Musings on the ‘Other’ Mothers

By Anuradha Mazumder

“Being a mother is an attitude, not a biological relation” – Robert A. Heinlein

The question literally begs itself: Do I, an unmarried Indian woman of forty-seven, who has neither birthed a child nor adopted one, qualify as a suitable candidate to write on motherhood? The answer to this hypothetical question cannot be simple; because it must first lay bare the component layers of the complex social-political-cultural conditioning that have gone into the making of the construct called ‘motherhood.’ The question, indeed, makes enormous assumptions – namely, an unmarried (and by implication, single or unattached, as far as Indian culture is concerned) woman cannot be a mother; a woman whose biological clock has ticked past a certain age cannot be a mother; a woman who has not given birth cannot be a mother – and thereby becoming a glaring example of the exclusionist politics that patriarchy perpetrates. Therefore, I believe that I am just the right person who should, who must, put my two cents in on one of the most hallowed, and also relatively recently, the most debated of cultural constructs that has come to be woven into the fabric of a woman’s identity.

In this article I hope to be able to establish the point that a woman can ‘mother’ without being a mother in the physiological (traditional) sense of the word, i.e., without undergoing biological motherhood herself, and that such acts of ‘mothering’ are no less significant culturally. I intend to weave personal experiences and anecdotes, with other real-life stories, which bolster the argument that Gloria Steinem had made a decade back: namely, it is necessary to think of ‘mother’ as verb instead of noun. Because, while ‘mother’ as noun is limited in scope and constrained by several accidents (of age, gender, nationality, culture etc.), ‘mother’ as verb – as in ‘to mother’ or ‘to be mothered’ – underscores the caring, the nurturing, and the acts of empathy that we are all capable of, irrespective of gender and other accidents, thereby liberating motherhood from the profanities that sometimes attend it. The greatest blessing of ‘mothering,’ as I would like to argue in this article, is that in our ability to “care about the welfare of another person as much as one’s own (Steinem),” we realize our true potential as humans and, in the process, give birth to ourselves.

In a country and society that stubbornly refuse to look beyond the heteronormative family ideal, it is no surprise that biological motherhood would be the most-loved tool of patriarchal control. It is not the ‘deviant’ mother who is celebrated, though; not the unwed mother (Bollywood has long warned us of the misfortunes that befall such hapless creatures), not the single adoptive mother (how could a single woman, who cannot protect herself, adopt and rear a child on her own!), not the divorced mother (feminists make bad mothers, as everyone knows), and most definitely not the trans/gay/lesbian mother (God forbid it!). We celebrate motherhood only when a woman has ticked all the right boxes first – she has married a man and ‘settled down,’ taking upon herself the sacred and selfless duty of reproducing for the sake of the continuity of the family line. Motherhood, in the Indian context especially, is not a private experience; like the institution of marriage motherhood too is a public issue. This is because Indian society still largely perpetuates the contradictions inherent in the Victorian ideas of motherhood – while a woman’s role as mother subsumes her identity as a human being and places the primary obligation of nurturing a child on her, it also raises her social esteem and places her on a pedestal for fulfilling her primary function, namely, maternity. While alternative options of becoming a mother are now available to women – who are opting for motherhood early or late in their lives, with their own frozen eggs or with donated ones, with and without partners – the perception of motherhood has not moved beyond the traditional conception-pregnancy-birth framework in any significant way.

