Crooked Brain｜Mimiana: As a woman, I am drifting away from the concept of “mother”

This article is a Mother's Day review article I wrote for Wai Nao. The original link is: "As a woman, I am gradually drifting away from the concept of "mother"" . I wish all mothers a happy holiday!

One of my most profound feelings about my mother turned out to be a certain "loss".

When I was a child, a kind of kindergarten service called "full day care" was popular. Children stayed in the kindergarten from Monday to Friday, and were only taken home by their parents on weekends. Although this is very convenient for young parents who are still working, it is a torment for their children. It is difficult for kindergarten teachers to replace the affection that parents can give to their children, so I still remember the moments when I was treated roughly and ignored by them, and I often felt anxious about being abandoned by my parents.

I never felt like my mom "enjoyed" her motherhood

The period from my birth to my childhood coincided with the 1980s and 1990s when China's market economy was accelerating after its reform and opening up. Parents in their prime are catching up with the rising tide of the times. My father went to the coast to work hard and was away from home for several years. It was my mother who took me through elementary school alone. She went to work during the day, picked me up in the afternoon and went to night school to study for a college diploma. She often didn't have time to eat together, so she just put the prepared meals on the table, set an alarm clock, and told me to do my homework after eating. , watch TV, and go to bed after hearing the alarm clock. By the time she came home late at night from class, I had already fallen asleep. After I entered the upper grades of elementary school, I could ride a bicycle back and forth for half an hour every day.

My mother was sent to the countryside during the Cultural Revolution and became an educated youth. She spent her years of poverty and hardship as a young girl. Later, she went to medical school and worked as a pediatrician in a small county in the mountains. She was already 27 years old when she got pregnant with me, which was considered a late pregnancy at that time, but she also bluntly told me that she had planned to "abort" me because she wanted to go back to work in the city and was worried that the child would be a drag on her.

When I was in high school, my mother casually mentioned that she had aborted a child. The family planning policy just gave women like her the power to resist the patriarchal tradition. It objectively promoted the rise of a generation of urban elite women, but it came at the expense of the blood and tears of countless more vulnerable women. Frankly, I can't imagine if my mom would have been able to finish college if she had had more kids, and if I would have had the resources to study abroad when I grew up. The fate of some women is very different from that of others.

My mother is a well-deserved progressive woman. She is so motivated and always wants to be at the forefront of the times. After returning to the city, she not only finished college while working, but also learned to drive in an era when private cars were not common and few women drove. She also learned how to work on a computer before computers were popular. She even taught me to use Word to write. She relied on her "progress" to keep her job during the wave of layoffs that swept across the country in the late 1990s.

I never felt that my mother "enjoyed" her motherhood or was passionate about it. Most of the time, she gave me the impression that she was just trying to get by. In the child-rearing process when she was unable to get help from the older generation, she never hesitated to use market means to share her mothering duties.

The family invited "aunties" intermittently. Especially when I was in middle school, in order to help me eat better and "prepare for the college entrance examination", my mother changed several aunts before finally finding the one she was satisfied with. She came to the house every day to clean, cook, and cook for me. Drink crucian carp soup. The aunts also have families and children of their own, but they sell their labor to take care of other people's children. I still remember the first aunt who came to my family. She had just come out of the countryside and was much younger than I am now. She had not even received any professional training in the era when there were no domestic companies. She lied about her ability to use household appliances to get the job, but was severely reprimanded by her mother when she revealed her secret.

My mother didn't care about raising me to be a good wife and mother. She never asked me to help with housework. All she expected from me was to study hard. Her "maternal love" has certain Chinese characteristics - not intensive emotional investment, but infinite respect for education. Although it is not as good as the "chicken baby" trend that later emerged, looking at it from a Western perspective today, this kind of Chinese-style parenting with "high standards and strict requirements" has always made me deeply doubtful of maternal love. ——I think my mother’s love for me is conditional. But I am one of the lucky ones after all. Many young people around me first tasted the toxicity of patriarchy from the trauma of their families of origin: the result of instrumentalized reproduction must be instrumentalized children - they feel I am just a tool of my parents.

Putting aside a certain lack of emotion, my mother’s progress and independence as a female elder profoundly shaped me, and the class advantages she accumulated time and time again in the two-way choices with the times became the basis for me to further break away from the patriarchy (even in the The “privilege” one has when coming and going freely within and outside patriarchy). The more I encounter the cruelty of reality and the more I realize this privilege, the more I understand the way she loves.

As a woman, I am moving away from “motherhood” on every level

Mom walked out of her mountain, but I walked further than her. When I left my family and job to study in the United States, we had a brief conflict, but soon the progressive background brought us back to the same context. Looking back on my escape from motherhood, it felt more like part of what I left behind when I fled the violence of a larger patriarchal society, along with gender and sexual orientation discrimination, socialization, involution, censorship, ultra-nationalism, and control-freak generalism. The government of… Motherhood is not that “ultimate oppression” that exists in its own right, but is a part of the patriarchy as a whole that isn’t even that bad.

Now I have lived in Western society for nearly six years. I do have a lot of happiness outside of motherhood, such as free writing, rich social and entertainment life, public value contributed by actively participating in public issues, contact with nature, Travel around the world, have more room to choose a job you like, and not be burdened by your livelihood...

But as my childbearing years came to an end, the anxiety of becoming a mother came back to me. I began to wonder if maybe I would never truly understand my mother.

After my life path has branched off too long and too far, I may not be able to "give birth" to become a "mother" so that I can meet her again, fight the battles she fought, and gain all the secret pains and achievements. .

This may not be a pity in contemporary times, especially as someone who came into contact with feminism earlier than the general public. I have long been completely disenchanted with the "motherhood myth" and am familiar with the social structure, culture and discourse on which patriarchy relies. Women's physical, emotional, and social roles are firmly controlled within the family, allowing them to engage in free labor throughout their lives in the name of wives and mothers from which they cannot withdraw.

