When I became a mother, I lost my body?

[Sizzlysausage]

Has anyone else read this?

When I became a mother, I lost my body – and realized it never belonged to me | Life and style | The Guardian

I am really fascinated by it - the author describes many deprivations and challenges surrounding motherhood. As just one example:

The motherhood content I located online and the advice I read in parenting books told me that mothers should study and perform model parenting at the cost of all else, and meet their child’s needs with monkish detachment.

It's not that I necessarily disagree with this but I just can't identify with it. Where are all these books and online content? I don't think I read any of it! Of course, there are tensions and compromises but my expectations of motherhood were that (like most things in life) sometimes it would be great, sometimes really shit, often just fairly ordinary and routine (ordinary can be good!), and that is pretty much how it has been. I knew motherhood would change my life, but I don't think I ever felt I had to sacrifice my entire being to motherhood and if I thought about it at all, I think I thought I'd be a far from perfect mother (who is?) but I hoped I wouldn't be terrible because, after all, most of life is muddling through.

I am slightly struggling with articulating this but - as a feminist who is very aware of the motherhood penalty at work for example - I do sometimes wonder about these very doomy depictions. If you have any privilege, including for example an involved partner and healthy kids, is the extent to which motherhood 'devours you,' as this author suggests at least to some extent, a matter of choice?

I am sure I am missing something really important so please do set me right. Is there a circularity here: if you expect so much from motherhood and put so much in, you are bound to be disappointed?

@meanderingbrook hear hear.

Thank you @nibblemonster

Thank you for starting this thread op - much to think about. I'm sorry the conversation was derailed by irrelevant, bombastic and somewhat ignorant posts - always one 🙄

it definitely got a bit bombastic! maybe someone just venting some anger. Muchlike the original author of the article venting her sorrow.

we all gotta vent, we all gotta keep each other on course

Judas, I saw two documentaries on the Magdalene Laundries, including one on 60 Minutes (US news documentary show)... and a fictional movie treatment. I think I have a reasonable knowledge of what they were. I said they were in Ireland, which is true. I said they operated mostly during the 50s and 60s... I think they hung on a bit into the 70s but were greatly diminished by then. (Part of the documentary, I believe, is that a couple of the women escaped or had family members rescue them and this started getting the stories out.)

They took in women, mostly (but not all!) pregnant as what we Americans would call a "foundling home"... or home for unwed mothers. After birth, the children were adopted out to "good homes" (married Catholic families). Some of these were in the USA! I imagine some were in Ireland and Britain as well. The women would remain, having no way to leave or get a job in society and the nuns exploited them as unpaid laundry workers. (Some of the reason this diminished is by the late 1960s, the laundry was being done in machines and not by hand... they couldn't utilize so many workers.)

At least some of the women were not even pregnant, but were locked up for promiscuity or even just premarital sex, and at least one example was a girl whose family THOUGHT she was too pretty & flirtatious and that she MIGHT sleep around. So it was very outrageous abuses.

I am not sure what you feel I wrote that is "100% incorrect here". It did not exist in the US (which was never predominantly Catholic anyways) and I never heard of it in Canada or Italy or Poland. It seems uniquely Irish. It might be that it started EARLIER than the 50s or post WWII, but that was not clear to me in the films, and anyways... that long ago, the surviving women would be deceased and no good records. The reason we KNOW this today is that the survivors have come forward to tell their stories.

So what is your DISPUTE here? that I have misreported the story of the Magdalene Laundries? or that it somehow "proves" that there is structural inequality?... in mid-20th century IRELAND? (a tiny, powerless nation of 5 million white people with no diversity?) How would abuses in IRELAND 70 years mean structural inequality in 20th century Britain or USA?