Occupation and borders in motherhood

Recently, I commented here about the book/film "The Lost Daughter". On the internet, there were those who judged the protagonist as a bad mother, a woman who should not have become a mother, as she did not meet the requirements to be a "good mother". A mother who has shown herself, at times, to be impatient, intolerant, even aggressive. But what led you to this state of impatience, of intolerance? What made her leave and leave her daughters? How many "things" and/or people failed for her to reach this condition?

Having children, it is well known, requires renunciations. Naivety would be to think that life would remain the same with the arrival of a new being, totally dependent and helpless. But what is the boundary between What actually needs to be renounced and what, on the contrary, needs to be preserved?

One of the great challenges of motherhood is to understand and accept that a child is someone else, that is, someone separate, someone else. Children are raised for the world, they say. This includes thinking of them as whole people, with their own interests, goals, quirks, skills, difficulties. I think that the school, for example, is a fundamental space for this exercise. It constitutes a place that belongs to the child and where he can be who he is independently of his parents; where she establishes relationships with her peers and where she establishes bonds with other adults; where he performs activities away from the eyes of his parents.

I feel that we have advanced a lot in this sense, of thinking of children as subjects, of not demanding or expecting from them things that, for example, they are not yet mature enough to do. It seems that we have better calibrated the demands in relation to them, as well as we have been more willing to listen to what they have to say about what they think and feel about themselves and the world.

I make the caveat here that when I write this, I am talking about a certain childhood, a group of children who have a series of guaranteed rights, as well as mothers with a certain condition of life. I will deal with this more specifically in a future text.

Children are then whole persons, they are "others", so to speak. It is a fact (or should be). However, sometimes I see that parents are forgotten — but here I am going to speak specifically of the mother — that the mother is also a person. It also has its interests, demands, desires, goals, dreams. And here it is crucial to highlight that many of these do not include the child. See what a surprise, The mother is also a person, independent of the child(ren)!

In Other text , I talked about how a child occupies time and space. Inevitable. Gestation itself is already in itself a moment in which boundaries are erased, or blurred. The mother's body is, to some extent, invaded by another body, which grows and develops there for months. This state limits certain freedoms, preventing them from performing activities that were previously commonplace, such as restrictions on eating or physical activities. After the birth of the baby, with breastfeeding, his body continues to be shared with another.

However, there is a sensitive border that, in my view, if crossed, could pose a threat to both parties. It is when the occupation effectively becomes an invasion, when the occupation passes into the semantic field of war. Someone misappropriates a territory, someone who shouldn't be there enters. This invasion can be experienced as a threat to the very existence of the woman, as a person independent of her children, with interests and potential achievements outside the domestic environment. It is at this point that the owner of this territory can raise its defenses and, most of the time, without realizing it, act aggressively, trying to preserve its space, to ensure its existence.

There is a tiredness that is practically expected when you have small children, but I am talking here about something that is beyond tiredness. I'm talking about when a mother's life starts to be reduced to taking care of her children, of a strenuous routine, without breaks, and that is not done by choice. I am talking about maternal loneliness, the incessant care of a child for days and days on end, when basic needs, such as bathing, eating and sleeping, become "self-care", they become privileges. I am talking about when the mother is slowly erased as a subject, crushed by motherhood.

It is necessary to break with the romanticized idea of the mother as a selfless being, unrestrictedly dedicated to her children, an enlightened being, infinitely kind and loving. It is necessary to humanize mothers, to take them out of the place of "warriors", superpowered heroines. When a mother is found in a state of deprivation — in the most diverse senses — it is necessary to ask herself what or who failed; He failed to truly see her, failed to give her minimal conditions to play other roles, failed to enable her to be who she is beyond mother.