A Girl, A Mother
Part I: That Time I Was Voted Most Motherly
This is part I in a series of essays about growing up as a Mormon girl and becoming a mother in America.
“‘There is no such thing as a baby,’ the child psychiatrist David Winnicott liked to say. ‘There is a baby and someone.’ The someone he had in mind was the mother.” - from Adrienne Rich’s Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution
“You should have a baby because you are a woman, and women have babies. Otherwise what are you supposed to do? You have been told that you should have a baby because there is a whole dimension of human experience that you are missing out on. When people tell you this, you want to point out that there are infinite dimensions of human experience, and to experience them all would be impossible. You have never been in a tsunami, for example, or had a tapeworm.” - Rhiannon Lucy Cosslett
All of the boys in the room said it was me--out of the girls in the room--who they’d want to be the mother of their children. We were in our early twenties, college students, friends, playing a silly question game. We were Mormon, eager, and mostly virgin. I say mostly because we all knew about the two among us who had actually had sex, and we were young and immature enough to take note of this. The boys didn't choose to kiss me or to be stuck with me on a stranded island--they would choose my sexier or more promiscuous girlfriends--but instead to raise their children.
The unanimity of the boys’ response surprised and flattered me. To be seen as motherly was a compliment for a Mormon girl and woman, since eternal motherhood was the highest level Mormon women could obtain in the highest level of heaven, according to Mormon scripture. Lesser righteous women would become barren angels or missionaries, but not mothers. Eternal motherhood was reserved for the best among us. So to be wanted after courtship, to be wanted forever, to raise generations and generations of spirit babies meant I possessed something far more important than something as trivial as, say, a hot ass.
Why had they all chosen me then? Sure, I often initiated or hosted fun gatherings like this one, hugged a lot, shared food a lot, and had an ability to put people at ease, sometimes at my own expense. I was confident then, knowing little of what little I knew, and decisive, knowing little of other options. Yes, I was full of brazen faith like the Mormon pioneer women I had grown up hearing about, though I imagined myself to be more fashionable than them, presenting myself on dates in ways I believed guys would be attracted to: curled hair, perfumed, makeupped, wearing black because it was slimming, stomach tucked in in an attempt to hide any evidence of fat on my body. I dressed modestly, had a wide waist and big boobs, a healthy, regular period since I was twelve–a cozy, comfy, evolutionarily-primed-for-motherhood body, though I rarely felt comfortable in it like most girls I knew.
I had grown up as the oldest daughter in a house of six kids, so I learned how to be frugal, how to babysit, how to clean, how to figure things out on my own, my parents often encouraging me to while they busied themselves with younger siblings. Since I was little, I had dreamed of growing up so I could grocery shop and pick my own food like Reese’s Puffs. I was also honest, chaste, a tad naive, reliable, hard working, obedient to what I believed then was a male God who always knew more than I did–was this our shared understanding of what it meant to be deemed motherly?
I always believed I’d be a mother, and I cannot remember not believing this or being unaware of this belief. When people asked me as a child what I wanted to do or be, mother was my definitive answer, though occasionally I would also say teacher, like the ones I saw at school. But teaching was like mothering as I understood and recognized even then. I used to gather my stuffed animals or my younger siblings and teach them songs and rhymes and their ABC’s, pointing to papers taped on living room walls or couches, papers scribbled with rules and instructions, sending unruly animals or siblings into the timeout corner. “You can only come back when you’re ready to behave!”
For a brief moment, I would also sometimes say I wanted to be an ice skater–I had been watching the winter olympics–even though I was a gymnast like my mom was as a child. I had seen a black and white picture of my mom as a fourteen-year-old on a beam once in a handstand with her muscularly carved legs in perfectly straight splits and pointed toes, a flexibility and form I was amazed by and also knew I did not possess, a comparative sentiment I carried with me later in life, for instance, when I became a mother. I would eventually quit gymnastics after every ounce of passion for it died out in me, reluctantly completing my last season at the age of ten to take up basketball instead. My parents made us involve ourselves in at least one sport. I’d play basketball for the rest of my at-home life, all the way up and through high school because I liked the wildness of it, the way we sprinted down the court together like a pack of feral wolves, scavenging for the loose ball, jumping and snarling and tugging for a rebound, me often ripping the ball up and out of the enemy pack with bruised arms and legs.
