“Mother’s Intuition” (AAARRRRGH!)

One of the patriarchy’s many lies about motherhood is the phrase ‘mother’s intuition’ or ‘maternal instinct’. And before we get into this, it might be worthwhile to begin by making the distinction made by Adrienne Rich, one of the only feminist critics who writes from the distinct point of view of a mother. Rich separates between the experience of motherhood - Real thoughts and emotions that run through and often overwhelm women who become mothers - and the institution of motherhood, which is a construct of the patriarchy’s making. The institution of motherhood is detrimental to women for many reasons, the listing of which is an undertaking on far too large a scale for this blog, but we can take a tiny glimpse by deconstructing just this one phrase, for starters.

On its face the phrase seems harmless; a compliment, even. My anger at it - which, I assure you, is quite pervasive and complete - may strike the casual observer as unjustified; just another angry feminist going overboard. But I can’t get over how devious it is, how contemptibly wily. It’s amazing what two words can do to culture’s entire perception of motherhood, of women.

First of all, let’s begin with the obvious, which is that ‘maternal instinct’ or ‘mother’s intuition’ does not exist. Sure, there are women who are better equipped for motherhood - naturals, to borrow a term from sports or music - whether because they had a ‘good’ mother to model themselves on (a slippery term we won’t tackle now; for the moment we can just assume that a ‘good’ mother is one who is attuned to her child’s needs), or whether they are just naturally calm, patient, empathetic, what have you (again, too much of any of these does not necessarily make a mother ‘good’ but for the moment we will have to live with the vagueness). The point is, even women who start out financially, mentally, and emotionally stable, who want their baby and see its arrival as a blessing, who arrive on the other side of labor in relatively functional physical health; even these women should never be labeled as having instinct or intuition. Because instinct is something every member of a species has. If it’s built in, it’s built into everyone. If not, it’s not fucking instinct, okay?

In actuality most women not only don’t feel like they have a mothering ‘instinct’, they feel the exact opposite of that. The problem - and this is just one of the many problems with the term ‘instinct’- is that they cannot necessarily share these feelings. Once you are hit with the notion that you, as the mother, are somehow supposed to just know what to do with an infant, you feel it necessary to keep up with the charade. Besides, you tell yourself, instinct could kick in at any moment! Maybe, like MS DOS or those dial-up internet connections we used to have, I just have to wait…

But it never does. What does happen, though, is that you learn to fake it. Because when your baby cries all eyes turn to you. You can feel them boring a hole through your skull, and the pressure - bolstered by that deafening alarm that sounds within when your baby needs something - is immense. So you try everything. You try milk, you try bobbing up and down, you try bringing the knees up to help a slow intestinal tract, you try singing, you try cooing, you try holding the baby on its back, then on its stomach, you try every shape and size and make of pacifier, till your kitchen counter looks like a fucking pacifier museum. And all the while you look out at the world and say: I got this. You hide your sweat stains, and you pray.

I have a friend who always used to amaze me on this account. Her newborn baby girl had merely to whimper and she would give her need a name. “Oh, she’s tired” or “her stomach hurts” or “she’s hungry” or “she has gas” or whatever else. I would gaze at her, amazed that she had figured out exactly what this week-old creature wanted. Was this a baby-whisperer in our midst? It took me a while to figure out that she was just guessing, and these matter-of-fact statements were mainly a form of calming herself. Sure, her assumptions may have often been correct, but as often as not they weren’t. When the latter was true, she learned from her mistakes, and, like any form of study undertaken seriously and continuously, she eventually learned to understand her baby. Well, as best as any of us can.

