she could share. She was asking what part of her legacy lived on in us. My mom loved our blackness because she loved us, and now that love had put our very identity out of her reach.

“I’m going to call your brother to see if he feels the same way,” she said. But I knew that she’d have no luck. My brother is hella black too.

And now, with these openly and proudly black children, my white mother is trying to find her way. She’s asking questions that she didn’t know she had to ask, she’s reading all my articles, she’s attending lectures. She’s identifying as white in a way that she didn’t think she had to, and she’s identifying as a white ally to black people, a white mother to black children.

“You’ve done all this on your own,” my mom guiltily told me last year, “I don’t know if I have a right to be proud.”

But I have black friends who were raised by white parents who tried to erase their blackness, who raised them to “not see color,” and they grew up feeling unseen and unloved and they are scarred and hurt to this day. My mom has every right to be proud.

I took my mom out for drinks a few weeks ago, and after about 1.5 drinks (my mom’s a notorious lightweight), she got all sentimental.

“I see what you do. I see you now. I see how hard you fight. I won’t ever know what it’s like to be black, to see the news and know that the people being killed by cops could be you and that breaks my heart. But I’m angry, I’m so damn angry and I just want you to know that I will fight and I’m not going to be a white lady who just thinks that things are okay anymore. I’m just so damn proud of you.”

And as my mom was drunkenly crying and pounding her fist on the table in a mix of love and outrage, I rolled my eyes like I have countless times my entire life.

Because that’s what you do when your mom loves you and she’s not afraid to show it.

flickr/Julien Ducenne

By Tracey Lloyd

Every year, the men in my neighborhood go out of their way to wish me a happy Mother’s Day. All the men. I suppose they assume that a woman my age would automatically have children. Either that, or they don’t want to miss an opportunity to honor the role of motherhood and all it represents. Yet interestingly, this never happened to me before I moved into a predominantly Black neighborhood.

When this happens, I just say “thank you” and keep on moving — but the well-intentioned pleasantry is hard for me to digest, every time.

One reason is that my own mother died over 20 years ago and I miss her every day; the other is that at 43, I have no children and no plans to procreate. And in the face of the myriad Black men looking to commemorate motherhood every year, I feel like I’m letting down my race.

Like many women my age, I grew up believing that I’d eventually have children. I took care of my baby dolls and rocked them to sleep, dreaming of the day I’d get to do it for real. But when I got older and there were real babies in my family, I was afraid to interact with them. My family, which is quite large, said that I’d get over my fear once I had my own children.

My grandparents had 14 children and raised nine, so the expectation was set that I’d follow in their parental footsteps. We’d talk about how my grandparents were sharecroppers and had children to help work the land, and also about how they were expected to have children to make for them a better life than they had. My grandmother plowed field side by side with her husband, ran the home, and did jobs for white women in order to make a life for her family. That model of womanhood — a woman who supports the home and simultaneously raises children — is a standard in my family, and in Black culture in general.

From the time of slave narratives, Black women have been depicted as stalwart workers and sacrificing mothers who did everything they could to protect their children. These depictions have also made their way into popular culture; in Toni Morrison’s classic novel Beloved, for instance, the main character makes the ultimate sacrifice of killing her baby to protect her from slavery. The recent TV drama Underground features Ernestine, a female slave who bears the attentions of the master in order to protect her children from hard work and mistreatment. Black mothers who are this bold and this sacrificing are depicted as the pinnacle of womanhood.

I will never have the chance to exhibit these qualities.

By adulthood, I’d absorbed my family’s preference toward parenthood. In my twenties, I’d assumed that I’d marry relatively young and have children thereafter. In my thirties, still single, I’d maintained that although I could be a single mother, I would wait to have kids until I had a husband.

Then I was diagnosed with bipolar disorder.

Managing my disease is its own full-time job. Though I’ve been treating my bipolar since 2009, I’ve been in the hospital three separate times. In between those hospital stays, my bouts of depression have lasted for years on end. In truth, I’ve only recently become a productive and well-adjusted person since my last struggle with depression. I’ll be 44 this year, near the end of my child-bearing years. I’ve considered what it would take to have a baby at this point in my life: either going off my medications (to personally disastrous results), or carrying a baby and exposing it to drugs with effects on pregnant women that are currently unknown. Neither of these options are palatable to me.

Maybe a woman with closer connections to her motherhood potential wouldn’t see those options as too difficult. After all, I did date a man who would’ve been willing to have a baby with me, even while I took four different medications. He reasoned that parenthood meant taking care of a baby regardless of how it turned out. That man turned out to be wrong for me — and not just because I didn’t share his willingness to risk a child’s well-being with psychotropic drugs.

