Tag: Aster Woods

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The Journal of Mother Studies Turns 5 Years Old: 2020 Online


How is everyone? Are you hanging in there? I hope so! This has been an unusual year, on so many levels. 

The MOM Art Annex is in quiet hibernation as well, as we lower our heads, hunker down, and try to survive. At the same time, many of us are raising our voices to call out systemic racism, social problems, and inequities as we identify them.
 
Through it all, submissions to the journal came rolling in as we prepared for our fifth year of digital humanities publications with research papers, book reviews, and some artworks. Thematically, the submissions were on diverse topics.
 
I thought about putting the journal aside this year. But, Patricia English Schneider’s piece on “Mourning Mother” was deeply moving and Olatunbosun Samuel Adekogbe’s submission about “The Cultural Value of Motherhood” in Jimi Solanke’s Music (in Africa), compelled. I thought, perhaps curious scholars need to see this information?
 
Finally, at the last moment, I was contacted by Samantha Kolber whose poetry book titled Birth of a Daughter was recently published by Kelsay Books. A review was quickly organized. There are multiple papers worth exploring here, including Kimberly Hillier and Christopher Greig’s later submission titled Mothering During Covid. So, we organized editors, blind reviewers, and connected them to the distinguished authors represented here.
 
According to the way I see it, we need to support each other, celebrate each other, and keep writing. While this year’s journal is unconventional, it is certainly a powerful read. I’m deeply honored to have been able to contribute to the dissemination of these pieces. It is my sincerest wish that you and your family stay strong and healthy in light and love. [Read JourMS online here].
[Read the full Newsletter here].
 
 Martha Joy Rose

October Art by Aster Woods

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Art Birth Books Education Feminism gender International Internships Queering Parenting

Making Space for More Than One Mother

By Aster Woods

Shelley Park in “Queering Motherhood” discusses her personal experience with being both a birth-giving mother and an adoptive mother in an extended family. She considers her children’s own perspectives on the way in which she mothers them; her adopted daughter in particular is resistant to her claim of motherhood, screaming “You’re not my real mother!” at her through a slammed-shut door. This leads Park to consider:

“ If child’s affective psychology might be queered to allow “room in her mind” for two (or more) mothers.”

Which begs the question, how do children absorb and interact with monomaternalism as it intersects with the heteronormative hegemony? This is the “teleological script – mythological life script” It is the pervasive system of indoctrination to the idea that a nuclear family is the only worthwhile family. It is tempting to see this as an outdated concept – and it is – and yet it remains with us, a shadow cast by our confusion and doubt. This concept of a perfect family is flawed in so many ways; as Park says, it:

“Ignores historical realities of genetic families divided by poverty, war, and slavery. It is further contested by the now common forms of family created by adoption, divorce, and remarriage, and new reproductive technologies such as surrogacy and in vitro fertilization (IVF)”.

Intuition is arguably an infant’s most profound sense of ability. Babies have no other reliable sense, no way of understanding the things they do perceive, but they can intuit accurately and consistently from birth. Furthermore, as a child begins to learn about the world around them, they are devoted to classification and organizing systems; particularly child-friendly systems such as color-coding. Have you noticed the extent to which we classify children’s gender? Before they have any concept of it their clothing, toys, books, games, and TV is telling them exactly what they are and how to behave based on that. This is compounded by what they mirror from the people around them (predominantly parents, although teachers and extended families play a huge role also) their intuition leading their development in a subtle but insidious way toward conformity. The “unlearning” of this comes in fits and starts later and throughout life; girls of 7 or 8 will ritualistically destroy their barbies, disavowing simultaneously their child-ness and their female-ness. Young boys have less permissivity in their experimentation of rejection; in a world where femalehood is seen as defective, a young girl aping boyhood is seen as unproblematic whereas a boy rejecting boyhood is cause for serious concern. The teenage years, with their turbulent uncertainty, are often marked with a return to gender norms which are then re-negotiated in emerging adulthood.

And so, to revisit Park’s question – How to “queer a child’s affective psychology” to refute the heteronormative one-mother fallacy?

From an adopted child’s perspective, these two frameworks are irreconcilable; loyalty to either script requires the child to be disloyal to someone in her life. Hence, as I suggest here, neither script’s notion of a “real” mother is adequate and the adopted child—indeed all children with multiple mothers, including children of divorce and remarriage, children of lesbian partners, and children birthed with the aid of new reproductive technologies and relationships—need to learn to deconstruct the nature/culture dichotomy that gives rise to these notions.