Which leads me to my next point. Not intuition or instinct but intelligence. A mother’s knowledge of her baby’s needs is hard-won. In the past few years researchers have discovered that mothers’ brains do change during pregnancy, but these changes can lead to anxiety and depression - symptoms that arguably interfere with the response to babies’ needs - just as often as they lead to positive results such as empathy. In any case, brain changes, if, indeed, they occur in all mothers (a conclusion researchers are very far from making) are just the starting point, the soil in which seeds of communication can be planted. Real knowledge of an infant’s needs require constant study of every facial expression, every cry. Mothers (or fathers, when they are the primary caregivers) study their babies constantly. And anyone who’s ever been a parent knows that infants change on a moment’s notice, so the study becomes exhaustive research requiring constant observation, experimentation, and commitment. Not unlike a degree in science, wouldn’t you say? 

Would you call a great scientist, an expert in her/his field, ‘intuitive’? Would you chalk up her/his knowledge to ‘instinct’? I don’t think so.

So why do it to mothers?

Here’s where I get angry. Because it seems like it’s purposeful. It seems like the term ‘intuition’ or ‘instinct’ was made up by fathers who couldn’t be bothered to achieve the same intelligence for themselves, who weren’t diligent enough, patient enough, or caring enough to put in the time that the mothers of their children did into understanding and caring for their children. Much easier to chalk it up to something only women have in those female brains of theirs. Decades of Mars-Venus type proselytizing has maintained that sex is destiny (as Freud once put it), and any attempt at bridging the divide would be a non-starter. However the research on neurological changes is clear on this point: Men who become primary caregivers undergo the same brain alterations mothers do, it just depends on the amount of time they spend with their infant.

Calling it ‘mother’s intuition’ or ‘maternal instinct’ is a double-whammy. First, it negates the equal involvement of men in childcare. Passing off a crying infant to its mother becomes legitimate because she is better equipped to handle it. Second, and this is what really sends the red bells of fury ringing in my brain, by calling it ‘intuition’ rather than intelligence, by implying that women are born with the knowledge necessary rather than acquiring it, the patriarchy can keep from affording women any sort of intellectual advantage over men. We are better than men at childcare, but not because we are more intelligent than them, we were just born that way!

Want to make it a triple-whammy? Consider the fact that women have bought this lie throughout history. Under the guise of innocuousness, precisely because of this guise, perhaps, this phrase is one of the most oppressive forms of patriarchal BS I have encountered as a mother. It keeps us believing we must be primary caregivers because we were born to do so while men weren’t, and that if we don’t feel intuitive, if we don’t know instinctively what to do when our babies cry, well, then we must be unfit in some way. The latter insinuation, of course, forces women to perpetuate this lie, never to call its bluff, because to do so would be to admit something horrible, unthinkable, about ourselves; to ourselves. Hey, the best way to oppress someone is to get them to oppress themselves, no?

So here’s a thought. Next time you want to compliment a mother, call her smart, not intuitive. And hand her a glass of wine, for chrissakes. She has no doubt been having a very long day. 

Introduction, or The Monster is Made

Forty-eight hours after my firstborn son tore himself out of my body, my husband dropped us both at home, set down the duffel bag I had packed for the hospital, and went to work. 

He hadn’t thought to open a business until I was four months pregnant, but since then it had been his life, and this seismic splitting of one person into two didn’t really seem to make it past his peripheral vision. He had an urgent meeting.

I had no way of knowing that I would have no idea what to do with this infant. Though I had failed to breastfeed at the hospital, I thought I might have better luck at home, because all they had there were cheap, uncomfortable, plastic office chairs. And I did not yet know how far into the future my trauma would reach, from the night I sat trying to make this squirmy, bawling, unwieldy thing latch onto my nipple while hunched over trying to find a position that worked, any position, while blinding fluorescent lights seemed to spotlight every tortuous minute of my failure. 

This scene begins at four a.m. - I remember getting the phone call from the impatient night nurse at the nursery - but I don’t remember how it ends. It is such a traumatic memory that, try as I might, I only get flashes of visuals, and a tsunami of emotions - the most prominent of which is frustration on a level I had never felt before - then cut to black. 