Women have taken unprecedented strides in their quest for a fair and more equal world; they have resisted the gendering of space by crossing the threshold of the domestic space that had been earmarked for them for centuries and claiming their rightful place in public spaces – in schools, colleges, offices, places of public worship and even in the most offbeat professions. They have excelled in academics, sports, and business; with financial independence and mobility, they now form a significant part of the consumer market; and, despite the invisible glass ceiling, many of them now head national and multinational corporations. India has a fair share of such accomplished women despite its notorious practices of female foeticide and its skewed gender ratio. Yet, the only time we celebrate women in a public ceremony – inviting guests and feeding them happily (burning deep holes in our pockets in the process) – is not when they top their class at the university, or land a coveted white-collar job, or purchase a flat or a car out of their own hard-earned money, but when they marry. Marriage – and the maternity that everyone expects would follow in due course of time – are the two institutions whereby woman’s body becomes a site of socio-political control. Marriage controls her sexual energies by determining her sexual destination (her husband), and maternity reinforces the trope of self-sacrificing motherhood by designating her primary role in the home and in the body politic – that of nurturer and caregiver.

Understood in this sense, however, ‘mother’ excludes half the human race; because, for this linear, uncomplicated definition of ‘mother’ to work a woman’s life must fall into the linear, predictable trajectory discussed above. But what of the nurturing instincts of the other half of the human race whose lives refuse to be straitjacketed by fixed definitions? What of the large numbers of men who invest their love and lives in rearing children, who share equal parenting responsibilities with their spouses or raise their children – biological as well as adopted – singly, for a variety of reasons? What of the large numbers of women who have no children of their own but shower their love, invest their time and exert themselves physically in taking care of the children of their brothers and sisters in many cultures across the world where the remnants of the joint family system still survive in some form or the other? Also, moving entirely out of the mother-child trope, what of the large numbers of men and women (but women, especially) who act as primary caregivers of aged, ailing, dependent parents and parents-in-law while already exhausted from walking the tightrope between family and work? Are not such acts – labours of love undoubtedly, but literally labourious too – acts of mothering, if mothering is synonymous with nurturing and caring about the welfare of another person as much as one’s own? As Steinem further observed, “to mother depends on empathy and thoughtfulness, noticing or caring;” therefore, how can we continue to exclude the above-mentioned acts of love, empathy and care from the definition of ‘mother,’ and thereby, decimate the cultural and human quotient of such acts?

On International Women’s Day (8 March) in 2020, Aditya Tiwari, a Pune resident, was felicitated with the “Best Mommy of the World” award. I remember heartily welcoming the news as a step in the right direction. Aditya had made news in January 2016 when he won the legal custody of Avnish, a boy with Down Syndrome whom he had adopted, after a long and difficult court battle of one and a half years. Since then, he has been taking care of his son as a single parent while also counselling parents of children with special needs. He was invited to the United Nations to participate in a conference on the ways of bringing up children with intellectual disabilities. Aditya’s inspiring story, covered by the national media, especially by NDTV, underscores the necessity of ungendering ‘mother’ while also shifting the weight of emphasis from ‘mother’ as noun to ‘mother’ as verb; from motherhood as a state of being to motherhood as a state of ‘doing’ – noticing, caring, nurturing, rearing – and thus, of becoming. Understood in this sense, anyone can mother. As Aditya observed in an interview to ANI, “Avnish has taught me how to become a parent. It is a stereotype that only a female can take care of a child….” It is time we broke the stereotype. Aditya is not a celebrity, but an ordinary, middle-class man who took an extraordinary step. His act of ‘mothering’, therefore, carries deeper significance for society’s conceptualization of mother and maternity – who is a mother, who can be a mother, what does maternal instinct/emotion mean in the present socio-historical-cultural-political context. His brave decision to mother a child with learning disabilities further engages with the deep social anxiety of the parents of differently abled children (children with social and learning disabilities, handicapped children and the like), but particularly that of their mothers who, as everyone knows, primarily ‘cares for’ them.

