Mother’s Day, for some of us, can be unsettling. If one is motherless and childless, a day dedicated to motherhood can feel a bit like the party you’ve not been invited to. For me, it’s the only day every year which forces me to examine my role in the circle of life.
Too often, women who are child-free by circumstance are left with the sense of not having an appropriate life. And many women who are childfree by choice find themselves vilified as heartless, selfish types lacking some vital quality that would make them “real” women.
A study, conducted in Australia, ‘Unnatural’, ‘Unwomanly’, ‘Uncreditable’ and ‘Undervalued’: The Significance of Being a Childless Woman in Australian Society, states “Thus for women, parenting and the act of mothering are not only presented as desirable, but are in fact seen as the natural expression of their ‘femininity’. While motherhood has been recognized as mostly undervalued in society through holding little material or social status, non-motherhood is often granted even lower prestige.
In the United, a little over 47 percent of women are childless. According to the U.S. Census Bureau’s Current Population Survey, in 2014, 47.6 percent of women between age 15 and 44 had never had children, up from 46.5 percent in 2012. This represents the highest percentage of childless women since the bureau started tracking that data in 1976.
While childlessness is increasingly acknowledged, it is still not completely understood. Where’s The Justice?
There are some like Sezin Koehler, who wrote for The Huffington Post in September: “I don’t need to push a child out of my vagina to be a real woman.”
Or Katharine Hepburn said in, Kate Remembered (by A. Scott Berg, published in July 2003) “I would have been a terrible mother because I’m basically a very selfish human being. Not that that has stopped most people going off and having children.”
Others married late or have medical issues. Some experience failed adoptions; for others, such a route isn’t an option. These women share pain and the hard-won wisdom born from living without that which one wants most.
Mother’s Day is one day a year where we stop to acknowledge that motherhood matters. Not just in the sentimental ways we talk about on Mother’s Day, but in the gritty, lovely, everyday realities of walking the path.
Of course, motherhood is no panacea or walk in the park, as I’ve learned from my friends who are moms. But to me, motherhood is a gift not all of us get, and it shouldn’t be taken for granted.
So today, in addition to the mothers of the world, I’d like to celebrate women who choose to be child-full; we choose to fill our lives with the children we love like our nieces and nephews and friends’ children.
Because whether you choose to bear children or not, there are lots of way to ‘mother.’
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