What a 5th wave might bring mothers.
A feminist fantasy.
Before becoming a mother, I would sometimes read (and judge) what I saw at the time to be the cliche narrative of motherhood being a full time job. My thoughts in response followed along the lines of ‘stop complaining’, ‘get on with it’, ‘it’s a choice you made’, ‘be grateful’ etc.
I would only much later come to understand that they weren’t complaining at all. They were celebrating and congratulating themselves in their daily triumphs of raising the next generation. Given how bitterly wrong this can go (see most recent US election), I would say that present, full-time mothers are quite important right now, but I appreciate and deeply respect that that is not what all of us want.
But what if we truly had the choice?
The other week, as I sat in my therapist’s chair, I said out loud the words, ‘I have never been career driven, and I don’t feel the need to pretend anymore’, and those words truly set me free. This followed on from a discussion we had been having about how few things in this world are as enriching, all-encompassing and uniquely challenging as motherhood. Not only am I at my fullest capacity as a new mother, but my cup is so full that it overflows, and none of that has to do with the career I was told I ought to want.
This might sound like its all about to take a dodgy, trad wife turn, but hear me out. Can the next wave of feminism come full circle and allow us to take pride in being mothers, and mothers alone? This is with deep reverence for the fact that not everyone will want or be able to do this, but can it be respected as as feminist of a choice as being a career gal?
I was raised against the backdrop of a feminism that advocated for women to enjoy the freedoms of men by trying to become like them; from girls being started unreasonably young on the contraceptive pill, often encouraged to use it to ‘skip’ periods on a whim, to the long shadow of basic health neglect caused by things like Margaret Thatcher championing 3-hours-a-night sleeps, which clearly filtered into all of the female pop stars of the early noughties that I desperately looked up to and longed to emulate for their tireless work ethic, brazen capitalism and razor board abs.
In trying to emulate what I saw to be this empowered emblem of womanhood, I ended up feeling like shit for a least half of the month. I wasn’t to know at the time, because there was absolutely zero education on it, but my health (physical, mental and emotional) and energy levels, were and are cyclical. This means that the boss-babe, hustling aspirations only made sense during the ovulation window; the energy boost of the follicular phase that signals that most fertile of times, and maybe on the wane into the luteal phase.
During my teenage years and even some of my early twenties, I tried to cheat the system by taking my contraceptive pill ‘back-to-back’, i.e. bypassing the recommended seven day break that allows your body to have its period, albeit in a controlled manner. The result? Mental and emotional carnage.
Now, of course, there are circumstances in which such contraceptive pill hacks can actually bring great benefit to those who experience intensely painful periods, caused by conditions such as endometriosis, but should such use really be encouraged on the basis that you just feel like not having your period this month?
The contraceptive experience that stayed with me, and not at all in a good way, was the coil. Not least the painful insertion, followed by an inexplicably haunting feeling of violation thereafter that followed me around for days, but the fact that, for the entirety of the time it was in there (I managed about a year) not only did I not have a period, but I had absolutely no sense at all of the phases of my cycle, they just simply weren’t there. I was on hold. Frozen in time. This was in my early twenties, maybe ten years ago now, and looking back from here, from a place where I know intimately the intricately intelligent twists and turns of my cycle; day-to-day, moment-to-moment, that have played their role in making manifest my greatest dream ever, I feel really, really sad that I felt there was no other option.
It is important to say at this point that I am in no way against birth control and I fully advocate for sexual liberation and also the choice to be child-free, and hormonal contraceptives play a big role in both of those things. I just wish that education on all the choices, and the impact they have on your cycle, and how that will make you feel, should also play a part in helping us make an informed choice. I also wish that male contraceptives had a better uptake, but it will take years, lifetimes even, until that hormonal modulation playing field is anywhere near levelled.
What does the future hold?
What form would a 5th wave of feminism take, and what might it hold in store for mothers?
Could you imagine a world that revered maternity? And I mean really revered it, not just a fetishisation of pregnancy and childbirth, only to discard the mother thereafter.
Could you imagine a feminist culture that revered and centred motherhood in the same way that it did career and capital?
For the past five years or so, like many of us perhaps, I have been going through an intense unlearning of so many things that I had previously held in authority. Some of those things, like the lie of a glorious empire and the wars it wrought, were easy to let go of. Other things, like the feminism I had grown up with, with its ignorance of intersections and its man-made love of capitalism, took a little bit longer. Is it really feminism when it is moulded in the image of the patriarchy?
I instead envisage a true matriarchy, where the mother, in all her forms, is at the centre. I’m not just talking about mothers who give birth to babies in the conventional sense. I’m talking about mother earth. I’m talking about respecting and correctly compensating roles that are inherently maternal and so integral to the wellbeing of society, like nursing and midwifery.
In Hinduism, the belief is held that there are seven mothers in your life. They are:
The biological mother.
The wife of your guru (spiritual teacher that you get from 5 years of age).
The wife of the sage (philosophical leaders of society, whose wives would help ground their intense spirituality into earthly reality).
The queen.
The cow.
The nurse/caregiver.
The earth.
Together, these seven aspects of Mother make up the creative and energetic force (Shakti) that animates the cosmic consciousness (Shiva). Hindu sages knew that we couldn’t have one without the other, and yet in modern society we seem to have forgotten the necessary interplay between the two. This might explain a lot with regards to the current state of the world.
How could that change? What could be done now to create a future in which some semblance of harmony is restored? If you look at the list above, I am sure that you can link the seven mothers to seven equal, if not similar figures in your close and wider communities. Are they all respected? Are they all centred? Are they all compensated for their roles?
In my fantasy 5th wave of feminism, the mother takes the lead.
For those that choose to conceive, carry and nurture the next generation, not only should there be maternity pay, but further significant material support to allow them to mother in a way that will not only deeply nourish their children, but replenish them too. If we had grown up under mothers who had enjoyed this, how different would our lives be? How different would society be?
As well as learning from academics, professors and hard data, could we as a society also give credence to the more subtler revelations of wisdom traditions passed on from our mothers and grandmothers? Could we let these knowings balance the findings?
Can we be more conscious in our consumption of mother earth and all her resources that are, as much as so many people try to deny, finite. Can we unlearn the feverish need to take, take and take without any efforts to replace and replenish? Can we repair the damage we have done to our great mother earth? I think that we can, but I don’t know if we will.