And it's one that has stuck around despite the best efforts to debunk it.
 | By Cornelia Channing Editorial Assistant, Sunday Opinion |
In the poem "The Raincoat" by Ada Limón, the speaker reflects on health problems she had as a child and the hours she spent in the car with her mother on long drives to see specialists. |
In the final lines, the speaker — now an adult — sees a woman on the street give her raincoat to her daughter, and has this revelation: "My god, / I thought, my whole life I've been under her / raincoat thinking it was somehow a marvel / that I never got wet." |
It's a quiet, stirring poem, and it gets at something defining about motherhood. We take mothers — their selflessness and care, their love and self-sacrifice — for granted. It isn't until years later (if ever) that we recognize how much they did for us. But why is that? |
In a guest essay this week, the journalist Chelsea Conaboy offers one explanation: We expect so much of mothers because we have been told that it is simply in the nature of a mother to be nurturing and put her children first. We have been told her selflessness is a fact of biology, an innate instinct. It's a tidy, comforting story. But is it true? |
According to Conaboy, it isn't. Her essay, which was adapted from her forthcoming book, "Mother Brain," unravels the concept of "maternal instinct," tracing its origins back through biblical representations of mothers and Darwin's theory of evolution. Conaboy argues that maternal instinct as we know it is a kind of social fiction — one that reinforces retrograde gender norms and which, despite the social progress of recent decades, we have never been able to fully let go of. It also places a harmful primacy on biological motherhood that minimizes the importance of other parents — including fathers and adoptive and nonbinary parents — in a child's life. |
Conaboy invites us to imagine an alternative model of parenthood that is less essentializing and more expansive, and encourages us to think deeply about what it means to care for others. Maybe if we were better able to appreciate the complexity of parenthood, we wouldn't take the raincoat for granted, no matter who is placing it on our shoulders. |
Here's what we're focusing on today: |
Forward this newsletter to friends to share ideas and perspectives that will help inform their lives. They can sign up here. Do you have feedback? Email us at opiniontoday@nytimes.com. |
Contact us If you have questions about your Times account, delivery problems or other issues, visit our Help Page or contact The Times. |
|
No comments:
Post a Comment