Now I was home alone with him, my son, my responsibility, a piece of my flesh with which I had zero communication. What the hell was I to do when he cried? How could I possibly know what he wanted? I had a book that attempted to attach meaning to different cries - short and loud, a slow crescendo, and others - which sounded more like piano-tuning instructions than what to do with my baby. Besides, all his cries sounded exactly the same to me. They started loud and got louder until my brain exploded. What if there was some existential problem, something deeply wrong, which there was no way for my son ever to convey to me? How would I ever possibly know?

Most importantly, how could I feed him if he refused to latch on? The doctors and nurses all swore by breastfeeding on one hand, and stressed me out over his weight on the other (all babies lose about a tenth of their weight in the first 24 hours, and it is then the overwrought mother’s responsibility to get them to put it back on). In response to all of this my sleep-deprived, hormone-ridden mind grasped one equation only: 

Inability to breastfeed = bad mother.

I had painful stitches, I hadn’t slept since the night before the birth (badly, as one sleeps in the final stretch of pregnancy), and my stomach felt and looked like a deflated kiddie pool (empty and jostling heavily, as though my lower organs were unanchored and tossing about). My body was like an avalanche on a never-ending slope; my mind, ever my practical and dependable servant and friend, had turned into a treacherous puddle of goo. 

As I would learn later (unfortunately a parent’s lessons are nearly always learned in retrospect), stress increases adrenalin, which in turn lowers oxytocin, a necessary hormone for production of milk. In just one of motherhood’s many biological clusterfucks, therefore, my incessant worrying over feeding my offspring would keep me from doing just that, in turn increasing stress, reducing my milk even further, and so on and so forth, in a never-ending loop, a downward spiral into deep, dark depression. (“Creationists” kindly explain, please). 

My son is four now, and I still sometimes think back on those first few months, wondering whether - and if so how much - they may still effect him, me, and our relationship today. It does not seem to me entirely farfetched that they would. If I had been less anxious, if I had gotten a doula and a lactation consultant, if I had kept him next to me in the first hours instead of handing him over to that loud, cold, horrid nursery; if and if and if. These ifs are just another tagline of motherhood, I have come to understand. A stream of nonsensical, heartbreaking regrets that end when you die.

It took me a while to figure out that my husband was sort of floating through all of this. He saw me crying almost every night at 4 a.m., attempting, to no avail, to attach my screaming son to one ravaged, calloused nipple or the other, for what little sustenance he could glean from them. The scene did appear to bother him somewhat when he witnessed it, but I think he just felt helpless. I have to say I relate. 

However, his nipples weren’t bleeding, so he didn’t cry about it, he just went back to sleep. 

After all he had a new business. And the baby never needed him anyway, never asked for him by name, so he may as well devote himself to moneymaking, I guess he thought. Which meant I was home alone, doing all the housework, of course, because why not? They were all my dishes, (though mostly I used the same dish for every meal, which was always toast with peanut butter, the only thing I had time to make), it was my mess, mostly mine and the baby’s sweaty, sour, spit-up-stained clothes. He was barely home, so it made sense that I would do it all, being so there and everything. 

In Hebrew maternity leave is called, literally, ‘birth vacation’. I have never heard a more insultingly misleading moniker for anything in my life.

At this point I would like to stop and apologize if I appear sour. Really I am not. Not anymore, that is, but I was for a long time. Until I found feminism, and thought about it a little, and decided that I had good reason to be as enraged as I was. Once I made up my mind to disregard the bad reputation the F-word had had when I was young - its approximation to hairy lesbians and romantic suicide - once I learned a little bit of history, and recognized that it was really about civil rights, I understood that no, I had not signed up to do everything. I had not agreed to ‘have it all’ (which is really a euphemism for ‘doing’ it all, all the birthing and child-rearing and housework and career making; everything necessary to sustain a household, that is). 

Already I was a bit less sour, being justified. But now I had to educate my husband. 

