Monomaternalism

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 It is tempting to see this as an outdated concept – and it is – and yet it remains with us, a shadow cast by our confusion and doubt.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.

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.