Episode 162 - The Patriarchal Double-Bind of Motherhood
Patriarchy asks mothers to hold themselves to impossible standards and then blames them when they struggle. In this episode, I’m revisiting the patriarchal double-bind through the lens of motherhood and unpacking the expectations women are expected to follow all at once. We’ve become accustomed to policing others and ourselves based on the rules we’ve been taught a “good mother” should follow, while the realities of exhaustion, isolation, grief, resentment, and needing help are treated as personal failures. But motherhood is beautiful and hard, and acknowledging that both things can exist simultaneously is what begins to set women free. Here’s what I cover:
Why motherhood is such a clear example of the patriarchal double-bind
How social media often pressures women to hide the difficult parts of motherhood
Why women are taught that needing help means failure and how that isolates mothers
The realities of parental leave and childcare that reveal how unsupported mothers actually are
How fear keeps women silent about motherhood and why telling the truth feels so risky
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Transcript
00:58
My sister sent me a reel last week, and a comedian is explaining this coping mechanism that she has for hard moments. And this is her strategy. I thought it was hilarious.
01:10
She mentally adds a baby to whatever awful thing is currently happening. So are you stuck in traffic? Mentally add a baby. Are you waiting in a long line? Add a baby. Is your flight being canceled or delayed?
01:27
Do you have diarrhea in the bathroom? Are you up against like a tight project deadline? Add a baby. And then mentally, she takes the baby away. And then suddenly everything feels manageable, right? That she's relieved.
01:44
Sometimes she was describing like genuinely physically relieved that it's only diarrhea or only a flight cancellation and not diarrhea plus an infant. And I watched it a couple of times. I thought it was funny.
01:57
And when I went to the comments, I was happy and then also not surprised because there were a lot of women in the comments saying, yes, you know, thank you. This is something we don't talk about enough.
02:14
Motherhood is hard. I agree. I have three kids and I agree. And then there were other comments. And I have no empirical evidence for this, but I think years ago, there might have been more comments like the ones I'm about to tell you about.
02:28
I'm hoping we're getting kinder toward women and mothers and motherhood in general. But it's interesting that there still are comments that were tearing the comedian apart and then shaming the mothers who were saying, like, yes, this is funny.
02:48
I sometimes have a hard time with my kids. And so I wanted to just revisit the patriarchal double bind. I talked about this in some previous episodes, and I can link to those in the show notes, where patriarchy gives women two impossible standards that are meant to be kept at the same time.
03:10
And motherhood is one of them. Because while there are some women in the comments of this video agreeing and, you know, happy that someone is empathizing with how hard it is to have a baby. The other comments were so emblematic of how we are taught to think about being a mother.
03:34
One of them said, you know, if this is hard, you're doing it wrong. Another one, being a mother is a privilege. Another one, you have no idea how joyful it is to be a mom. And another one, you're a bad mom if this is how you feel about your kids.
03:53
And I wasn't surprised. Like I said, I was happy that there were probably the majority positive comments and people were laughing. But women are completely unaware of how much internalized sexism and patriarchy we are carrying around.
04:11
And that comes out when women drag other women who don't follow the rules. These are women who are doing the work of the system, patriarchy, so that the system doesn't have to do it, right? We are policing each other and policing ourselves.
04:30
And I want to unpack a little bit of what's happening because it, again, speaks to the double bind that patriarchy puts women in, where they are supposed to act a very specific way to be quote unquote right.
04:46
And then that way actually defies the actual experience of the thing. And here's what I mean by that. A good example of a double blind is like a woman is supposed to be virginal and pure and also sexy and know exactly how to please a man, right?
05:06
You can't keep both of those at the same time. And being one kind of defies the existence of the other. And in motherhood, it works a little differently because the reality is motherhood is beautiful and also hard.
05:22
And patriarchy does not let you or it doesn't do a good job of letting you acknowledge that both things are true. And what ends up happening instead is that other women enforce a set of rules, shaming and policing everyone who dares to talk about the hard parts about motherhood because of what it means about them.
05:47
And I'm going to talk a little bit more about that. I also want to say this, this rule book that I'm about to describe, the rules of motherhood, is really specifically written for women who are white, Western, and middle class.
06:02
And this is the kind of woman whose motherhood has always been held up as the standard in parenting books, on social media, and in society. And social media in particular has done something particularly insidious.
06:16
It's taken this very one version of motherhood, the white, middle class, Western, curated, grateful, hallmark version, and made it the wallpaper of a lot of people's lives. You don't have to have grown up with these rules to absorb them when you bump into them all over the place in advertising, on social media.
06:44
And I just want to acknowledge that other cultural groups and communities have different rules around motherhood. And they have, in a lot of cases, a lot more communal, a lot more healthy, supportive rules around motherhood.