What becomes evident from Aditya’s instance alone is that, in contemporary culture the word ‘mother’ has come to be invested with layers of complexity that defy a standard, simplistic definition. To further complicate matters, while discussing motherhood many women are deviating from the standard maternal script to confess that if they could make that choice again, they would not: it’s not their children but motherhood that they are regretting, and their candour is part of a growing yet contentious conversation about maternal regret. Though such mothers are labelled, unsurprisingly, as selfish and unnatural, the discussion on maternal regret was fuelled by Israeli sociologist Orna Donath’s 2015 book titled Regretting Motherhood: A Study, based on Donath’s interviews with twenty-three anonymous Israeli women aged between 26 and 73, five of them grandmothers. Therefore, for all the overvaluing of pregnancy and biological motherhood in cultures across the world – and the media hype and hoopla around the pregnancy-and-parenting industry – ‘mother’ is a difficult word today. Permit me to include a personal experience at this point. My cousin and his wife, both IT sector employees, have a five-year-old son, who was primarily raised by us for the first two years of his life, before the COVID-19 pandemic struck. The lockdown – a time of anxiety for most of us – ironically turned out to be a blessing-in-disguise for my little nephew who, for the first time since his birth, spent significant and uninterrupted time with his mother. But before the pandemic, the amount of time, energy and effort that we invested in raising the baby hands on – from feeding and bathing him to attending to his various biological, emotional and minor medical needs to playing with him, singing him nursery rhymes to keep him joyfully engaged, and putting him to sleep – is enormous and unquantifiable; we, his aunts (both teachers) literally took on the role that new mothers are expected to play. The hours I spend to this day tending to my nephews are the most rewarding and emotionally fulfilling hours of my life without doubt; but it is no less true that their loving demands on my time leave me exhausted, making unbroken focus seem like a thing of the distant past. However, nobody considers this mothering, even while the traditional conceptualization of aunts fails to accommodate this kind of devoted and unconditional caregiving.

The workaday world, which prefers simple definitions, and functions on traditionally-held, grand and glorious narratives of biological motherhood, doesn’t yet know how to categorize aunts like us. So, it pretends that complexities inherent in the social construct of motherhood do not exist; as always, the need to reduce complexity leads to an inevitable invisibilization of our labour of love, our many happy – and exhausting – hours of mothering. Were it not for my hands-on experience of caring for my nephew Pika (and now, his toddler brother, Golu) while also fulfilling my various academic and administrative responsibilities in the college where I teach, alongside the many other kinds of deadlines that I have to meet every day, I would not have, perhaps, questioned the stale, outdated, simplistic ideas of mother and motherhood that my society still holds sacred. Also, having seen my late father through his heart ailments and surgery, his two cerebral strokes and multiple hospitalizations, and his post-hospitalization recoveries since he was just fifty-five years old – and also in my current role as the primary caregiver of my ailing mother – I have realized that there is no acknowledgment in society of a woman’s many labours of love as caregiver till she has married and literally gone into labour! It is frustrating, amusing, hurtful, and sometimes downright ridiculous, to observe how society makes bizarre assumptions about women who are unmarried and child-free: it assumes that they have much less ‘work’ and responsibility at home than their married counterparts with kids; that more than a fair share of office workload can be justifiably shifted to their shoulders because they have plenty of ‘free time’ at their disposal; that they have much less expenses to bear because they have no ‘family’ (read husband and children) of their own. As if, by some inscrutable decree, caring about one’s husband and child is legitimate and visible, while caring round-the-clock for a sick parent or sibling is not!