I spend enough time trying to take care of myself, monitoring my symptoms and charting my moods. Preventing bipolar relapse and another trip to the psych ward are at the top of my list of priorities. They have to be. Even if I had a child, I wouldn’t be able to put it ahead of myself because if I’m not well, I can’t take care of anyone else. Being a mother means selflessness, at least the way I understand it, and I need to be selfish.

So childless I’ll remain — and as such, fretful about not being a good Black woman.

My clear decision not to have children is at odds with what I feel I’m supposed to provide to my race. I’m a rare Black person. I grew up with married parents. I went to an Ivy League college. I have a master’s degree. I’ve earned as much as $160,000 a year as a marketing professional. People like me are supposedly a credit to Black people, a shining example of success and a role model for future generations. People like me are supposed to raise smart, well-balanced children to continue a legacy of success and benefit all African-Americans. Instead, I’m keeping my genes from future generations like the selfish woman that I am.

At the same time, the feminist in me is quite okay with not being a mother. I studied women’s studies in college, and I learned that being a feminist was all about wanting women to be whatever we wanted to be. Images of burning bras and marching in support of the ERA resonated well with my personal and professional goals. And the second wave feminism that I grew up on was very grounded in breaking women out of traditional roles, like motherhood. With these theories and role models, I believed I could be a good and appropriate woman no matter what role I chose in life.

The Black Power and Civil Rights Movement images I saw were less kind to my lukewarm feelings toward motherhood. Like good feminists, Black women were marching side-by-side with men in the fight for racial equality. But these Black women were also expected to add motherhood to their list of tools in the struggle. I’ve seen footage of the Black Panther Party in which the women continued to have and raise multiple children, all the while working for the “revolution.” Their motherhood was seen as supporting the movement, growing the community by literally creating a new generation of soldiers to take up the struggle.

Even now, my childlessness flies in the face of the needs of my community to grow and take up the fight for equality. The contemporary Black Lives Matter movement and splinter movements have been spearheaded by mothers; women who have been spurred to action by the death and mistreatment of their children. And while I support that movement, I will never know the deep and meaningful mother-child connection that many of its women experience.

But there’s nothing I can do about my feelings of inadequacy besides hold fast to my well-reasoned decision not to have kids. I’ll have to talk about this decision with every man I date, and keep justifying it to my family that craves a new generation.

I can probably handle all of that more than I could a baby. And to me, that’s really the point.

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]]> https://theestablishment.co/becoming-a-mother-reinforced-why-im-pro-choice-63602256fb53/ Thu, 18 Feb 2016 16:42:31 +0000 https://theestablishment.co/?p=1731 Read more]]> I am a better parent because I chose to become a parent.

When I was eight months pregnant, I chanced upon a pro-choice rally in downtown Seattle. A small group was blocking traffic, holding signs depicting women who had died because they lacked access to safe abortion services. I was hot and grumpy and desperately craving a cupcake, but I had to stop. A few men in the crowd were hurling abuse at the demonstrators, to the tired tune of “Close your legs!” and “Abortion is murder!” I started a campaign of vigorous counter-heckling, loudly asserting my support for abortion rights. Eventually, the cops showed up. I raised my fist in solidarity, applauded, and shouted, “thank you!” to the protesters as they were being led away in handcuffs.

As I turned to go, a guy wearing a shiny purple shirt and a self-satisfied smirk looked me up and down. “Are you really pregnant?” he asked. I was too shocked for a witty comeback; an indignant “Of course!” was all I could manage. “You never know,” he replied. “You could be a plant.”

The guy was clearly a dolt, or trying to provoke me, or both. His bizarre question, however, tidily illustrates a key assumption of the anti-choice movement: that people who are pro-choice are anti-baby. But just because someone believes that people should have the right to end their pregnancies doesn’t mean they’re obliged to get an abortion if they themselves become pregnant. And falling in love with my son — and by extension, babies in general — only further cemented my conviction that abortion should be available on demand, for any reason.

My own pregnancy was unplanned. When two methods of birth control failed to prevent an embryo from taking up residence in my uterus, my life was thrown into chaos. I had a job that I loved, but the exhaustion and hormonal turmoil of early pregnancy made my work suffer. I was no longer in a relationship with the guy who got me pregnant. The long darkness of Seattle winter had set in, but the judicious self-medication that usually prevented me from succumbing to the gooey, grey tentacles of seasonal depression was suddenly unavailable to me.