That is, I began to see him for what he was: A boy who knew nothing of life - the making of it, the sustaining of it, the emotional/physical/mental needs of parent and child - nothing, nothing, nothing, and as a mother, that is, a human being who had gone through all seven circles of hell to achieve the knowledge necessary to be a mother, it now became my further burden to impart it to his sorry, clueless ass.

So it was, and probably always has been: 

First there was the mother. And, after reassembling the tatters of her former self into something new and considerably less physically attractive, she created the son and the father. She put herself together piece by piece, and, when she was ready, began the arduous labor of turning a thirty-five year old man-child into something she could work with. 

But first she had to figure out just how deeply fucking necessary it was.

I have said that feminism was a necessary factor in all this, but as appreciative as I was of its presence in my life, I soon realized there wasn’t much in it for mothers. Many of the top theorists I read were lesbians, some childless and some, for reasons unknown, tending to ignore the dirty details of motherhood. Much is said about gender, which I feel strongly about, of course, and oppression, and language, all of which are valid topics, but when all is said and done there is not much comfort in academic theory for a mother of my generation, a mother like me, who wanted nothing less than to model herself after her own mother, not because she had been bad but because she had been too good: too selfless, giving more than she really could or wanted to, veiling her own needs as though there was something wrong with her for having any. A terrible role model, therefore, but as I looked around I saw no other, because while fatherhood is pretty transparent, more or less, to the outside viewer, motherhood is opaque. For both sons and daughters this is the complex relationship, the one you pay thousands to have a psychoanalyst patiently unpack and unfold, layer by disturbing layer.

This opaqueness is a factor, I’m sure, in the lack of scholarly attention paid to motherhood. It is alien territory, a no-man’s land, literally, surrounded by impenetrable walls of secret guilt, self-disgust, and terror: of being judged, of messing up horrifically; of being judged for messing up or messing up due to concern over being judged. 

And we are judged. Easily, because we ourselves often sit in harshest judgement. After all, we have no idea what we’re doing and we know it.

But we mothers must send out a signal, radio waves, clicks, morse code, anything to communicate our locations. We must strive to talk as much as possible, as openly and honestly as possible, amongst ourselves and, importantly, with our partners. We must not be selfless, we must make demands, we must persuade and scold and nag and educate; and prop each other up and help each other do all of these things, over drinks if possible.

And we must try very hard not to judge each other.

That is what this blog is about: talking. Not advice, no, because advice descends from judgment. It is about encouragement, and schadenfreude, and blatant honesty, and shamelessness, and selfishness. 

Because it’s time feminism was for mothers. We are the ones who need world change the most. We have shouldered too much of the responsibility over the years and neglected too much of what makes us human. In believing the lie that selflessness makes a good woman/mother we have erased our own identities and blotted mothers out of the public sphere, making it impossible to know ourselves and each other. If we do not wish to continue to “have it all” we need partners, allies, we need a cultural shift extending from the home outward. Our cultures must be persuaded to ask basic questions about our lives, such as: If two people are needed to bring a child into the world - male and female - how can it be that responsibility for said child has always leaned so heavily on the latter? How can it be that men are applauded for changing a diaper while women are practically spit upon for working full time? Why are employers so much more likely to ask a 30-year old woman about her plans to have children than a man? For now, the answers to those questions are “because women get pregnant and lactate”, in other words, biology. And if you ask me, no social question should have a biological answer. If we do that, we may as well go back to flinging feces at each other from the trees. 

More to the point, biology is not the real answer. It is the patriarchy’s most convenient excuse. And it must be outed as an excuse before my daughter grows up to believe it.

What is the patriarchy? How do we kill it? And how to find the time while holding a baby on one arm and restraining a four-year-old with the other? 

Well, I don’t know. 

Yet.  

But I do know there’s nothing stronger than this strange monster I've discovered in me - this angry amalgam of feminism and motherhood - and no one more equipped for this uphill battle.