My oldest two daughters, Lydia, aged nine, and Eleanor, eight, have never explicitly answered the question, “What do you want to do or be?” with my answer. Instead, with consistency over the years, Lydia still wants to become a marine biologist like her favorite Octonauts, and has dared to explore which colleges have the best marine biology programs because I asked her once if where she claimed she wanted to go to college–my alma mater, BYU–had a good marine biology program, which she didn’t know. She also said this afternoon that she wants to live by the ocean so she can read a book and sip a piña colada while listening to the waves. Eleanor currently wants to be a veterinarian or a zookeeper, but before that she wanted to be a chef/restaurant owner of a specifically fox restaurant, where real foxes roam, and where items on the menu consist of favorite fox and human foods. A few years ago, she described in detail her restaurant and menu ideas while I wrote them down because she was still learning how to write and spell. I tried looking for her old notebook just now, but couldn’t find it. I do remember that the restaurant ceiling was a light blue with white clouds and the walls were painted green with forest trees, not unlike her bedroom walls are now, which she chose and designed herself. She told me many times then that family, including me, would get to eat at her restaurant for free, to which I responded, “Every meal???” and she said, “Every meal,” and we hugged. I don’t know how long Eleanor’s fox obsession will last, but I want it to stick with her forever. Already, she has sometimes forgotten to sleep with her Foxy—a stuffed animal she got in her stocking when she was one but didn’t start appreciating until a few years later—something that would never happen just last year.
My daughters’ answers fascinate me for many reasons, three of which are the following:
1. How a stuffed animal gift could inspire a vision for an inventive, genre-bending restaurant.
2. How accidentally playing a children’s Netflix show about creatures, some of which are marine creatures, who study marine creatures could become the catalyst for an entire vocation.
3. How I don’t recall ever seriously thinking about a career with paid income as a child because I was that zeroed in on becoming a mother and a “stay-at-home” one. And mothers, at least in the U.S., aren’t paid for mothering.
In youth church lessons, if we were to learn about faith or other Mormon virtues, there was reliably a discussion of how these qualities mattered not only in the here and now as a member of God’s youth army, but also how these qualities would matter later in our lives as wives, which was another word for inevitable mother as I understood it, the two words often grouped together as if they were the same thing. Standing as a witness to the world meant something particular to young Mormon girls growing up in the 1990s who were taught like their great-great-great grandmothers that a woman’s earthly role was to bear and nurture children and to be a particular example of Christ to these children. If our children as primordial spirits were not witnessing us from the heavens, they were witnessing us later in our homes, all day long, once they came to earth.
Sharon Hays writes that this idea that mothers should be moral exemplars for their children in the home didn’t always exist, though it became prominent among white Christian women in the nineteenth century in the U.S., long before I or my mother stepped inside a Mormon church. Historians refer to this particular idea of motherhood as “the cult of true womanhood”, a value system that defined “true” femininity, where women were to become mothers and the center and light of home life, embodying virtues such as piety, purity, domesticity, and submissiveness. Pamphlets informed mothers that “‘every irritable feeling should … be restrained,’ because everything a mother did or did not do would stay with their child ‘eternally.’”1
This was a belief system intended to apply to all women, though it could only be practiced by upper and middle class white mothers who were married with partners or family with enough money. BIWOC mothers, women without children, unmarried women, women who were not labeled women at birth were not considered true women because of prejudice and/or because they more likely than not had to work outside of the home to survive, sometimes watching other women’s children, and cleaning other women’s homes.
Discussions about children and becoming a good enough mother took place before I ever received my first period. My twelve-year-old journal is often addressed to a future child who I assumed would be a daughter like I was. Many entries are signed with “I love you already *heart* *heart* *heart*”. As a child approaching adolescence and just beginning to face my own heightened emotions and wishes and thoughts in my private journal, I was also imagining future children I did not yet have watching me. There is a performative nature to all of my journals because of this, and after I read my childhood and teenage journals last year for a therapy assignment, I lay down on the couch, gloomy and sad. Where was the evidence that I was ever just me?