06:58
But this white Western version kind of seeps into everything. And so that's what I'm going to focus on today. So rules. The commenters in that reel were dragging the other women because they had broken these unwritten rules that women are handed in this culture.
07:20
And for the record, I am Latina, but I am white passing. And I grew up in a very white centric home, even though my mom's Mexican. And so I really identify with this. You don't have to be white. I don't consider myself white to have been infiltrated by these rules.
07:42
So these rules don't come all at once. They're not in like a syllabus that you get handed at one point that you can point to and read through and either accept or reject. It comes in pieces. It comes from your mother.
07:59
It comes from church, from television, from the way people respond when you tell them that you're expecting. And it accumulates quietly. And I think that we are not aware of how often we are bumping up against these rules because they're so subconscious.
08:19
And I want to name a couple of them. Number one, rule number one is you asked for this. Whether that is literally true is almost beside the point. In our very Western individualist, pull yourself up by your bootstraps culture, even if you're recovering from childhood, once you are a mother, your suffering is your own fault.
08:41
You chose this, which means that any complaint, any struggle, or any honest reckoning with how difficult it is is self-indulgent. Like, listen, you signed up for this. You don't get to be surprised. You don't get to be overwhelmed.
08:59
You chose this. We have this idea that individuals are the total of their own choices and not the choices of the system that they live in or the options of the system that they live in. And so that really comes out in motherhood.
09:16
If you choose to have a baby, then you chose every single thing about it that is hard. And that means you should just shut up about it. Rule number two, you are supposed to love being a mom so that other women also want to be moms.
09:36
And that love is supposed to be so totally overwhelming and encompassing that it transcends the physical reality of what is happening in your body and your life. I remember telling my husband after having a C-section and I said something like, my life is nothing but blood and shit right now.
09:59
And that felt accurate, but I'm not allowed to say that, right? I'm not allowed to say that to another woman because number one, I chose it. And number two, I'm supposed to let the way being a mom takes over your entire life be something happy that I protect other people from the reality of.
10:20
Because if I accidentally poison the well, so to speak, and they don't want to have children because of what I am sharing about my experience, then that's on me. Rule number three, you shouldn't need help.
10:35
This one is crucial, A, because you chose it, and needing help is evidence of failure. Good mothers figure it out. They find the system that works and they keep trying until they do. And they have to make it look easy or at least manageable.
10:53
You certainly don't get to be angry at crying babies when you don't know how to make them stop. If motherhood is natural, quote unquote, and women are born to be nurturers, if you're struggling with that, then there is something wrong with you.
11:09
And of course, that women are nurturers and that motherhood is natural are two of the biggest patriarchal rules for women. So if you're struggling, that's a you problem. There is this insidious kind of unspoken rule that can be traced right back to our puritanical roots as a country, especially in the United States.
11:34
When Eve fucked everything up by eating the apple and God said that her punishment, this is in the Bible, Genesis, that he would, quote, greatly multiply her pain in conception and childbearing. Basically saying, Ya Eve, as your punishment, having a child is going to be painful and childbearing is going to be painful.
11:58
And that is your punishment. And so suffering in childbirth and child rearing is part of the deal of being a woman. So you shouldn't need help with that. It's what is innate to your lot in life. Rule number four, you should be grateful that you get to be a mom.
12:20
And you can't just feel grateful. You have to demonstrate it. You have to think about all the people who want to be moms and can't. You have to think of how it will affect your children if they see you being frustrated or sad about how hard it is sometimes to be a mom.
12:38
When someone, this happened to me in church, I was holding a screaming toddler and chasing another one. I was frustrated. I was hot. I was sweaty. I had to pee. And an older woman walking down the hall looked at me and just smiled and said, you know, these are the best days of your life.
12:57
You're going to miss these. If someone says that to you, you have to smile and agree. You do not get to complain about the privilege of being a mom if you're going to be a good mom. Number five is kind of similar to number two about, you know, protecting other people from the truth about motherhood, but it goes a little deeper.
13:18
You have to protect everyone else from your reality. So women who don't have kids, your own kids, your mom, friends, your church congregation, you have to manage their experience of your motherhood so that it stays pleasant and doesn't disturb them.
13:39
Because there are two things they should not know about, how hard it really is to have kids and how you are experiencing being a mom. If you are grieving about your past life, if you are grieving about the way your body has gone through massive changes, traumatic changes, if you are grieving about having to make the decision to stay home with a baby because you don't have enough money for childcare,
14:11
like you have to protect other people from that because the fantasy of what motherhood is supposed to be has to be kept intact so that A, other people want to have children and so that they think you are a good mother.
