What is a mother?

On motherhood and gender.

This topic has been brewing for some time for me; bubbling up in the back of my brain, finally it passed the liminal threshold from subconscious to conscious thought. What shepherded it over that line, funnily enough, was the podcast series The Witch Trials of J.K. Rowling.

I didn’t go in search of this particular podcast, I was, in fact, searching for ‘witchy’ playlists on Spotify, when this came up, but I thought, ok, go on then, because I am a sucker for a long, extensively produced podcast series, plus my social media sabbatical has primed me for the consumption of long form, complex and dissenting conversations, which allow you to engage in this cool new thing called critical thinking.

This podcast has nothing to do with motherhood, and, having listened to all seven episodes, the erudite Rowling remains confused and, although she won’t admit it, conflicted, but steadfast nonetheless, as I find a lot of erudite individuals often are, when their strongly held opinions are challenged.

As an author, it makes sense that J.K. Rowling is particularly preoccupied with language and the correct naming of a thing, with a word that she deems to be acceptable, sensical. I too can be a grammar pedant, and when I hear a word used incorrectly, it can make the hairs on the back of my neck stand up, and not in a great way.

When my daughter was very young and we were experiencing feeding issues, I had to explore many means of getting her fed, along with the help of medical professionals. Being fed via a tube meant that I had to express breast milk to put down it, and this is commonly abbreviated to EBM, at least here in the UK’s National Health Service. On one occasion however, a junior doctor kept referring to it as ‘human milk’. This piqued my curiosity and, briefly, my annoyance. It annoyed me because getting a substantial amount of breast milk from my breasts, for a baby that wasn’t feeding well, had been a huge uphill struggle and a very, very hard won feat. Momentarily, I felt that by removing the word ‘breast’, which signified the very thing from which this magical byproduct of motherhood came, my whole experience and effort was at once devalued.

But then I remembered, its only a word.

Not only is it just a word, but the whole experience of breastfeeding, heart-wrenchingly challenging for me though it was, does not compare to the pervasive knowing that your entire identity is largely denied by the world around you.

Yes, I am going to talk about gender.

I told my husband that I planned to write about this, to which he simply replied ‘be careful’, and I get that, because the internet is a very reactionary place, but I think that it would be remiss of me to avoid this topic, given that I write a whole publication about motherhood, championing the matriarchy. Its probably a good time to clarify who I think mothers really are.