Becoming a Real Mother by Not Playing It Straight
by Karen H. Senecal-Davis
At the beginning of the song, “What It Feels Like For A Girl”, a female voice explains: “Girls can wear jeans/And cut their hair short/Wear shirts and boots/cause it’s okay to be a boy/But for a boy to look like a girl is degrading/cause you think being a girl is degrading” (Madonna & Sigsworth, 2000, track 8). I grew up believing that it was not only okay to be a boy, it was also safer to be a boy. Boys, I thought, didn’t get raped or beaten by their spouses. And boys grew up to be men. Men had careers but could still be playful. Girls, if they had children, become women. Women, had to sacrifice and accommodate. Becoming a woman/mother meant losing your sense of self, whereas men were always developing their senses of self. It was continuous. Men were always in the process of becoming men. Women were always being identified by how they were in relation to others. I grew up wanting to play shortstop for the Boston Red Sox. When I was prepubescent this was considered cute and something I was grow out of. Soon, it was expected, my longing to be a mother, which I read as to stop having fun, would kick in and I would relinquish my boyish ways.
“I was a kid that you would like/Just a small boy on her bike/Riding topless, yeah, I never cared who saw/My neighbor would come outside to say ‘Get your shirt,’ I said ‘No way/It’s the last time I’m not breaking any law” (Williams, 1995, track 1). When I was a boy I tucked my ponytail inside my baseball hat. When I was a boy I did not have to worry about becoming a mother. Boys do not get pregnant and lose their sense of self. Even when I got too old to be a boy, I did not fully assimilate into the dominant culture’s understanding of femininity. As a lesbian, most of the prejudice that has been directed against me has been derived from a perceived violation of my gender role. For instance, I am much more likely to be accosted when I am dressed in a more androgynous and less obviously feminine way. A few years ago, my partner and I were walking to dinner in gay-friendly Greenwich Village. I was wearing a baseball cap over my short cropped hair. A man walked by and shouted “Dyke! What are you supposed to be? Are you a man or a woman? Make up your mind.” He then proceeded to douse us with ketchup and spit at us.
The way I dress suggests to many that I am not trying to attract a male partner (Schope & Elisaon, 2004) and this makes me a violator of the female sex role. This is what makes me dangerous to some people in our society. This is why wearing a baseball hat can be so dangerous for me. You are not really a woman until you become a mother and cannot be a “real woman” if you have a homosexual identity. I internalized my culture’s ideas of acceptable gender behavior. I absorbed the values that the dominant culture ascribes to gender-role appropriateness. During early adolescence, I was forced to see myself as being like my mother - a woman. As my body developed into a woman’s body, I saw that I was physically like my mother in her femaleness. I became fearful that I was destined to become a mother, which I had somehow internalized to mean an impotent woman living within the rigid boundaries of a closed family system ruled by a misogynist.
As an adolescent undergoing the process of leaving my “mother of childhood,” (Levy-Warren, 1996, p. 62) I had to see myself as both like my mother and different from my mother. I did not “become” a lesbian as a way to differentiate from my mother; however, as a lesbian I am different from my mother because the world sees us so very differently. Some of the assumptions that society makes about my mother are as follows: she is a woman. She is a mother. She is straight. She is married. Some of the assumptions that society makes about me: I am gender deviant (not really a woman). I am not a mother. I am not in a monogamous relationship. People define my mother, rightly or wrongly, by what they assume she is --- affirming her by today’s cultural norms. People define me by what they assume I’m not. In essence, negating me.
The need to differentiate from my mother was a developmental necessity, but it was also fueled by my desire to immerse myself in my lesbian identity so as to cope with my self as a lesbian. Surrounding myself with other lesbian women was a way of dealing with being the other in a predominately heterosexual environment. The process of establishing a self-derived identity elicited feelings of guilt and shame because on a certain level I had rejected crucial aspects of my mother’s identity. As a lesbian, I felt I could neither be a real woman nor a mother. For much of my young adult life, I struggled to know just what it was that I had rejected and what it was I had lost in the separation-individuation process.