In rare, glittering moments, however, my young journaling self dips below the surface of optimistically reporting events to reveal a deeper vulnerability, rage, wish, or doubt. But just as quickly, she comes back up for air, to reassure future children that all is well with middle school Mama, and don’t you worry, lil luvs.
In one entry, young me confesses to my imagined daughter that I will never be a horrible mother like I perceived my own mother to be, after scribbling an authentic outburst about my mother NOT LISTENING!!!!! and for BABYING MY LITTLE SISTER!!!!!! which I interpreted to be at my expense. “I HATE HER!!!!!” I wrote about my mom with hard pressed exclamation marks and underlinings. “I HATE HER I HATE HER I HATE HER!!!!!!!!!!!!!!”
Skim to the bottom of the page, though, and you’ll find me composing myself for the kiddos: “But don’t worry, sweetie, I will be a good mom to you.”
I once read this entry to my now fourth grade daughter, Lydia, who laughed much more than she usually laughs. She still refers to this entry after our initial reading, at times opening up more to me about her thoughts and wishes and anger, apparently the hatred for a mother starting to resonate with her, building common ground between us.
When I was seventeen-years-old, after listening to the then president of the LDS Church, Gordon B. Hinkley, I wrote in my spiritual journal,
“I will be a stay-at-home mother. I will never work outside the home.” It was a promise I made to myself and to God.
Some variation of William Ross Wallace’s poem,“The hand that rocks the cradle is the hand that rules the world,” echoed throughout my entire young adult life by church leaders and women leaders and women relatives. Teachings like this made mothering look not only like a righteous choice, but a powerful one, and more powerful than any other power in the world.
“It is hard to speak about mothering,” Sara Ruddick writes in “Maternal Thinking” in 1989. Though written decades ago, the words still apply to mothering and parenting around the world today: “Overwhelmed with greeting card sentiment, we have no realistic language in which to capture the ordinary/extraordinary pleasures and pains of maternal work. War, poverty, and racism twist a mother’s best efforts. These are not sorrows brought on by mothering; they are socially caused and politically remediable.”
I knew women who did not have children like my jazz choir director and math teacher. I knew mothers who worked outside the home. Both of my grandmas had helped provide for their families, my mom’s mom by working graveyard shifts at the hospital so she could mother in the day. My aunts and neighbors and friends’ mothers also worked outside the home for a variety of reasons--divorce, money, disabled spouses, passion, desire--but they were rarely discussed by the people and content in my life and if so, I don’t recall them being discussed in ways I should emulate. Why some women didn't have children or why women needed to work outside the home but I wouldn't have to was never fully articulated to or thought out by me. I knew my jazz choir director, my aunts, my neighbors weren’t bad women. I knew my grandma was not to blame for her husband’s mental and emotional deficiencies that held him back from being able to solely provide as the father of the family in a capitalistic society. (I never considered how my grandpa understood himself as an “insufficient-providing” Mormon father for much of his life either.) And yet, I believed all growing up that if I had faith, I wouldn’t be husbandless, or childless, and if I followed my prompting, which was also an explicit commandment to be a stay-at-home mother, I wouldn't need to work away from my kids. Without acknowledging my complete thoughts or the implications of them, I could avoid condemning these women while also believing in my own exceptionalism that could prevent me from living a life like them. I wanted to be good, or rather, I didn’t want to be bad. To be a good girl, to be a good woman was to be a mother, and a certain kind who worked only at home. This was the way of God and the way of God was always good. I called this righteousness. I called this faith.
Womanhood as motherhood was the oxygen I breathed in from every direction. Every version of motherhood–some versions, I was learning, more moral than others–, every contradiction was rooted in centuries of societal and institutional manipulation of women, but in the end, it was still motherhood I breathed, and any womanhood that was not motherhood was discussed only as a deficiency of motherhood. Not mothering never crossed my mind. With the encouragement of adults I respected and trusted, my own mother and all mothers and supporters of motherhood as an institution, my future as a mother had been decided for me even if I thought motherhood had been decided only by me. I had no understanding of privilege, and little understanding of sexism, gender, classism, capitalism, essentialism, white supremacy, indoctrination, or systemic patriarchy. These experiences and institutions existed, but the articulations and labels of them did not exist in my vocabulary and they certainly did not exist if applied to God or his church, even after I learned the meaning of them.