Free labor – in feminist discourse, this is key to understanding the exploitative nature of motherhood for women. While people praise the greatness of mothers, they often look down on housewives because "motherhood is endowed with extremely high moral value, but very low economic and social value." (Xiao Suowei, "Motherhood Crisis under the Epidemic " 1: “Mother’s plight amplified by home quarantine” )

This mainly constrains women in two aspects: First, under the moral abduction, fulfilling the duties of wives and mothers has become a natural obligation for women, and it also makes them blame themselves for never doing a good enough job. Second, economically, labor that cannot accumulate capital causes women to lack bargaining rights and autonomy, making them more dependent on their families and men.

After the myth of motherhood was completely deconstructed by feminism, motherhood not only lost its noble halo, but was also revealed as the ultimate oppression of women and was resisted by feminists. "Anti-marriage and anti-childbirth" has become one of the main topics of the pan-feminist community active on social media. When activism dedicated to improving society has become a thing of the past, passive resistance that refuses to cooperate has become the mainstream. Women with resource and class advantages are better able to escape from patriarchal control mentally and materially, but at the same time they have lost the ability to interact with disadvantaged women. Empathy. Pan-feminists’ hatred of patriarchy often extends to women who have children, and they are considered conservative forces and accomplices in oppression.

Even people like me who can reflect on their own privileges and do not hold negative assumptions about women who marry and have children rarely pay attention to the experience of childbirth. I unconsciously attributed these experiences to the private experiences of some “special groups” rather than to universal public experiences and public discussions capable of widespread participation.

British novelist Rachel Cusk said in her work "Becoming a Mother": "The birth of a child not only distinguishes women from men, but also distinguishes women from women."

I found myself, as a woman, moving away from “mother” on every level. Far away from the concept of mother, mother's affairs, mother's group, and even mother as an individual - after the epidemic, I have not seen my parents in China for three years. Moreover, I have long since stepped out of my mother’s range of life experience, and she no longer has life experience “worth sharing.”

Motherhood divides us. Most of the women my age have already given birth, and there is a huge, unspeakable difference buried in the "premises" between my daily life and theirs. My circle of friends is always filled with new young "juniors" who I have met, but it is often difficult for them to connect with my life experience. After being freed from the shackles of "what time to do what", I feel like I have become a person outside the generation.

Losing that connection made me feel lonely, both as a feminist, as a woman, and as a human being, and I realized that they didn’t need me, but I needed them.

After all, pure individual freedom is not an end. The value of freedom lies in our right to choose and pursue important things. The more freedom I have, the more inclined I am to believe that women have autonomy and agency over reproduction, rather than being completely subject to the construction and kidnapping of patriarchy.

Are we still looking for the parts of our mother that cannot be deconstructed?

Indeed, qualified women can avoid exploitation as much as possible by not participating in the gender division of labor, but that also means that it is difficult for us to practice our will and obtain our needs. As Lu Pin said: "Many women can only suffer in a victimized way. Women who are "involved in this society" but exist entirely as passive "victims" may only exist in the theoretical model of feminism. This makes me want to step away from the posture of a bystander and enter the world of mothers with a feminist perspective, to witness and even experience the complex interface between them as individual women and the patriarchy, and even struggle.

Beyond that, setting aside my search for a “holistic solution to liberating women,” I no longer expect feminism to provide me with all the answers about motherhood. The closer I get to my mother, the more I can see the unbearable details and all the broken disharmony under the label of mother; but the further away I get, the mother turns into a whole, abstract image - always re-evaluated. Fuel my desire.

Are we still looking for the parts of mothers that cannot be deconstructed, such as "unconditional love"? When I am tired of constantly making transactions in this capitalist world, looking for the recognition of others and the value of being "useful to society" ; Or when I have to endure loneliness in order to pursue independence and freedom, I miss my mother and still project my imagination of the ultimate human connection to my mother, and I am willing to show all my vulnerabilities for this connection.

Becoming a mother will never “comply with the principle of instrumental rationality and fail to pass the cost-benefit calculation of worldly interests” (Huang Weizi, “Is it possible for us to imagine a feminist motherhood” ). Motherhood will always be a Trading at a loss. At this point, mother has always been a warrior against the world. Although I admit that warriors are sometimes portrayed as brave and sometimes as cannon fodder.

As Xiao Suowei said:

The practice of motherhood highlights the fact that people are interdependent, interdependent and even entangled. As a caregiver, you have to consider, make decisions, serve, be responsible, compromise, etc. for another individual. The caregiver must understand the needs and thoughts of the person being fostered, put aside the ego, and gain satisfaction and pleasure from the growth and achievements of others. This other-directed action (colloquially known as "love") and the ability to connect with others are prerequisites for good care. This is actually a kind of in-depth reflection and even challenge to individual subjectivity by neoliberalism. This is what I think is the “liberating” aspect of motherhood in contemporary society.

(Xiao Suowei, "Motherhood Crisis under the Epidemic 1: "Mother's Dilemma Amplified by Home Isolation" )

Therefore, my perception of motherhood, and my anxiety about whether to become a mother, are always torn between these two contradictory emotions. As we liberate mother narratives from patriarchal hijacking, how do we relocate mothers’ experiences? And amid the constant construction and deconstruction of motherhood, how do we rebuild our connection with our mothers?

I don’t have the answer, but I am grateful to my mother for practicing motherhood, which makes motherhood more like her. In the past two years, she has stopped asking me about any matters related to marriage, love or childbirth. For me personally, when I don’t feel complicated external pressure, this issue has become more pure. I was ready to talk to her about everything about becoming a mother.