The nature vs nurture debate leads to some difficult ideological areas. One argument supporting genetics and privileging gestation and birth as the only valid path to motherhood, can be uncovered as problematic when you consider the child is a person in their own right, who cannot be owned or controlled unless ethical structures are seriously breached. However, are children blank slates? I don’t believe so. Genetic and epigenetic factors aside, how much do we pass on to our children?
As Uma Narayan (1999) states, perhaps the most ethical form of parenting holds “the virtue of privileging a child’s interests above those of competing parents, treating children more as ends-in-themselves than as objects of property-like disputes between contending parents.”

Furthermore, by rejecting the teleological, monomaternalistic and heteronormative life-script we are able to engage again with other historical and cultural forms of child-rearing, which involve:

“maintain[ing] as many . . . parental connections with adults who wish to maintain these bonds as is . . . feasible in any given case”

And, when done responsibly and ethically, have been proven to be beneficial for the health of all children and adults involved.

Sources:

Park, Shelley M. Mothering Queerly, Queering Motherhood. State University of New York Press, 2013.

Petrella, Serena. 2005. A geneology of serial monogamy. In Geneologies of identity: Interdisciplinary readings on sex and sexuality, eds. Margaret Sönser Breen and Fiona Peters, 169–82.

Narayan, Uma. 1999. Family ties: Rethinking parental claims in the light of surrogacy and custody. In Having and raising children: Unconventional families, hard choices, and the social good, ed. Uma Narayan and Julia J. Bartkowiak, 65–86. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press.

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Education gender health home Internships Medical motherhood Queering Parenting

Accepting Help

By Aster Woods

Can you imagine a scenario that would finally push you over the edge?

Or do you just keep telling yourself you can handle anything?

For people who care for others, hitting rock bottom is often an abstract principle. You do whatever it takes to keep on going. Because what’s the alternative? Really? People you love are counting on you. If you’re exhausted, you have to keep going. If you’re overwhelmed, you have to keep going. If your hands are shaking so badly that you break the plate you’re trying to clean, and then you burst into tears because you’ve failed to clean that plate, and then can’t stop crying, and then go numb and sometime later realize you’re still sitting on the kitchen floor…you stand up and finish the washing up, hands wrinkling in the cold water. Because you have to keep going.

I care for my mother. I need a break, I tell her. She doesn’t understand why; I explain that I’m struggling with my mental health, that I’m tired and stressed all the time. That I have been for a long time and it’s taking a serious toll.

She suggests I try chilling out.

I leave the room and scream into my pillow.

A few days later she hangs up the phone and beams at me. Your sister has agreed to help out while she’s visiting! Anger wells up inside me, hot and dry. Why on earth is it up to her? My sister knows the least about this situation, has no knowledge of how hard it is. Why on earth is she the one to decide if I get to have a break or not? Why does she get to choose when she takes care of our mum, but I don’t?

I know this is supposed to be a good thing. But panic overwhelms me. I have been resenting my caregiving but I can’t let it go. I have held it too tightly for too long. It’s who I am. Can I trust my sister to do it right? Is she going to mess up my carefully organized systems, making more work for me in the long run?

Or worse. Is she going to tell me that this is all easy, that I have nothing to worry about really, that my stress and frustration and despair and isolation are not valid emotions, but rather a symptom of my weakness and failure?

Why is accepting help so difficult?

Why can’t we put down this toxic burden of control? I want to relinquish this weight of responsibility so badly. I want to be able to move freely within my life. To do things that are only about me. I know that I can be a better person if I manage to do this and that it will mean I take better care of my mum; as people are so fond of telling me.

You can’t pour from an empty cup.

But people are not cups. Filling yourself up again is difficult.

And this is what I think of as the heart of the problem: The stress is the only thing that enables you to get stuff done. The most sustainable option is to remain stressed, like a plane using less fuel to cruise than to land, refuel, and take off again.

Stress gets you out of bed in the morning, gets the kitchen cleaned. I can’t relax while there are the bins to take out; I can’t sleep properly if I’m also listening out for mum’s call for help.

To let go of my stress is to relinquish my responsibility; and that is an impossibility as long as I have people relying on me.

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Art Digital Media Internships Education Feminism gender home motherhood Queering Parenting Sociology

Let’s Talk About Monomaternalism

Explorations and Art by Aster Woods

What is Monomaternalism?

Monomaternalism, as defined by Shelley Park in her 2013 academic work ”Mothering Queerly, Queering Motherhood: Resisting Monomaternalism in Adoptive, Lesbian, Blended, and Polygamous Families” is essentially the pervasive notion that a person can have only one mother; it also privileges the bio-essentialist belief that only the birth mother is real. This notion naturally marginalizes the existence of adoptive parents, lesbian parents, transgender parents, inter-generational parenting (such as a mother-daughter team raising a child,) extended/blended families, and polyamorous families.

Let’s Unpack it!