Only after rearing children would it occur to me that mothering was less about being a noun, “a mother,” and more about acting out a verb, like caretaking, instructing, nurturing, adopting, “conceiving, miscarrying, quickening, carrying, birthing. . . . cleaning, feeding, sleeping, not sleeping, providing, being interrupted, passing back and forth,” as Sarah Knott writes in Mother is a Verb: An Unconventional History. Only after rearing children did I realize mothering as a verb was a little too hard for me to be enjoyed or done well for a whole day, let alone a little too monotonous and frustrating for me to be fulfilled for a lifetime.
But the thing about believing your eternal life is known and decided for you based on your genitalia by a holy, all-knowing, perfect god, is that you often feel bad or wrong if you don’t want what he’s chosen for you, or if you don’t like what he’s chosen enough. You risk facing your own unworthiness or unholiness if you admit your disdain for your role. And you feel awful about it and dwell on it until you feel comfortable lying to yourself about it. This we called “eternal perspective.”
Many people understand maybe not wanting to take on the family business. Many people understand maybe wanting to choose your own career instead, to maybe carve your own path, or change that path when it no longer works for you, say, up to seven times, what’s the average? Look it up. But many people still do not understand or admit how there’s no going back or changing for mothers once they begin mothering, a beautiful experience sometimes, a bland or exacerbating experience other times. There’s no changing majors or careers or companies or bosses or work teams for mothers, unless they leave their kids to die or with someone else who will never be preferred over the centuries-old, patriarchal idea of a good mother. Or, unless mothers murder their kids like every once in a while we read in the news. But even then, they’re still mothers of dead children. Many people will not look the institution of motherhood in modern America in the face, many of whom are mothers themselves, and why would they? The path they or their mothers have chosen or that has been forced upon them has often left mothers more poor, sick, overwhelmed, overworked, exhausted, mentally ill without support or resources–unless they’re lucky or rich or both–than non-mothers. Sometimes mothering has left mothers dead without a voice, dead by suicide or dead in childbirth. Black mothers die in childbirth almost three times more than white mothers today. In the past, dead mothers were sometimes buried two to a grave to obscure the high numbers.
Why would already mothers admit mothering sucks for them, or if not for them, for many other mothers or parents, especially single ones? What’s the point? It’s too late now. And besides, like many mothers before me, I love my children. So why talk about it?
I don’t know, really. Other than my experience matters to me, and maybe I want something better for my kids. For all kids. For any future mother. Jessica Grose calls mothering in today’s America “unsustainable.” How do we change it before we collapse?
Maybe we start by telling the truth about our experiences as mothers.
Maybe the college boys choosing me to be the mother of their children was more a reflection of my rebellious girlfriends who did not seem to the guys as fit for mothering as a verb as I seemed to be, duped into bruising my own body, my own journals and dreams for the team. Though I was flattered then to be seen as good and desirable, I see now how my own fear or obedience or indoctrination, call it what you will, kept me in a worldview so plastic and tight like sealed tupperware, I can feel my airways constrict even now just remembering what it was like to be voted the most motherly girl in a room full of girls.
See Jodi Vandenberg-Dave’s “Modern Motherhood: An American History” qtd in Sharon Hays’ “The Cultural Contradictions of Motherhood”.
`All of the boys in the room said it was me--out of the girls in the room--who they’d want to be the mother of their children. We were in our early twenties, college students, friends, playing a silly question game.`
As a male outside of the Mormon community, this made me incredibly uncomfortable. The idea that I, let alone a group of friends, would vote, let alone publicly with the "options" in the room, for "person I would want to mother my children" is for lack of a better term foreign and weird. Our college experiences were obviously going to be very different, but from a social perspective I didn't think the difference would be so drastic.
I deeply appreciate your unflinching honesty in this essay. So much of it was deeply familiar. And as I attempt to get pregnant now, it’s poignant and important to unpack all the messages I got around mothering. Thank y out for helping me do that.