Motherhood, wrote Adrienne Rich in her groundbreaking 1976 polemic, Of Woman Born, is “the suffering of ambivalence.” A poet and radical feminist, Rich had already had three children— and outlived her husband—by the time she began writing her exploration of what it meant to be a mother. At a time when to publicly admit to dissatisfaction or frustration with motherhood was almost treasonous, Rich insisted that we should recognise its difficulties, as well as joys. For her, it is both about the relationship a woman has to her children and also the institution of motherhood, “which aims at ensuring that potential… shall remain under male control.”
If the possibilities afforded to mothers—especially in the workplace—have progressed since Rich’s day, then new difficulties have emerged. TUC research shows that childcare costs have risen up to seven times faster than wages since 2008. A single parent working full-time spends, on average, 40 per cent of their salary on childcare. For many families, it makes more sense for one parent to leave work; for most, this will be the mother. Increasing numbers of women find themselves taking a career break just as they gain seniority. With maternity pay entitlement still low and take up of shared parental leave stuck below 10 per cent, more and more women thinking about starting a family are calculating the true cost of child-rearing and not liking the result.
Our investment in mothers—their wants and desires; their behaviours and concerns—remains high stakes. Both Sheila Heti’s semi-autobiographical novel Motherhood and Jacqueline Rose’s Mothers: An Essay on Love and Cruelty consider motherhood as a state of being as well as an experience. “Mothers” are a class of people whose status can engender envy, longing, fear or disgust. Rose, a literary scholar and psychoanalyst by training, has long been uncovering aspects of women’s lives that are ordinarily hidden from view. In a 2014 essay she observed: “It’s clear that to be seen by a mother is a mixed blessing.” The darker ingredient in this mix is the burdensome expectations. The whole subject, she writes, “is thick with idealisations.”