What Does It Mean to be a
Mother?
Motherhood is a fraught
concept for many people. Some mothers struggle with their identity in the
context of motherhood and sociocultural expectation; others with the concept of
their own mothers and the complexity of that relationship. Undefining
Motherhood suggests “The answer to “What is a mother?” is not “Someone who
has birthed a child.” Period.”
In developing this
project, I acknowledged quite early in my pondering that the act of childbirth
alone does not make a mother. In the context of records and record keeping, I
made some startling discoveries. If you bear nine children, and four die in
infancy, are you a mother of nine, or a mother of five? If you are pregnant but
things don’t progress, does society validate your emotional attachment to your
motherhood? Or conversely, invalidate your experience with well-meaning but
casually cruel comments? How are your children, and thus your motherhood,
reflected in records? And what if those records are incomplete? I read stories
of convict women giving birth on ships during transportation, children with
death certificates but not birth certificates (and vice versa), and bereaved
mothers being required to jump through bureaucratic hoops to have their
motherhood recognised and not recognised simultaneously.
Conversely, defining
human existence without reference to motherhood is equally tricky. When your
family history is incomplete, how are records of your own existence created? Is
living memory enough to fill the gaps in the record? (Of course not.) My search
turned up many memento mori, but without accompanying information their purpose
lies unfulfilled. I found many circumstances in which mothers were erased from
history, through accident, carelessness and deliberate obfuscation. I saw
evidence of people simply disappearing through a lack of connection, familial
threads lost forever. I read of mothers trying, to no avail, to track children
taken from them. I read of birth certificates altered. I wondered how it might
feel to see the words ‘unknown’ written beside my own name.
So then, who decides what
makes a mother? Who records motherhood, and how? And who chooses what records
to keep – whose identities are valid – and whose should just fade away?
Attributable
Sources:
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/ef/Isaac_Kershaw_%281840-1894%29_death_certificate.jpg
https://search.sl.nsw.gov.au/primo-explore/fulldisplay/ADLIB110320438/SLNSW
.jpg){kind=link}
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-55909216