14:30
Your job is always to make sure that they don't feel uncomfortable about something. And if you take all of these rules together, I imagine them forming like this perfectly little sealed container. And here's the thing about that container.
14:49
It is supposed to be love. It's designed to look like love because we tell ourselves, this is what love looks like. It is sacrificial. It is total. It is uncomplaining. It is grateful. And if you can't do that, your only other option is, do you really love your children?
15:12
Are you a bad mom? You can either be a good mom inside of that little sealed container following the rules, or your only other option is you're a bad mom. And that's the trap. Motherhood is hard and it is also beautiful.
15:29
Some of the most transcendent, memorable, bonding moments of my life happened in the very same hour as some of the most depleting and exhausting. I remember nursing a baby, don't even remember who, at, I don't know, 2, 3, 4 a.m.
15:45
in the morning, and just looking down at the little face and feeling so incredibly in love with this human, and then getting up and barely being able to make it back to my bedroom, leaning on the walls because I was so exhausted I could barely walk.
16:04
There is joy and struggle, explosive diapers and snuggles, tantrums and love. And what the rules do is they tell us how much of that struggle that is there, that is real, that exists, is acceptable to share and how much help and support we should give moms.
16:29
And here's what makes the rules so insidious. No one tells you where the line is. You know, the rule says you should protect other people. And clearly we've gotten away from that a little bit because some of the comments that I read were people sharing struggles.
16:46
And so it's okay to struggle a little bit. Like a little bit of struggle is allowed. That's appropriately human. That, you know, other moms kind of nod. But you never know where the line is. And you don't find out you've crossed the line until you've already crossed it, until you speak up and say something honest and other people look at you like, oh my gosh, she's a bad mom, right?
17:12
Until you admit how depleted and exhausted you are, how things don't feel right, how your body feels terrible and you get the comment section or the comments from friends and family. I remember my mom telling me, you know what, just focus on the baby, just focus on the baby, which not terrible advice, right?
17:35
But also certainly not advice that was helpful to me. And it just made me be quiet. And so a lot of women, when we are afraid of what will happen when we tell the truth, we err on the side of silence.
17:52
We say things carefully. We perform being fine. And oftentimes, especially in the case of mothers, we keep trying and trying and trying to figure it out because that's what a good mom does. That's what a mom who is a natural nurturer does.
18:08
Often waiting until we are so depleted that we can't pretend anymore. And by then it's a crisis instead of asking for help. And so my point about the rules is that they are vague enough that we worry about crossing it and receiving the backlash from other people.
18:33
And that is the point. The vagueness is a feature because when you don't know where the line is, you stay well behind it. You don't talk about how hard it is unless you're certain that the people listening to you will be accepting and kind.
18:51
And you certainly don't ask for help. And help is what I want to talk a little bit about now. When you look at what our culture actually provides for mothers and families, it sends a very different message than what patriarchy wants us to believe.
19:07
Patriarchy wants us to believe, again, you're a natural nurturer. It's your highest and holiest calling. It's the best thing you could do with your time, your body, your energy, your brain. And yet, culturally, politically, in terms of systems that actually support, you're on your own.
19:26
There is no guaranteed paid parental leave. Let me say that again. We are one of only a handful of countries in the world that does not guarantee paid parental leave. I mean, it's the United States and Papua New Guinea and a small number of others.
19:46
That's the company that we are in on this particular policy. Many women get 12 weeks of unpaid leave, and that's protected technically under the Family Medical Leave Act, if they work for a company with 50 or more employees, which means if you work for a small business or you're a contractor, you get nothing at all.
20:07
You might be back at work two weeks after a C-section because you ran out of time off. I had three C-sections and I scheduled every single one of them on a Friday because at least that way my husband could take Friday and then the following Monday off and I'd have four days of help because he didn't work for a company that was big enough to give him even unpaid time off.
20:32
There is no subsidized or free child care. In most parts of this country, full-time childcare costs more than rent. It is often more than a mortgage. It is common for families to pay $20,000, $30,000 or $40,000 a year for infant care.
20:50
And that's if they can find a spot. In a lot of states, there are two to four times as many children who need care as there are licensed child care slots available. And so most of the time, and that falls on mothers who then have to choose between a career that they might enjoy or need and staying home.
21:14
They stay home because they have to, not because they want to, just because the math doesn't work. There's no universal health care. Women are making decisions about whether or not they can even afford prenatal care, whether they can afford the follow-up appointments after birth, whether they can afford the postpartum depression medication or visit.
21:39
These are not hypotheticals. This is a daily reality for millions of women in the wealthiest country in the world. And lastly, there's no village. Like that saying, it takes a village. I think it really matters, especially here around women and childbearing.
