I recently added to my archive on antiauthoritarianism and motherhood here. For some reason, my post apparently evoked thoughts of mother regret, or mothers who are “bravely” going against the narrative of the fulfilled and/or self-sacrificing mother by complaining about their kids and/or motherhood on the internet. Childfree women, of course, know that mothers talking about kids and motherhood and otherwise drawing attention to themselves is hardly a brave or novel or even an interesting thing to do, online or anywhere.
Indeed, mothers talking about themselves and their own experience is probably the one thing all mothers feel confident in, whether the conversation is framed in positive or negative terms. Mothers talking about themselves, their kids and motherhood constantly is completely normalized, and yet for some reason, some of us are left with the opposite impression. So let’s throw some cold water on that shit immediately. In reality, that is not the case at all, the motherhood conversation from the perspective of mothers themselves is fucking everywhere, everywhere. If you spend any time around mothers, you will know that mothers talking about themselves is impossible to avoid. Which is not to say that the conversation is ever particularly honest, or reality-based, or useful to anyone except themselves.
So let’s talk about mother regret. In their all-consuming focus on themselves, some mothers have concluded that motherhood including conceiving, gestating, birthing and raising children, and dealing with the state and their children’s fathers as it relates to motherhood, is not entirely in their own self-interest. I don’t wish to repeat their arguments here (seriously, they are everywhere and I will not provide the additional space). One thing I must address, however, is the apparently widespread assumption by “regretful” mothers that their lives would have been so much better had they not had children, and by better obviously I mean more good and less bad. That mothers assume their own lack (of whatever) or overabundance (of whatever) is due to the fact of their children. What is implicit in that assumption is that unmarried and/or childfree women have it so much better than mothers do. Isn’t it?
In the contextless vacuum they obviously occupy, disgruntled mothers almost always assume that, had they not had children, they would’ve somehow (somehow!) become some kind of capitalist royalty, achieving the “top of their class” status in academia, in the workplace and whatnot and that this would’ve been very easy for them to do. Because they are so fucking smart, and so fucking special, you see, mothers would have easily done everything right and somehow achieved the (privileged, unburdened) status of not just normal men but exceptional men, in the top 1%, 10% or even the top half of whatever field. As if that’s so easy to do. Statistics and probability (and fully reality) be damned.
The demonstrable fact that unmarried and/or childfree women have yet to achieve the status of exceptional or unexceptional men does not seem to affect mothers’ assumptions about themselves and what they would’ve been able to accomplish if they had been unmarried and/or childfree themselves. The assumption by any women that they themselves are so much better and smarter and more savvy than all other women, past, present and future, and would’ve easily succeeded where all other women have always failed is hardly novel is it. We will just never stop falling for that one.
But what I would like to address in the limited space in which I am allowing myself to discuss it, is this: mothers’ very obvious assumption that someone would’ve gifted them the married mother-resources they have, as inadequate and pathetic as those resources may be, even without the expenditure of marriage and motherhood. That they would have been able to accomplish quite a lot on top of the married-mother resources they already had, and maybe they would’ve. It’s relatively easy to accomplish and accumulate when your basic needs of nutrition, shelter and whatnot are already met.
Here, I am obviously talking about married mother-resources including spousal income, court-ordered support, state welfare benefits and whatnot that are unavailable or largely unavailable to unmarried childfree women. Get it? I am talking about married-mother slut-math, where all the married mother-goodies they are given/earn are worth approximately (or exactly) zero and like entitled, consumerist zombies, married mothers want MOAR. Married women and mothers don’t seem to grok that married mother-resources are resources, that they are given married mother-resources as compensation for a job, and that unmarried and childfree women are not eligible for that job, no matter how shit or how well it pays.
Unmarried and childfree women have to look elsewhere for work and to be compensated for the work they are qualified to do. And looking around, it seems to me that those jobs — the ones available to unmarried and childfree women — aren’t as widely available or as lucrative as the “job” of extreme male-pleasing, otherwise known as marriage and motherhood. And importantly, the jobs available to unmarried childfree women are nowhere near as lucrative as the jobs men delegate to themselves. If they were, unmarried and childfree women would enjoy the same status and resources as men do. But this is clearly not the case at all, despite what married mothers like to imagine about their own “potential” and the deleterious effects of marriage and motherhood to themselves.
As an historical note, having read most of the radical feminist canon, because I don’t enjoy hearing myself speak and/or reinventing the wheel, in my own estimation, feminists never even said that marriage and motherhood put married mothers in a one-down position compared to other women ffs. Although some television and other programming made that leap, that (mostly) did not come from us. The feminist point, whether or not this point was ever successfully made or widely broadcast, was that marriage and parenthood demonstrably place women in a one-down position compared to similarly situated MEN, meaning, compared to married men and fathers. And that is obviously the case: marriage and parenthood leave women in a lurch that males simply never experience. Under patriarchy, all similarly situated males are always in a one-up position compared to similarly situated females. That’s pretty much the definition of it.
In my own estimation, far from being revolutionary or even interesting online discourse, mother-regret is simply an unseemly display of married mothers (male-pleasing sluts) wanting MOAR. The resources they are given are worth nothing in their own minds, but in reality, and very fortunately for themselves, they will never have to actually find out how well (or how poorly) they would’ve fared in the “real world” where unmarried childfree women start from nothing, and are often given no work, no resources and no help.
And where whatever we do manage to accomplish can be taken from us in a moment, because frankly, accumulation is against natural law, innit. It takes millennia of intentional social engineering to protect hoarded/amassed wealth, and under a more or less global patriarchy, exactly none of that engineering has been directed towards unmarried, childfree women, has it. Or, not towards benefiting us, anyway. That’s about all I have to say, because it’s what is never said, about mothers and mother-regret, but feel free to tell me how wrong I am, and everything I’ve missed, in the comments below.
Comments open.
Cannabis Refugee, Esq. 