Don't Mind Me, I Just Woke Up

Photo by dvxfilmerdoug.

I came across this quote in The Maternal Is Political.

Motherhood these days is like zigzagging around in bumper cars. The fun-house music keeps getting louder and faster, and the moms in the bumper cars keep going in tighter little circles, and though some cars are fancier than others, we are all prisoners of the apparatus, which is a culture that treats children as sentimental objects or consumers or inconveniences — as anything but people. And I wonder: How do you stage a bumper car revolt?

— Tracy Thompson

Beside the nice visual of bumper cars and successfully conveying the sting of social injustice, what strikes me most about this quote is precisely what most people, especially those with the interests of mothers and children and families in mind, forget.

Children are people.

So does that mean one way to stage a revolt is to treat children as people?

I'm already giving that a try.

And from The Price of Motherhood, which I also recently read:

To most women choice is all about bad options and difficult decisions: your child or your profession; taking on the domestic chores or marital strife; a good night's sleep or time with your child; food on the table or your baby's safety; your right arm or your left. ... What about the mothers who have no choice but to entrust their children to untrustworthy caretakers? Is this really their choice, or society's choice?

It is suggestive how few people talk about choice in this broader sense; how few liberals or conservatives question the choices that male legislators make, when they write tax codes that confiscate mothers' earnings; the choices that employers make, when they resist a shorter working day; the choices that [partners] make when they act as if child care were wholly [a woman's responsibility]. These are the choices that frame and drastically shrink the choices a woman is able to make.

— Ann Crittenden

Or if you'd rather hear it from a poet:

What look like female values are regulations of society at large: to protect, conserve, love and rescue life. It is because these are demanded as actions and attitudes from individual women and not [also] from a social structure that women are oppressed.

— Frigga Haug, "Daydreams"

So, it looks like another way to stage a revolt is to change the choices society offers us.

Maybe like this or this.

Seems as though my heart (I'm a mother) and my head (I'm a feminist) got together and made a little baby called politics.

(I know! I'm a little late to the party... But it's better than driving around in that bumper car forever.)

I'm off to cast my vote this morning! See you at the polls!!

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Last year, I was writing about first child syndrome.