Like so many lesbians who have dis-identified with their mothers, I could not envision myself as a mother, because I could not see myself as a legitimate woman (Schwartz, 2005). It was not until I could accept myself as a woman that I could safely acknowledge my deep desire to be a mother. The tomboy who fielded ground balls for the Doyle Street Relators Little League team also fantasized about becoming a mother. These fantasies were repressed not only because I was afraid to become a real girl/woman but also I recognized that I had no desire to carry a child. There was no visible or readily available cultural identification for me at that time. I knew I couldn’t grow up to be a father. I didn’t want to be a father or nondescript parent. And so I repressed my longing to be a mother until I met the love of my life.
In The Art of Loving Fromm (1956) wrote “mature love is union under the condition of preserving one’s integrity, one’s individuality...love makes [man] overcome his sense of isolation and separateness, yet it permits him to be himself, to retain his integrity (p. 19). My partnership with Barbara fits this description of “mature love.” Our union has helped me to realize that not being female like my mother does not mean I am not a real woman. Barbara is attracted to me because I am a woman. Like so many lesbians who have dis-identified with their mothers, I could not envision myself as a mother, because I could not see myself as a real woman (Schwartz, 2005). It was not until I could accept myself as a legitimate woman that I could safely acknowledge my deep desire to be a mother.
A question that has been asked of me and Barbara is “how did you two decide who would carry the babies?” Once, an acquaintance of ours followed the question with another question: “Did you flip a coin?” Implicit in these questions, I believe, is the longing to know why a woman would not carry a child given the opportunity. It is only “natural,” it is assumed, for women of childbearing years to want the experience of becoming a birth mother. For many well thought out reasons, Barbara did want the experience of bearing a child and fortunately her biology cooperated with her. For many complicated reasons, I didn’t want this experience. So, how did I become a mother to two beautiful girls?On December 16, 2006, Barbara and I became parents for the first time. We are co-mothers in a lesbian co-parent family. The day we welcomed our oldest daughter into the world marked the beginning of another identity transformation for me. As the process of coming to terms with a lesbian identity changed my experience of self (I had to come to terms with my internalized homophobia and I had to deconstruct my internalized representations of femininity) motherhood has also evoked changes in my experience of self. The heteronormative culture in which we live still regards motherhood as the standard by which femininity and womanhood are measured. Of course, in this culture lesbian mothers are of lesser value than married heterosexual mothers, but still motherhood pulls lesbians into the expected role prescribed for women by a male-dominated society.
Not long after I heard Hannah’s crackly little cry announcing her arrival I knew I was a mother. Society has raised numerous questions regarding my authenticity and adequacy as a mother because I am not Hannah’s biological mother. I was not pregnant with her and I did not carry her to term. Many cannot reconcile how I can call myself mutti -- the German word for mother that we are having our children call me. Our lesbian co-parent family is fraught with ideological and political implications. We find ourselves caught between resistance and assimilation. We want to challenge conventional notions of family and we want to fit into the mainstream of society. Our family, by its very existence, challenges fundamental patriarchal notions of gender relationships.
When people discover that Barbara is the birth mother, they make the assumption that she is also our daughters’ primary caregiver and I am the wage earner. The supposition being that since Barbara had the desire to give birth she must be the feminine gender in the relationship and therefore more suited for domestic work. I must be the masculine gender, the lesbian father because my journey to becoming a parent was (and still is) a social labor --- actions that I take, legal and otherwise, to ensure and protect my status as a real parent (Sullivan, 2004). In reality, Barbara is responsible for the task of breadwinning and I have taken on the majority of the childcare and housework responsibilities. Gender seems to be produced through the work that we do (p. 98). Perhaps Barbara and I are gender benders.
