Column | Complaining mothers – NRC

A year ago I participated in an evening in a room about motherhood. From the stage I saw a writer (and the mother of slightly larger children) sigh and support in the audience. A while later she said in an interview about that evening that « many mothers were complaining. »

I found that very unkind, but now, a year later, I unfortunately start recognizing something in her story.

I asked Ianthe Mosselman, author of the memoir All that love and angera revolutionary book about the mix of rownia and tenderness that you can overwhelm if you are just a mother, where my sudden slight fatigue when seeing young, aging mothers comes from. Ianthe had thought about that. She reasoned as follows:

If the anger for your lost life and the intimidating ideas about motherhood are often, that is often because your children simply get a little bigger. You leave the battlefield of the sleepless, read another book, pick up your career and find the time to have long conversations with your loved ones. But, you also lose some of your involvement in all the injustice that young mothers receive. The battle for (promised us!) Free childcare no longer makes sense for you, because all your children go to school. You no longer have to fight breastfeeding in public spaces.

Moreover, if you are in the middle of the first years, you have no energy at all to convert your frustration to, for example, too short parental leave into an actual lobby. In other words: you walk in a more comfortable period, in order to no longer be able to bring it to you to commit to the good store.

I also want to add to this reasoning that the well -intended but annoying remark, ‘it will be better, really’, is not digesting for a fresh mother, but, I now know my youngest is almost going to primary school, it is where. If I had realized that a little more, nauseous and pregnant, with two young children with a high fever and a man who was away from home for days, I might have bleed a little less voicemail full. Anyway, someone who drowns has nothing to do with reassuring words.

And so too little changes. I think that a government is also aware of that: a mother with a chronic sleep deprivation is perhaps dangerous on the short track, but unable to work patiently through the thousands of tough layers of the system to tackle – I call something – pregnancy discrimination.

At the same time, we naturally see a lack of solidarity with groups that we have ignored, or groups in whom we do not recognize ourselves in all the ranks of society. That is not crazy in a world that has more and more staircase-or-improved as an adage. Run from that looser vulnerability, as soon as you can.

In an attempt not to get infected with such cold, I will try to continue to write old and gray about those who give birth to children, and thereby sacrifice a lot: freedom, social power and carefreeness, for example.

And all in the hope that one day nobody will be nagging about ‘complaining mothers’.

Sarah Slumber Writes a column every week. She is the author of books, essays and plays.