As Shelley Park explains:

“Monomaternalism, as an ideological doctrine, resides at the intersection of patriarchy (with its insistence that women bear responsibility for biological and social reproduction), heteronormativity (with its insistence that a woman must pair with a man, rather than other women, in order to raise children successfully), capitalism (in its conception of children as private property), and Eurocentrism (in its erasure of polymaternalism in other cultures and historical periods)”

Monomaternalism’s patriarchal ethos has increased the pressure on mothers as they attempt to take care of their new baby within a vacuum, often devoid of support and under an overwhelming amount of pressure. While we are seeing a slow trend towards an even balance of parenting duties within nuclear families, society still has a skewed view of the responsibilities of the mother versus the father. The work being done, intellectually and culturally, to balance family dynamics will need to continue for several decades before a true equilibrium can be achieved.

Additionally, these parental gender roles can replicate in queer couples, with one partner bearing the weight of “motherhood” particularly if that person has physically given birth. Monomaternalism distances the non-birth-giving partner into an unreal and devalued form of parenting much closer to outdated archetypal fatherhood than traditional or contemporary motherhood. Additionally, we see withi8n monomaternalistic views the belief that the child themselves will suffer in a non-traditional environment; that only the straight, middle class, Eurocentric nuclear family is capable of raising a child successfully, and all other forms of child-rearing are to a greater or lesser extent covert forms of abuse. This particular belief is extraordinarily short-sighted as a large proportion of global cultures utilize an extended system of adults in order to raise children. The closed nuclear family is an outdated and relatively short-lived concept, as intergenerational households containing a number of different relationships and structures have been consistently the norm for much of our human history. I am also curious to see if, in the developed western world, we are likely to see a return to this family living structure as economic instability reduces the residential options of young couples, along with our improving healthcare and nutrition extending the average lifespan. It may become more normal for individual households to become communal, intergenerational extended and flexible arrangements, sharing childcare between them, as in other contexts.

Essentialism is a sociological theory that reduces a person to their biology, causing unsupported, widely erroneous claims.

“Antecedently convinced of biological essentialism, the romanticization of the biological mother-child bond shapes one’s phenomenological experiences of biological motherhood; those experiences then become “proof” of the essentialist hypothesis, making it a difficult hypothesis to dislodge.”

i.e. if a person is already convinced of biological motherhood being the only valid form of motherhood, the idealised view of the bond between mother and child forces that person to experience motherhood within that limited parameter (i.e. the biological bond is sacred and mystical) which then “proves” the original hypothesis, making a circular argument that is difficult to break. However, we have, as a society, a wealth of qualitative research and anecdotal evidence that proves that a mother-child bond can be profound to the point of sacredness in fathers and non-biological mothers.

What are just some of the negative consequences it has on families?

Competition among women for maternal status
This is especially prevalent when views differ on childrearing techniques, or best practices. At its most toxic, this can develop into a situation where the child’s autonomy is reduced and they are used as a pawn in a game they cannot understand. This situation can also play out inside a child’s mind, for instance after learning they have been adopted. It can cause significant emotional damage.

The erasure of many women’s childbearing and childrearing labors. 

A lack of attention to the ways in which women might— and sometimes do—mother cooperatively.
Much of the raising of children is devalued as only the biological mother’s input is seen as being true and valid parenting; although every adult who consistently interacts with a child has an influence on their wellbeing and development, this invisible labor is termed “babysitting” even when the adult in question has a societally valid link to the child (for instance, a grandmother or aunt.)

The treatment of children as private property.
This is a capitalist idiom that erases the rights of the child as an independent and autonomous person. Often used as a means of control within the context of punishment.
“I am your mother and you will do what I tell you to.”

The separation of children from mothers (and mothers from children) 

A lack of imagination concerning ways in which laws, policies, and practices could be transformed to better serve both women and children.
If a form of motherhood or parenting is not seen as legitimate it can have impacts far beyond the social; legal practices governing adoption and custody overwhelmingly privilege biological mothers and take little account of non-biological parenting. These have knock-on effects into child protection policies, family preservation policies, social welfare policies, tax incentives, census bureau definitions of family, school policies, hospital policies, employer benefit policies, and (in the case of diasporic families created through transnational adoption or by some other means) even foreign policy.

The maternal grief and guilt often suffered both by those who relinquish custody of their children and those who come to bear full responsibility for them.

Source:

Park, S. M. (2013) Mothering Queerly, Queering Motherhood : Resisting Monomaternalism in Adoptive, Lesbian, Blended, and Polygamous Families. Albany: State University of New York Press.

