Parenting Off The Grid

Who is a Legitimate Mother? Part II. Becoming Illegitimate-Divorce.

19 Mar 2010 6 Comments

by Martha James Hartney in Politics and Parenting

Divorce is one of the most dramatic social changes a person can endure–man or woman. At this point in our society, the benefits of leaving an unhappy marriage outweighs the social costs. If they didn’t, the divorce rate wouldn’t be so high. Still, women and men who’ve been through it know that the family’s supporting structures collapse at divorce–perhaps not as dramatically as they did 50+ years ago but they collapse nevertheless. Women, in general, experience this on a deep emotional level as a distinct, desperate drop in social status but sometimes have difficulty pinpointing the source of the social pain of divorce. I experienced a dramatic shift in my social status when I left my marriage. And this is how it felt:

I was a privileged mother. I was married to a successful man. We had ample resources and an enviable public life. I had an education, a career, seemingly endless opportunity. I was a pillar in our community. And I had two incredible sons; handsome, highly intelligent, capable boys. By this description, you might ask, what’s the problem? I had everything women are told they are supposed to want out of life. But I was not as happy as many women with a lot less.

Our marriage was not the joyful companionship I wanted or was told would be mine at matrimony. It was not an equal partnership. About five years into it, and for reasons I won’t belabor here, my love for him died a sudden and painful death. I held on for seven more years believing that we would could become the kind of couple who were truly united in an intimate, vulnerable way. When that did not materialize after years of trying, I gave up. And in one heaving sigh I said, “I want a divorce.”

I moved out within a month, our divorce was final 100 days later.

My life changed overnight. Aside from dealing with the gut-wrenching issues in divorce, my community and social structure changed. Family relationships changed, friendships changed, even my acquaintances changed. The local women began to eye me watchfully. Sideways glances told me they were wondering if I was a danger to their marriages, being a divorcee, seeking a lover to fill the void my husband left. Was I going to go after their husbands?

But a more subtle question simmered. In my leaving a seemingly perfect marriage, was I breaking the collective silence that traditional marriage was not all it’s cracked up to be? Wary eyes told me that–in addition to fearing a new, single woman in town, my fellow women feared that their secret dissatisfactions and complicity in their servitude was going to be exposed. “Please don’t tell anyone how unhappy, unfulfilled, alone I feel. My economic life depends upon it.”

I had become an illegitimate mother.

The school principle stopped asking me for input. Neighbors no longer asked me to dinner. I was not invited to the local gala Halloween party for the first time in years. Some people stopped speaking to me altogether. Fortunately, I had also started law school at the same time so I was too busy to take this deeply to heart. Still, I was excluded from many activities in my community and I knew it.

This experience unveiled one of the many ways women’s interests conflict with society’s interests, and women, being the pragmatists that we are, cooperate in order to reduce that conflict. When I stopped cooperating, society brought down a rain of penalties on me. Of course, I would do it all over again, because as a white woman of adequate means, thanks in part to divorce law that did not leave me out in the cold, I had somewhere to go–unlike my mother and millions of mothers in America today.

The only reason I am aware of this brooding question is because I started getting phone calls from local women–and a couple of men–asking how I did it, how I found the courage to leave, how I thought they could do it. There were plenty of women who felt as I did but fearing the loss of shelter, food, clothing, sank back into the quiet background of their family lives. Other women ask me privately to describe the experience of law school, of returning to society to claim my own personhood, of being a mom AND a woman. The more I told my story, the more I realized that a good portion of my sisters (my tribal sisters) want more for themselves as I do. They want to count as mothers and as people with something to offer the world, something creative, abundant, wise, and valuable.

