Stories About Motherhood: So What?

Guest blogger, Lisa Catherine Harper

One of the major revelations of my first year of parenthood was that the home, motherhood, and domestic life mattered. This sounds simple, even trite, I know, but for me, it was a new point of view that required a kind of revolution in my conventionally feminist thinking. Like many modern women, before I had children I believed that real power and value existed in the public sphere and extra-domestic work. It wasn?t so much that I had bought the myth that I could ?have it all,? as much as I unconsciously mapped power onto the places it already existed. This is, of course, the enduring legacy of second wave feminism. But once my daughter was born, I found that tending to her life?and the domestic life of the home that supported it?was not only interesting, but important. It became fundamental and equivalent in value to my working life as a writer and professor.

In the penultimate chapter of my book, A Double Life, Discovering Motherhood, I revisit a moment of crisis occasioned by the profound isolation I felt near the end of the first year of motherhood. I came to the visceral realization that in order for women to achieve full equality, what we really need is a shift in the cultural imagination: the home and family life cannot be simply a sentimental refuge from the workplace. The home was a political, creative, generative space. Suddenly I knew that every time I reduced motherhood to its most tedious tasks (because, in truth, there were a lot of those), I diminished myself, my daughter, and the new family that my husband and I were creating. I knew, too, that the real issue for mothers was not simply work-life balance. What I knew (newly) was that mothers could work full time (or part-time, or not at all) and still be fully committed to their children. The crux of the matter was how much we allowed our children to transform us. For me, the most radical, feminist act was allowing my daughter (and then my son) to occupy a place in my mind as important as my writing. As my children have grown, my career has grown, too, but I must still, always, proceed consciously from that place where the home and motherhood are equal to my writing life. This is the real challenge of ?balance.? Because honestly, some days it is much, much easier to write than it is to parent.

I wrote my book, A Double Life, Discovering Motherhood for one overriding reason: I found motherhood to be an interesting category of experience. In my own very ordinary pregnancy, I found a story of identity and transformation that was personally profound, and, I hoped, widely relevant. I wanted to write the book that translated the experience of motherhood for all readers, not just for expectant and new mothers, but for their partners, their grown children, and even for people who might never have children. Using medical research to ground my personal narrative, I dug deeply into the biological and emotional story of motherhood in order to show how my story?like every woman?s story?was not an isolated, idiosyncratic event but a central experience. For me, motherhood was not marginal. It was stitched to life at all its corners. Breaking the traditional forms of self-help and straight forward personal narrative in order to write my very ordinary, domestic story was as much an act of literary defiance as it was a political stance.

?Motherhood? is not a lifestyle, it?s a fact of human existence. The stories we tell about it are essential, and they can teach us much about what it means to be human. But there is a catch. When we write about our lives as mothers, we also need to ask of ourselves the same question I force my students to ask of each piece of writing: So what?

If we can answer that question about the stories we tell about our lives as mothers and our children, we will go a very long way to understanding what our children are teaching us about ourselves and the world, and how we have allowed ourselves to be transformed by the day to day fact of our maternity. Whether we write literature of fact or fiction, comedy or tragedy, personal narratives or short stories, blog posts or essays, answering that single difficult question, that question every writer fears most, can help us get to the heart of our stories and also to know exactly why and how much it all matters.

Lisa Catherine Harper is the author of A Double Life, Discovering Motherhood, winner of the 2010 River Teeth Literary Nonfiction Prize. She lives in the San Francisco Bay Area with her husband and two children and teaches in the MFA program at the University of San Francisco.

Source: http://www.hercircleezine.com/2011/07/08/stories-about-motherhood-so-what/

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