After my parent’s divorce was final, Mum moved us to London so that we could be closer to Dad. She wanted to make it easier for us to see him, she explained. It was 1985. In London, all the buildings were big, and the streets were filled with people you never saw more than once.
Swapping sleepy country lanes for the sophistication of the city felt like one step closer to being a grownup – and at age nine, I could not wait to be a full-grown woman. This was also the year that the Madonna classic Desperately Seeking Susan came out – a move and a movie that would make for an intoxicating cocktail of influence when it came to my ideas about what this even meant.
Given that I was too young to see the movie in a theatre, and taking into account that it would have taken a year or so for it to be released on VHS back then, let’s assume that I was ten years old when I sunk into Dad’s battered corduroy sofa with the cat- scratched arms, squished between my brother and Dad’s new girlfriend, to watch the film. I snuck a sideways glance at her. She was ten years younger than my father and as tall as him. She had a loud, confident laugh, and she wore her hair in a sleek, shiny bob. I got the feeling she was also part of the reason we’d moved to the city.
Madonna’s character in the film, the Susan of the title, was a gum-chewing, loose-limbed rock chick who lived out of a battered drum case lined with pink satin and adorned with graffiti skulls. I couldn’t take my eyes off her. Watching the scene where she arrived in New York City at the Port Authority Bus Terminal, headed to the restroom, blasted her underarms with the hand drier, and opened up the case to change into a black lace tank, it was as if I had been picked up from my spot on the sofa and transported into my future.
But nowhere in my future as a woman did I see myself as a mum.
Having grown up around pregnant and nursing women, it was clear to me that women and babies went together like hot milk and honey. As for my mum, she worked because she had to; her primary and most precious identity was that of “mother.” But as I matured and the potential paths my life might take began to reveal themselves, the womanly experiences of pregnancy, childbirth, and childrearing did not even cross my mind as possibilities to be rejected. Which just wasn’t normal. Was it? Girl children are indoctrinated with the message that womanhood is synonymous with motherhood from the word go. Aren’t we?
“In some ways, forgoing motherhood in favour of doing literally anything else with your life is the final frontier in women’s fight for equality.”
Until relatively recently, the answer to the above has been an unequivocal yes. Being female has meant being socialised to aspire to the role of mother.
But the pervasive ambivalence about motherhood among my generation and younger, and the numbers in which we are either putting it off or opting out full stop, suggests that this is no longer the case – that we are the ones who are destined to rewrite this script for good. After all, the past four decades have also brought forth untold alternative role models for what a woman can be – and more emerge with each new generation. She is an artist, a director, a CEO. A traveller, an activist, a whistleblower, a W.I.T.C.H. (Woman in Total Control of Herself ). She is the vice president of the United States. She is trans; she can even be a he or a they.
The question What is woman if not mother? used to draw a blank at best. But I say she is whoever the fuck she wants to be. In some ways, forgoing motherhood in favour of doing literally anything else with your life is the final frontier in women’s fight for equality. The ultimate expression of my body, my choice. So why is it, then, that outside of a few progressive circles, non-motherhood remains such a stigmatized, deviant path? Why, no matter what other roles she might perform and what other roads she may travel down in her life, is a woman still not seen as complete until she becomes a mom?