Even in 2010, women can still be valued more for their reproductive labor than their feminine wisdom, strength, intuition, and companionship; and are undervalued economically in industry. We are generally paid less in all forms of industry because the economic world is a masculine world. A woman still makes less than 80 cents for every dollar a man makes, a fact that highlights why we are economically dependent on men if we wish to have children and raise them ourselves. Women often cooperate in the illusion that traditional marriage is perfectly fulfilling and desirable in order to maintain the delicate balance of power that is the foundation of traditional marriage. Of course, for plenty of families, this model works very well, particularly with a male partner who honors his vow to “love, honor, and cherish.” But for others, it is a gilded cage.

Next Up: Who is a Legitimate Mother: Part III. “He Who Has the Gold, Makes the Rules.”

Who is a Legitimate Mother? Part I

15 Mar 2010 3 Comments

by Martha James Hartney in Politics and Parenting

I’ve always had a sneaking suspicion that the world is not as it seems–that there are forces at play of which I am only vaguely aware–that affect me as a person, as a girl, a young woman, a wife, a mother, and even now as a student of the law. When I became a mother, I felt keenly aware of vast amounts of social pressure and expectation that falls upon mothers, as Christine Gottlieb of NYU School of Law observed recently at DU’s Motherhood Conference. There were pressures to have my child in a hospital, in my home; to breastfeed, not to breastfeed; to circumcise, not to circumcise; to sleep with my baby, to make my baby sleep in a crib. The players? Doctors, husband, parents, in-laws, brothers, sisters, aunts, uncles, cousins, co-workers, friends, television shows, commercials, and complete strangers. But those were the influences of which I was aware. Countless others outside my direct experience were busy setting expectations and asserting pressures that I had no knowledge of, no framework for understanding.

Only after I had had my second child did I start digging deeper to uncover and face these forces consciously. And that digging eventually led me to law school.

I’m a mom. That’s what I do. That is how I identify myself. But I am a single mother. I am unmarried. I am white. Without knowing any more about me, what would that say about me? It begs the question of why I’m alone, why I chose to have kids, what kind of person am I? Am I stupid for having had children? Am I uneducated? Did I lack other opportunity? What happened to the dad, or (gasp!) dads? Most damningly, am I a woman of loose morals?

What labels do you go by?

White, African American, Latina, Asian, Indian, Native American, Eskimo? Single, divorce, married, separated? Living with kids, without kids? Highly educated, high school educated, drop out? White collar, blue collar? Upper, middle, lower class? Middle age, young-middle age, not-so-young age, old age? [By the way, I put them in the order society values more or less, but you knew that already.]

The pressures and expectations we experience as mothers are directly and inextricably intertwined with the labels we bear. The degree to which society accepts or excludes us is an algorithm of these variables. What an adult black mother with a college education experiences in society is nothing like what a white teen with two years of high school experiences. What a low-income mother experiences is nothing like what a well-to-do mother experiences. What a married woman experiences is nothing like what a single woman experiences.

We know instinctively that American society decides who is a good mother and who is a bad mother–and that our opportunity to participate in social life is linked to our obedience to this algorithm. A woman who “should” be a mother is expected not to exercise her right to choose. Her offspring is a valuable resource to society. This is the good mother. A woman who should not be a mother is expected to exercise her right to end her pregnancy (or for pro-lifers, abstain from sex, or for the misbehaving, relinquish her child for adoption). This is the bad mother. Bad mothers are single mothers, mothers-of-color, teen mothers, and disadvantaged mothers. Her offspring are a drain on society and are not deserving of being raised to participate fully in American life.

In a tangible way, privilege in a America is about the right to have sex. It is no surprise that those who most vocally demand that women’s right to choose be ended are those that themselves are privileged. It is rare to meet a young, underprivileged black woman who is opposed to abortion or reproductive justice but not at all surprising to meet a young, well-to-do white woman with a big belly whose mother proclaims her daughter’s pregnancy is sacred and should not be judged. I dare say that same woman would not so defend a black girl’s pregnancy. The abortion debate is less about the sanctity of life as it is about maintaining the social strata placing some women above other women as proper mothers; permitting some women to have sex, while damning others for it.

Next Post: Who is a Legitimate Mother? Part II: Taking the Plunge, Changing Classes