Lyz Lenz - Belabored: A Vindication of the Rights of Pregnant Women

In a poem attributed to Herbert Farnham, a mother is described as a flower, majestic as a tree, gentle as the dew, calm as the quiet sea. She is as graceful as a bird and as beautiful as twilight. God, Farnham wrote, pulled all these elements together and called them simply Mother.

I read Farnhams poem on a card that I received from my mother-in-law on my first Mothers Day in 2011. I was still sixty pounds over my pre-baby weight and constipated from the iron pills I had to take because I lost so much blood during labor. Every time I went to the bathroom, my bowel movement pressed against my stitches and made me cry. The only thing dewy about me was the noxious stew of postpartum juices in my underwear. My vagina looked like raw ground beef.

I tossed that card and all its treacle in the trash. What did those words mean, anyway? Dew, sea, brook, flight. None of them had any relation to my life as a mother. The fragrance of the flower had nothing to do with the deep darkness into which I stumbled every three hours each night to stuff my bleeding nipple into a screaming baby. With the way my boobs, once A cups and now E cups, hung like balloons full of sand from my body. The rippling brook sounded nothing like the womp womp womp of the breast pump, which in my exhaustion-induced hallucinations I thought was saying, Bob Hope, Bob Hope, Bob Hope, over and over. The majesty of the tree spoke to no part of my hormonal acne or the way Id stare out the front door and imagine myself running away.

How does it feel to be a mom? my own mother had asked me.

Like myself, but fatter and more tired and with weird shit coming out of my vagina, I said.

My mom has eight children. By the time she was the age I was when my daughter was born, she was already five kids deep. I dont think shed forgotten what it felt like to be in my position. But she had done it all alone. Her own mother absent. My father working all the time. The burning pain of mastitis, the exhaustion, the times she must have sobbed in the bathroom because we wouldnt stop cryingit all had to be for something more than our fat upper pubic area.

A video from 2014 that went viral shows clips of job interviews for a position called Director of Operations. The applicants are told the job involves long hours, no pay, no sitting, no breaks and requires expertise in the culinary arts, medicine, and finance. The job, they are told at the end of the interview, is Mom.

The video, titled #WorldsToughestJob, has been viewed over twenty-eight million times. It is meant to be a celebration of motherhood. Of the pain and the struggle. A glorification of the brutalization of our bodies and the lack of help we get from our own partners and government. It says to women that this, this is the greatest thing you can be: a martyr, a mother.

The pedestal on top of which sits the perfect mother appears in our creation myths. There is Gaia, Mother Earth from Greek mythology, who bore the powerful monstrous children of the god Uranus, the Titans. An Algonquian legend tells of the Mother of Life, who feeds plants, animals, and humans at her bosom. The Inca mythology includes Mama Pacha, fertility goddess of planting and harvesting. Christians have Eve, who failed in her first tasknot to eatand was given a second: bear children. Each creation story ties together the concepts of the worldly and the otherworldly. The flesh and the myth.

Not all creation stories begin with a mother. Not all of them involve a womans body given up for the good ofas its often phrasedmankind. But in America, to be a mother is to become a myth. To be a mother is to step into a role of someone elses invention, to cosplay a character who exists at the intersection of race, class, gender, and religion. Stepping into this role, a woman is no longer a human. (But then, was she ever truly seen as human?) She is now a river, she is dew, she is a majestic tree, she is earth and wind and magic and mama.

But not all mothers are permitted to embody this hallowed, all-consuming role. And who our culture sees as not succeeding in the role of mother says even more about how we conceive of mothers, than who we laud as perfect exemplars.

In our cultural imagination the perfect mother is a white, middle-class, straight, cisgender, married woman. She announces her pregnancy on social media with a photo in which shes smiling, draped in a gauzy dress, framing an almost nonexistent bump with her hands, wedding band glinting in the light. We are happy for her. We say, Congrats, over and over in the comments. Her hair is perfectly curled. Her husband smiles benignly behind her. She is the modern-day Virgin Mary.

This mother doesnt force us to think of the complications of sperm and egg. With the focus on her glowing skin and hair, we get to skip that part. The perfect mother would never force us to think about sex.

Imagine if that woman had conceived before she was married, perhaps as a teenager. She announces shes pregnant and we whisper: What happened? Couldnt she keep her legs closed? What went wrong? We think of the darkness. We picture the wet-stained sheets. The tearful acceptance. Her parents. We blame herher cavernous need. Her cavernous stupidity. We blame her, for her failure to live up to an arbitrary moral code. We dont reckon with the societal conditions. What we told (or didnt tell) her about conception. (After all, Texas, with its focus on abstinence-only education, has one of the highest teen pregnancy rates in the nation.) We excuse the boy who refused to wear a condom, but not the girl who didnt push back and insist he wear it. The girl who didnt have access to birth control or who was too ashamed to seek it because of her religion, her family, her lack of money or adequate sex ed or both. No, in those moments we think only of the girl, of her sex.