When I started to think that maybe I might want a baby, and that this might be my only chance — past health issues had indicated infertility — I agonized over the moral and practical implications of continuing my pregnancy. I made an appointment to get an abortion. Then I canceled the appointment. I talked to my friends, my parents, my co-workers, and the embryo’s father. I cried a lot. In the end, despite the inauspicious timing and my prior conviction that I would never parent biological children, I decided to accept the curveball the universe had thrown me and become a mother.

As I became ever more pregnant, crushing fatigue and depression gave way to sciatica, searing heartburn, intense pelvic pain, and unremitting commentary and conjecture from friends and strangers alike. I was excited when I started to feel the gentle flutters of my fetus moving; when he grew to be the size of a house cat, kicking the shit out of my ribs and jabbing at my cervix, it wasn’t so cute. I felt ungainly and awkward and vulnerable. And despite my weirdly confident attitude toward giving birth, I was quickly disabused of the notion that my high pain tolerance and self-perceived toughness would be of help: Labor was the most excruciating experience of my life.

I made an appointment to get an abortion. Then I canceled the appointment.
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In spite of all that, experiencing pregnancy and birth enriched my life. I even look back on it (parts of it, at least) with fondness. I know my ability to weather the rigors of pregnancy and motherhood has been a direct result of the fact that abortion was a readily accessible option. I had chosen to grow a human inside of me, fully aware that my choice would result in serious discomfort and changes to my body.

Each day that I spend caring for my child rather than pursuing my pre-baby interests and dreams, wistful “what-ifs” and nascent resentments quickly evaporate when I remember that I freely chose this path. I am a better parent because I chose to become a parent. What’s more, I feel that it was a goodchoice: I have a loving family, loyal friends, and a supportive co-parent in my baby’s father. I have enough money to care for my child, stable housing, and, thanks to Medicaid, health care for me and my son. If my circumstances hadn’t been so favorable, I might have chosen differently. And had carrying a baby to term been anything other than a carefully considered act of personal agency, I suspect that the suffering would outweigh the joy.

The understanding that no one should have to undergo the pain, the loss of bodily autonomy, and the extreme change in circumstances inherent in pregnancy, birth, and parenthood against their will has always been at the basis of my pro-choice convictions. But having a baby — experiencing a love of previously unimaginable intensity — added another, very personal, dimension to my beliefs.

I Had An Abortion Because I Love My Son
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Never having been a “baby person,” I considered myself immune to the charms of what I saw as drooling, squawking poop machines, and was concerned that I wouldn’t feel a connection with mine. I needn’t have worried: When I held my son to my breast, his perfection, and my love for him, struck me with brain-scrambling force. Inextricable from this epiphany was a tremendous heaviness, a sickening awareness of his vulnerability. I saw how easy it would be to harm him, how desperately dependent he was. I recalled every baby-related horror story I’d ever heard, and my fierce drive to protect and nurture my own baby was matched by grief for all of the equally valuable little ones who aren’t so lucky. And I knew — knew — that for a baby to come into the world unwanted and uncared-for is a grievous wrong.

The preciousness of babies is a constant refrain in anti-abortion rhetoric — but the focus is almost entirely on making sure they’re born. When holding forth on the value of human life, anti-choice activists largely ignore domestic violence and child abuse, and access to health care and education. Most importantly, the staggering inequality that consigns many young people to lives drastically lacking in opportunity. The politicians who pander to this demographic by opposing safe, legal abortion are busy cutting the programs and services that help to ensure that all babies can thrive. For the anti-abortion movement, the quality of the life they purport to hold sacred is a non-issue.

The claim that an immature fetus with an extremely limited range of experience and sensation is morally equivalent to a breathing, crying, cooing human infant had always struck me as disingenuous.

The politicians who oppose safe, legal abortion are busy cutting the programs and services that help to ensure that all babies can thrive.
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But now that I have a baby, it seems nothing short of outrageous.

The idea that life must be preserved as a good in of itself, no matter what the cost — that even the greatest life suffering imaginable is preferable to death, is similarly offensive. A fetus is not a baby. And for a completely innocent being that lacks self-awareness — whose only reality is immediate sensation, and who absolutely requires constant, gentle attention — neglect and abuse is much worse than non-existence.

Of course, access to abortion does not preclude every instance of child abuse and neglect. People who want to become parents sometimes hurt their children and people who don’t want to become parents often turn out to be competent and loving caregivers. But bringing a new person into the world sensitized me to the extreme value and fragility of infants, to the incredible degree of sacrifice, patience, and work required to raise a child with the gentleness that they deserve.

I already knew that legal abortion is essential to women’s health, autonomy, and dignity. Having a baby convinced me that it can also promote the sanctity of life.