During her pregnancies, Barbara worried about her lesbian identity. From prenatal yoga to breast-feeding class to the waiting room in her OBGYN’s office, she passed as a heterosexual woman. She began to wonder if she was still a legitimate lesbian. However, there has never been any question to the legitimacy of her relationship to our daughters. She is unequivocally Hannah and Emma’s mother.
I am fortunate to live in a state that allowed me to legally become my daughters’ mother. Although my name is listed on their birth certificates, there is still a question to who I am. Mother is not an easy concept to deconstruct because of its range of implications including legal, political, personal, cultural, theoretical, and clinical (Drescher, Glazer, Crespi, & Schwartz, 2005). It is not my name on Hannah and Emma’s birth certificate that establishes me as the mother of my daughters. It is really the manner in which I relate to Hannah and Emma and signify to them a deep sense of their own legitimacy that makes me Hannah and Emma’s mutti.
I feel ashamed of myself when I let a reference to my husband pass when I am playing with my daughters in the park. I am pretending that Barbara, Hannah and Emma’s mommy is not the love of my life and subsequently that I am not Hannah and Emma’s mutti. And for a moment, these beautiful little girls, that I would give my life to protect, are not related to me. There is no cultural category by which I, as the non-biological mother, can signify my identity as a parent to the outside world. When trying to explain to strangers my relationship to Hannah, and Emma I often define myself by what I am not; I define myself in negative terms (Sullivan, 2004).
When Hannah was a baby, Barbara and I had to take her to the emergency room. The person doing the initial assessment asked, “Who is the child’s mother?” We answered, “We both are.” And then we were asked, “Who is the real mother?” This time the attending was looking directly at me when she asked the question, probably because I was holding Hannah in my arms. I pointed to Barbara and said, “I am not her birth mother, she is.” For the rest of the evening, even when my sobbing daughter choose to cling to me for support, every question about Hannah’s first fifteen months of life was directed to Hannah’s biological mother. I felt like the peripheral parent (Drescher, et al., 2005). With one question, “Who is the real mother?,” our triadic family structure had been reduced to a dyad. I was relegated to the position of compassionate outside observer. I had no standing as a guardian much less my daughter’s mother. At the moment Hannah had one legitimate mother. The woman who gave birth to her.
The trouble with defining myself by what I am not is that I end up reinforcing the dominant culture’s myths about real mothers and real women instead of challenging them. When I relinquished my parental rights, because they were not automatically established or culturally definable, in the emergency room, I accepted the propaganda of our heteronormative society as fact that I must garner permission for parental status instead of being allowed to claim it. The negative identifications I use to try and describe a socially and psychologically complex relational experience erode my confidence as a mother. When I describe myself by what I am not, I am reinforcing all the negative things that I have internalized about being a lesbian – not being feminine enough, not being a real woman, and not fit to be a mother.
I carry a copy of my daughters’ birth certificates everywhere I go. It documents my legal standing as their parent. Hannah and Emma are either my daughters, or they are not. Having to define myself negatively is like covering up my name on their birth certificates. These negative identifications force me to cover up my girls as well which weakens our mother-daughter bond. My sense of legitimacy impacts Hannah and Emma’s sense of legitimacy.
A few years ago, when my daughter was in nursery school there was a class meeting to discuss a Mother’s Day art project. Hannah announced to the class that she would need enough materials for two projects. A classmate asked her, “Why?” Hannah replied, “Because I have two mommies.” The boy asked, again, “Why?” Hannah’s response was “I’m lucky. How many mothers do you have?” He answered, “Just one.” “Oh, that’s too bad,” said Hannah. My daughter has been legitimated by her two real mothers. And her role as our daughter legitimates us.
References
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Sullivan, M. (2004). The Family of Woman: Lesbian Mothers, Their Children, and the Undoing of Gender. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.
Williams, D. (1995). When I was a boy. On The Honesty Room [CD]. New York: Razor & Tie.