Scapegoating Mothers

Lionel Shriver wrote a great piece for the Guardian about the scapegoating of mothers after tragedies like the one in Connecticut earlier this month:

"Nevertheless, Nancy Lanza has been disparaged from the start. Multiple stories have pegged her as a "prepper" – a survivalist gearing up for economic collapse by stocking weapons and tinned food. Yet this gonzo tag hails from a single, biased source, Nancy's sister-in-law, and has since been contradicted by friends. An acquaintance said she seemed "high-strung" – an opaque and prospectively neutral adjective that went viral, repeated to insinuate that the mother herself might have been unbalanced. And tut-tut: she never seemed eager to invite neighbours into her home."

She also touches on the blaming -- and demonizing -- of mental illness, particularly Asperger's syndrome, which the shooter has been purported to have:

"Sandy Hook has been the most misreported story in recent memory, but a few facts may have emerged. To date, authorities have not located any confirmed diagnosis for Adam Lanza. Relatives and former classmates say he had Asperger's syndrome, but this mild form of autism has no correlation with violence. The boy is described as anything but menacing – rather, as withdrawn, antisocial, even "meek", according to an official at his high school, who explained that Adam was only assigned a psychologist because a scrawny, cringing loner might be tormented by peers."

I'm glad she mentioned that there is no correlation between autism spectrum disorders and violent behavior. The news media has been neglecting this fact, and it's feeding the narrative that something organic in Lanza's brain"made him" kill over twenty people. As for  blaming Lanza's mother, or at least holding her partly responsible, I'm torn. It's wrong -- and all too easy -- to fault the mother, but I can't understand why someone would keep assault-style weapons in her house in the first place.

The myth of the selfish childfree woman

Dodai wrote a great article on being childfree and not necessarily by choice. Unfortunately, the comments devolved into the usual accusations that all single, childfree women live lives unburdened of responsibility , free go wherever, buy whatever and do whatever they want. You know, kind of like Zooey Dechannel in that cotton commercial. I'd like that life. Oh wait, I am that childless woman in her thirties in some sort of suspended adolescence. Something must have happened on the way, something called ADULT RESPONSIBILITY that, by the way, usually does happen with or without a kid.

This comment in particular irked me:

"'no one ever said to me, “Thank you. Thank you for giving the biggest possible gift to the planet by not having a child' 

Yeah, those 940 Saturdays you slept in, all that discretionary income you spent on yourself and your intact vagina make you seem like much more of a giver than selfish ole me who hasn’t had seven hours of consecutive sleep since Dubya was in office. JAZZ HANDS FOR YOU!"

As someone who's been taking care of people for a good chunk of her life, I really take offense at this. I guess caring for elderly relatives isn't as sanctimonious as motherhood.

And even if hadn't -- even if I didn't have a way to justify myself -- so what? So what if I'm "selfish?" I'm hurting no one except maybe a few antediluvian rules about what women are supposed to be. Oh, and isn't having children because you want to have children a patently selfish act? Nothing wrong with that either.

Stop pitting women with children against those without

A few years ago when I was a novice blogger, I was given a link to a parent blogging site. I'm not a parent, nor do I plan on becoming one in the near future, but at the time, the only blogs I knew that were penned by women my age were "mommyblogs." Mine didn't exactly fit the template, obviously, but I was happy to find a gang of progressive-minded women who could write, and some of them even got paid. I wedged myself into their community.

The turning point came during one epic discussion about childless -- or childfree -- women. Being a childfree women in her thirties means usually fielding questions from society at large, but in my small blogging community, I never felt judged for it. So you can image my dismay when one blogger whom I respected declared that "you're not a real woman until you become a mother." Even if you ignore the apparent heterosexism and transphobia in those words, it's still a pretty shitty thing to say. Um, hi, I'm very real.

(Also it should be noted that the panel -- a panel on childfree women -- didn't actually have one childfree woman on it.)

A few years later, on another, even more progressive, site with a cabal of childfree women, the same kind of discussion swelled: this time the commentariat was more evenly split, but the results were unsurprisingly familiar. The mothers were bad feminists who insisted their children be present anywhere and everywhere adults are, and be universally loved for it;  and the women without children were selfish, immature twits who must have had terrible relationships with their own mothers, hence their decision not to reproduce.

Can we stop this?

Fellow childfree women: children are people, not just annoying appendages. You don't have a right to childfree spaces; motherhood is a feminist issue, lest you forget. Mothers: I realize I'm not one of you and have no business criticizing how you raise your children, but not all childfree women live lives of leisure untethered to adult responsibilities. Reasons for not having children differ from woman to woman, and shouldn't be dissected. If not having children is "selfish" in the most literal, non-judgmental sense of the word, so what? Having children simply because you want to have children is also a selfish act.