Maternal thresholds
talking about motherhood, true things, and the line between self-compassion and self-critique
I recently started a parenting channel on our interruptions Discord server after an acquaintance suggested a place to house conversations around motherhood. “Let’s bring the mommy wars to us,” she joked, and I laughed, added the channel, and thought little of it. But I’ve come to realize the chat that has developed there over the course of the last week or so has sustained me in way I hadn’t fully articulated to myself that I’ve needed. We’ve talked about breastfeeding and c-sections, sleep and loss of control, ultrasounds and the fear of voicing any kind of opinion on motherhood out loud, online, in public, at all, for how it immediately lands you in “one camp or another.” These are people in different stages of motherhood, from different kinds of families, in the U.S. and outside of it. Some have older children, some have babies, some might not have children at all. Their voices, and our conversations, are part of what I’ve been missing in my long, two-year entry into mothering—precisely because of their openness to any affective orientation toward the experiences and institution of motherhood. We talk about regret and ambivalence, sure, the popular antecedents to “maternal” anything these days. But we’ve also discussed joy and pride, fear and anxiety, naming and the body-in-pain, isolation and illness—all of it, so far, approached with a tender inquisitiveness about what it is we’ve gotten ourselves into, as parents voicing contradictory things about raising kids to stranger-friends on the internet.
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Like many others on the left, over the past several years, I have been infected by the (not-really)-subconscious idea that self-hatred might be the only antidote to the abdication of self-responsibility proffered by the rhetoric of social media self-healing—you know, all the rich white lady Instagram influencers who pivoted from bendy yoga challenges in the late 2010s to a vaguely more political “love and light, self-care and hashtag activism” platform in recent years, while also continuing to sell us their colonizer yoga retreats and healing circles on islands, their Nuvita CBD discounts for our ever-increasing states of anxiety.
That stuff sucked, and it also sucked me in, once upon a time, as a 25-year-old white girl newly released from eating disorder rehab and looking for a “feel-good” way to deal with lingering health issues, family-of-origin bullshit, and a tendency to dissolve into whatever substance would provide relief for a while. It’s true; I’ve spent the first half of my 30s now trying to atone for how easily I fell for the book-length captions of YogaGirl and the like, hitting the like button and signing up for yoga teacher training in my town as fast as I could, buzzed off the influencer promises of a clear head, a newfound love for soft hips, and an excellence in arm balances that would help me, too, ascend to influencer status, thereby paying my bills. None of that