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Art Blog Featured gender health Internships

Vegetables by Aster Woods

Art and Words by Aster Woods – Aster is caregiver to her mother

03/08/2020 10.32 AM Clean Bedroom
03/08/2020 10.52 AM Find Last Night’s Dinner
03/08/2020 10.55 AM Have Difficult Conversation about Vegetables

I want her to eat vegetables. I want her to eat vegetables so much. I have a Pinterest board full of creative ideas for hiding them, or else making them fun; all are designed for fussy children, not adults. My mum has her sense of taste eroded and warped through too many medications. It tastes metallic, chemical, or burns as if it’s causing an allergic reaction. Almost all foods have turned against her, from vegetables all the way to her beloved chocolate oranges. But it’s the vegetables I care about.

Food tastes bad. I know, I know. But you need vegetables, I say. Your body needs these nutrients, now more than ever. She refuses. She will eat: pasta, cheese, fish fingers, and sausages. But vegetables, I say. You always made me eat my vegetables, as a kid when you were taking care of me and not the other way around. I had to even when I didn’t want to and now it’s payback time. I will meet you halfway, I say. I will blend carrots into cheese sauce on your pasta. I will bake onions into a quiche; you might care about them less if they’re smuggled under bacon, if you don’t have to look them in the eye.
It doesn’t work. I’m dying, she says. Why should I care how much worse I get? There’s no being healthy for me. Healthy is not an option for me. I am and will continue to be unhealthy until I die this year or next year. Any time, really. I am suffering enough. Why can’t I do what I want, now? Why does this have to be harder on me?

I spend half an hour angry, then tearful, then angry again.

I understand. I think. She’s got a point; she knows that eating broccoli now will make no difference to a body already eating itself. I know this too. I know I cannot make her healthy again. But I am selfish. I am still the child, her child. Why can’t she do this for me? Doesn’t she owe me something, don’t all mothers owe their children something? For the sacrifices I have made for her, why can she let me feel I am making a difference? If she were my daughter, and I was her mother, I would force her to eat her vegetables. There is a well-published litany of tactics for this. If you eat your vegetables, you will have ice cream for dessert. You’re not leaving the table until you eat your vegetables. I have neither stick nor carrot for her. There is no treat she can enjoy anymore, no punishment I could inflict worse than her existing suffering.

But I’m not giving up. 

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Feminism gender Internships motherhood Queering Parenting

Meet Our New Intern and #Queering Motherhood:

In our ongoing efforts to bring education and practical knowledge together in a place where we can cooperatively learn and grow, MOM is proud to present the work of our newest intern Aster Woods. Aster hails from the Welsh/English border and is interested in museum curatorship, art, caregiving labor, and the notion of #queering motherhood. She contacted us regarding her interest in creating an online body of work around these topics.

The phrase “queering” something has been widely used to deconstruct normative assumptions about individuals and social expectations. By queering something, we are asking people to reconstruct a known definition of something and complexify it, complicate it, and disentangle it from its strict confines. Often motherhood, and the way in which it is performed, is something people are quick to judge and fast to condemn. Some believe that all mothers should only behave in nice, good, and proper ways. But, women who are mothers, are people first, with all their inherent problems, issues, and challenges. When we apply one universal theme to all people we stop seeing them for who they really are, which in turn makes the individual invisible. Below are some excerpts from the book Queering Motherhood, which Aster is reading as she goes through the next several weeks with us looking at this subject.

Essentialism is a sociological theory that reduces a person to their biology, causing unsupported, widely erroneous claims. From the book Queering Motherhood: “Antecedently convinced of biological essentialism, the romanticization of the biological mother-child bond shapes one’s phenomenological experiences of biological motherhood; those experiences then become “proof” of the essentialist hypothesis, making it a difficult hypothesis to dislodge.”P5

i.e. if a person is already convinced of biological motherhood being the only valid form of motherhood, the idealized view of the bond between mother and child forces that person to experience motherhood within that limited parameter (i.e. the biological bond is sacred and mystical) which then “proves” the original hypothesis, making a circular argument that is difficult to break. However, we have, as a society, a wealth of qualitative research and anecdotal evidence that proves that a mother-child bond can be profound to the point of sacredness in fathers and non-biological mothers.

“we may do psychic harm to children who do not live with their biological mothers, causing children who are adopted or raised by another mother to wonder why their real mother failed to exhibit maternal instinct.”P6

5 Reasons Why You Should Never Ask Queer Parents “Where does your baby come from?”

1. It’s invasive! The journey to queer parenting can be difficult, deeply personal and often unique. Respect boundaries.

2. You wouldn’t ask a straight family that. By asking a queer couple, you perpetuate their “othermess.”

3. You imply that their parentage is not valid or real. Their baby is their baby. End of discussion.

4. It’s disrespectful to the baby, too. As they grow older they will develop their own perspectives on their origins, and it should be up to them what they disclose, and to whom.

5. IT’S NONE OF YOUR BUSINESS! Your life will not be impacted by this knowledge in any way, therefore, you have no right to know. If the parents themselves share with you then that’s their choice. But don’t ever ask!