So, why am I bringing up these issues in an article on motherhood? The answer is simple: it is time society – which is nothing but a conglomerate of ordinary folk like you and me – woke up to and took due note of the reality of the not-so-new phenomenon of ‘mothering,’ taking some time off from its constant eulogization of matrimony and biological motherhood. Not just society, governments too need to recognize caregiving-mothering as the most constant human need, and right. The Child Care Leave that governments sanction to mothers till their children turn eighteen is a welcome step towards ensuring child rights; but it would help if some special leave allowances are made for working women juggling their demanding jobs and ailing elderly parents at home or in the hospital in addition to other family responsibilities. It is time societies and governments acknowledged caregiving – in its many forms and manifestations – as mothering. I know through experience how hard, how stressful it gets; I’m sure there are thousands like me who are going through the ordeal even as I write. As Catalan writer and journalist – and mother – Esther Vivas writes in her book, Disobedient Mum: A Feminist Perspective on Motherhood (2019), “It is society that … needs to adapt to the fact that human beings require care – when we are children, when we are old, when we are sick – rather than our care needs having to be adapted to the rigidities and imperatives of the labour market.” Given the reality of the upsurge in elderly population across the world – old men and women whose lives have been extended by medical science, but the quality of whose lives is way below desirable standards, especially in developing countries where geriatric care is still in its nascent stage – such a step is the need of the hour. Such a step would also go a long way in acknowledging acts of ‘mothering’ that go beyond, and subvert, the conventional ideas, ideals, and trappings of motherhood. To quote Vivas once again – though she makes the observation in the specific context of supporting the idea of collectivizing childcare instead of thrusting all such responsibilities on mothers alone, as is so often the case everywhere – “a different motherhood requires a different society.”

I would wrap up my rumination with two personal anecdotes related to the care of children – incidents that moved me deeply, while also reinforcing my long-held belief that one need not be a mother to mother. Both involve my oldest nephew Putku, now nine years old, whose life has been inextricably woven with ours till the pandemic stopped our frequent mutual visits to each other’s place. He has been no less than a son to me, and he reciprocates my love in full measure; we have been through all the familiar episodes of laughter-fun-play as well as those tough phases when missing each other got the better of us and resulted in tears and heartache on both sides. My sister-in-law, his biological mother, has been remarkably supportive of our mutual affection and kept me updated of all his daily little-big activities, accomplishments and mischiefs. I have quite regularly written about him – his high emotional intelligence, his cognitive maturity and his unique personality – in my social media wall, to the great amusement and appreciation of my friends, many of whom have commented, over the years, that “none but a mother” could have noticed this or that or written about him with such “overwhelming love.” Two such incidents, though, have stayed with me: one, when a friend, who is a mother of twins slightly younger than my nephew, thanked me personally for my minute observations and anecdotes on my nephew which, she said, helped her understand and relate to her own children better; the other, when my sister-in-law wished me (and my sister) on Mothers’ Day a couple of years back, in loving acknowledgement of the love and care we have showered on her son.

Such sincere acknowledgement coming from two biological mothers is the best evidence I could cite to bolster my argument in favour of locating motherhood in acts of love and nurture rather than in the biological act of giving birth. As Angela Garbes, in her 2022 book, Essential Labour: Mothering as Social Change, observes insightfully, “The terrain of mothering is not limited to the people who give birth to children.” I am not certain how helpful or important or meaningful my mothering would be to my nephews once they grow up (only time will tell), but I am sure of this: mothering them has brought out shades of emotion and dimensions of my personality that I never knew existed. It has calmed me, healed many of my wounds, helped me come to terms with life and loss in unique ways, and made me more empathetic as a person. Mothering has been a chaotic, funny, and deeply rewarding journey of self-discovery.

Photo:  ‘Mother’ (art by Laura Lee Harasym) sourced from the website lauraleesart.com

Bio:
Anuradha Mazumder is an Assistant Professor of English at Prafulla Chandra College, Kolkata. An alumna of Presidency College, Kolkata, she did her Masters in English Literature from the University of Calcutta and completed her M. Phil. in English Literature from Jadavpur University. She is currently a Ph.D. research scholar at the University of Burdwan, West Bengal. Her areas of academic interest include Victorian Studies, Holocaust Studies, Indian English Writing, and literature’s interface with cinema and popular culture. She is the author of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice: With an Introduction and Explanatory Notes (2018), published by Authorspress, New Delhi. Her poetry and short fiction have been published in Setu, Muse India, Saaranga-English, and Café Dissensus. ORCID ID – 0000-0002-2732-3761.

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