Blasting 6 Motherhood Myths into Smithereens

Read this for drops of hope + some action ideas

It’s the night before my birthday. But I’m feeling more rage than rah-rah. Every year since the day dot I’ve endured had St Valentines as the lead into my big day. It’s a mantle to carry all red and expectant with exuberant love-ins.

Instead, this evening I was called by one local authority who were checking how my child with an EHCP¹ (and complex special needs) is doing. Suspicious at almost 7pm of a St V evening. Until I remembered tomorrow isn’t just my birthday, it’s also the cut-off deadline for all children of transition ages to have their next school setting named. It’s a legal requirement.

The glitch in the conversation?

The fact that we moved out of that local authority almost three years ago. The Manager had no idea.

Awkward.

You’d think that our current local authority would be in touch to say what educational provision this child will be offered, wouldn’t you? It all must be some administrative blip.

It’s pretty obvious, what with my rage, that they’re missing in this picture - they’re avoiding their legal responsibility to provide education for this child with complex learning needs. They’re doing their damnedest to look the other way.

We’re almost three years in during which I’ve had to hold everything together for them, cut loose from the support we as a family need, and are legally due. As

Caro Giles

says, “It’s not just me - this is a national crisis”.

This child of mine is safe, loved and accessing what we can muster. But that’s not the point.

Across this country tonight as I write there are mothers (many fathers too) at the edge of their capacity wondering how we’ll carry on another day. We might get hours of sleep but lots of us won’t because special needs children’s needs don’t take naps.

I wrote the piece below without this rage fuelled preamble. But I can’t compartmentalise away the power of the myths below in the context of what’s happening in the education system. Leaning into most of these myths allows local authorities to simultaneously assume mothers will be there while also blaming these same carer parents for the situations we are in.

My children asked me what I want for my birthday. I told them I want a day in bed. I mean that.

When a dear friend asked the same, I told her I wanted a mummy. I used those words. Someone to rely on, not a local authority.

Wish me a Happy Birthday and good wishes for a PJ day and a few moments of rest in my bed!

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The “halo” around motherhood is so deeply entrenched in societies that we’re expected to wear it, smiling all the while. Bile-worthy myths surround mothers and motherhood.

They impact, and shape the ways we experience motherhood as well as how we observe, judge, and treat mothers. Blasting these myths into smithereens is nothing less than world changing and necessary.

Ripe Avocado

The intense focus on an ideal of ‘GOOD’ mother is probably the most enduring and pernicious myth embedded across cultural and socio-economic locations. Let’s start with that little swine.

This myth forms a significant part of our collective “fantasy baggage” and is not a model mothers can truthfully aim to replicate in real life. Except that we try, don’t we?

Take Jessamine Chan’s dystopian novel “The School for Good Mothers” in which Frida (protagonist mother of Harriet, her young child) is taught that she’s committed a sin not of parenting but of ontology. In conceiving of herself as a daughter, lover, employee and citizen rather than mother alone, she has violated THE code of maternal ethics. The corrective action she must take, is to slaughter all superfluous selves. She is, like all mothers meant to conceive of herself as mother. Only a mother.

In my own book, NOISE: A Manifesto Modernising Motherhood, set in the here and now of modern motherhood, I dismantle six systemic narratives [aka myths] shaping mothers’ lives and our views of motherhood. These narratives have become mythological ‘truths’ I blast apart. I didn’t write it as a how-to book to show off all my smug answers that truthfully hardly fit my own life, I wrote it as a how-come book, a contagious term I love from author Jessica Elefante - subscribe to her words here

Modern Bullshit

!

I wrote NOISE because my heart still hopes for a rebuild and new/different conversations for mothers (not only white upper middle class women) that positions us all as powerful social change agents this world desperately needs. As Rebecca Solnit says,

“Hope is not a lottery ticket you can sit on the sofa and clutch, feeling lucky. It is an axe you break down doors with in an emergency. Hope should shove you out the door, because it will take everything you have to steer the future away from endless war, from the annihilation of the earth's treasures and the grinding down of the poor and marginal... To hope is to give yourself to the future - and that commitment to the future is what makes the present inhabitable.”

It’s not a lottery.

Here’s those six myths and thoughts on blasting each:

Myth One: Motherhood is Our Calling

Being a mother is persistently positioned as the culmination of women’s existence, pitched as the ultimate goal for any ‘good’ woman while simultaneously being the least recognised job in the world. This same myth tells us we can be a mother, have a career, have it all, but our children MUST come first. 

BLAST IT: All women are held accountable to this myth, but when considered under an alternative lens of race, education, and class, nuanced complexity becomes obvious. Research shows white working-class mothers often find motherhood a calling since other options may not be present. White middle-class mothers of financial means may also perceive motherhood as a calling since their financial resources may allow this. Questioning whether our structural circumstances offer the opportunity to place being a mother as pinnacle is vital. When we strip back Western, white, upper-middle-class narratives that blanket this myth, it falls apart.

Myth Two: Mothers Must Make Our Children Happy

Knowing what makes our children happy is an ever-changing smorgasbord. The responsibility for shaping our children into functional, contributing, stable and happy people is single-handedly given to mothers. This task of making and buoying up children’s happiness is cited as a source of deep worry for many and most mothers. Yet it’s key to remember there’s a considerable difference between putting in place the best conditions we can for our children to be happy, and taking responsibility for their happiness in ways we ultimately can’t control. 

BLAST IT: It’s better to teach our children to have developed understandings of their mental health rather than educate them that their mother is in charge of their happiness. This false reality doesn’t help them learn emotional regulation or navigate the world with the inner skills they require within themselves. Being happiness gatekeepers is not in our children’s best interests or our own, but being their guides helping them explore what happiness means for them individually helps equip them to chart their own happiness journeys. 

Myth Three: Mothers Must Be Selfless

Once we’re mothers, we’re no longer seen as a person in our own right. We’re told repeatedly from every corner of society that everything - our hopes, desires, dreams - must be relegated or stop once we become mothers. Even the notion of self-care is entwined with mothers being selfless. Self-care is ‘allowed’ as long as it keeps us focused on our ability to mother. Being selfless asks us to be less of our selves.

BLAST IT: This myth tells us that when we choose to become mothers, we abandon the ‘selfishness’ of focus on ourselves because that’s what ‘good’ mothers do. Truth is, we have to pursue the things we need for ourselves as whole human beings. If not, we leave our children with a terrible burden, that we failed to live our lives because we gave it all up for them. And perhaps worse, we leave our daughters with the legacy they should do the same.

Being Nice by Tamara Gore

Myth Four: Mothers Must Feel Guilty

Guilt and motherhood are wrapped up in social narratives about ‘good’ and ‘bad’ mothers. Good mothers sacrifice ourselves for our children; we don’t need time for ourselves or ways to feel fulfilled outside of being a mother. Anyone who strays from or even thinks outside these narratives inevitably feels guilty for not staying the true path of ‘good’ motherhood. 

BLAST IT: There are tips everywhere on coping with maternal guilt, but the assumption this guilt exists as an accepted part of motherhood continues to go uncontested - and that’s how we blast it. Trouble guilt in your life, pull the threads of its existence apart and see where they lead. Many mothers find their guilt is wrapped up in narratives that simply don’t belong to them. If you want to spend an hour with me pulling these threads apart, be in touch. Pay what you can. We need to make busting this a collective mission.

Myth Five: Mothers Ambition Shrinks

Being a central figure in our own lives is unacceptable for ‘Good’ mothers. Where ambition is allowed, it must be tethered to productive pursuits within a career or creative activities that aid homemaking or benefit partners and children. The idea that mothers might have ambitions and seek to grow as individuals in our own right is still considered redundant and self-absorbed.  

BLAST IT: It’s inaccurate to suggest that ambition shrinks for mothers; the link between reducing ambition and motherhood isn’t proven. Women’s ambition levels vary, but this is unrelated to motherhood and links to (unsupportive) company cultures, expensive childcare and insufficient support. Ambition isn’t a fixed attribute but is nurtured (or damaged) by daily interactions, conversations, and opportunities women face within organisational, cultural and social structures. Blast this myth by facing the fact that this is not about your individual ambition. Within the Mother-Stopping culture, anyone’s ambitions might be (and are) affected.

Myth Six: Mothers Must Be Sexy and Sexless

‘Mothers, sex and sexuality’ are not words put together frequently. Writer Adrienne Rich suggests that a mother’s experiences of sexuality are not only personal but institutional; heavily regulated by a patriarchal society. Integrating our sexual and maternal self causes conflict for many women. The bottom line is mothers aren't supposed to be sexual, at least, some mothers aren’t, while others are expected to occupy a ‘sexy mother’ identity.

BLAST IT: Whether denied sexuality or over-sexualised, mothers are constrained by seemingly ‘appropriate’ sexual behaviour. Classic madonna-whore mythological noise is at the source of contradictory judgements and expectations of different mothers. Viewing this myth through opposing social and cultural structures around motherhood promptly sees it fall flat. Busting this myth in a hypersexualised and sexist society is a must to reclaim our right to, as Audre Lorde says, “an assertion of our life force”. 

One Bonus Myth to Blast: It Isn’t All About Mothers

When mothers re-architect our relationship to these six myths, it potentially affects men's relationship with themselves as fathers.

Mothers don’t live in a silo bubble separate from the other key figure in our children’s lives²: their fathers. It’s fair to say, though, that mothers are still expected to carry the responsibility for children and everything domestic despite much societal progress. In reshaping conversations around motherhood, the place of fathers within that conversation can, and must transform. 

I’m especially interested in that transformation, as I know many parents will be, and it forms the basis of my most recent book, SPUNK: A Manifesto Modernising Fatherhood. When we actively blast these myths surrounding motherhood and parenthood more generally, we instantly create space for bold new dynamics and ways of thinking.

It’s a conversation that’s still in its infancy. It’s a conversation PWT is committed to.

If this resonates, leave a comment below and I hope to answer from my birthday bed,

1. Education Health Care Plan

2. I recognise key figures in children’s lives are not only a mother and a father. Not gone trad in my sleep.