22:01
We talk about the village constantly, but we don't honestly talk about where the village went. It's gone because we have built a society that prizes individualism and individual nuclear family self-sufficiency above everything else.
22:22
It's gone because the way capitalism works and you have to work harder and harder and harder to earn the same amount of money, you end up moving people away from their families for jobs. And then we make those jobs so demanding that it's nearly impossible to look for and build new community.
22:43
You're just so tired. And it's gone because we have designed suburbs and office parks and schedules that make it really difficult to be in real relationship with anyone outside your immediate household.
23:00
One of the things that I've been struck by as I have reflected not just on my own birthing experiences and motherhood experience is the lack of, I mean, the women were the nurses, right? I lived in Texas.
23:15
My parents lived in California. My mom came out for a couple of the births and then she had to leave. And it was just me. And I remember walking out of the hospital, carrying my oldest, Rachel, and just thinking, oh my gosh, are they just going to let me leave with this baby?
23:34
Who do I ask if I have a question or if I don't know how to do something? And that's what the village is for. That's what the community is for. And the village disappeared because we have built a world that doesn't have room for it.
23:52
And then we tell women, you have to keep these rules all by yourself. And it's your job to, if you want a community, you have to recreate that from scratch while also working, while also gestating a baby, while also managing everything that comes after the birth of the baby, doing the majority of the household labors.
24:11
And you should be grateful. This is not a personal feeling. This is a political choice. And this is the most frustrating part. It is straight white men who are making the rules about the system that we still live in.
24:28
White straight men created patriarchy, all the rules that we're supposed to be following, and they created now the system that doesn't allow us to have anything but the type of birth and child rearing experiences that we're having now, completely without support.
24:46
So I want to live in a very specific kind of world. I want to live in a world where mothers and babies are supported and loved, where families are supported and helped, where we get away from this increasingly insidious idea that humans are just the sum total of their own choices.
25:10
And because they chose it, you're on your own. I am going to be talking more about this world that I want to live in because I think that is a really important part of becoming an ex-good girl is that it's not just that I leave behind all the rules and the practices and the paradigms that kept me performing goodness, but that I actually find my voice and start advocating for the world I do want to live in.
25:43
I want to end on this. Those women writing those shaming comments were also women who have been shaped by the same system. They've internalized those same rules. In many cases, they're the ones who have organized their entire identity around being a woman who does this well and gladly.
26:02
And I know because that's what I was programmed to do. And that's what I tried to do to present this idea of this hallmark motherhood and to hide anything that exposed it as anything other than beautiful.
26:21
And so when we think about how women uphold these systems, it's a nuanced discussion because let's imagine that you run into me. And this is, you know, 15 years ago when I'm basically like a trad wife, conservative mom of, you know, three kids at home.
26:43
And you say something negative about motherhood. You kind of pull back that curtain just a little bit. Me, as a woman who had organized my entire sense of self around being a good, joyful, happy mother, I'm going to feel threatened by that because it's destabilizing.
27:02
Because if you're allowed to say that it's hard, why am I over here doing so much work to make it look easy? If I'm over here busting my ass to make motherhood look beautiful, why aren't you joining with me in keeping these same rules?
27:17
That is internalized patriarchy. Because what I'm going to do, rather than feel the emotion of being destabilized and like, whoa, maybe what she's saying has value. And do I feel some of that too? I'm going to yank that curtain back, right?
27:33
I am going to make sure that it gets put back up and stays firmly in place because I don't want to, or I don't know how to deal with the destabilization of seeing the double bind, of seeing the rules.
27:51
And that is internalized patriarchy doing exactly what it is designed to do. It is getting women to police each other and to police themselves so that the system doesn't have to, so that the structure never has to change, so that we never get together as moms and be like, hey, why don't we have paid parental leave?
28:13
That's ridiculous. Hey, why don't we have subsidized childcare? Why are we spending so much money on bombs and killing children in other countries? Why don't we take better care of our children here so that more of them can have a healthy, happy opportunity?
28:33
Patriarchy wants it to stay a you problem so that we never examine the systems, so that the political choices that create these systems are never examined. And instead, it's just a failure of individual woman.
28:51
She should try harder. She's a bad mom. She doesn't know how joyful it is to be a mother. It's not a we problem. It is a you problem. And that is why there's so much mom guilt. That's why that term exists.
29:06
Because you can't do it all. It is blood and shit. And you can't say that without being punished. And it's a you problem. And so the system cannot help you. You are on your own. So the women shaming others in the comments, they are as much a victim of this system as those who aren't, right?
29:31
We're in the same container. And the only difference is a mom who's willing to recognize the difficulty and the nuance and the both and of motherhood has gotten out of that container. And the one who's still shaming others is still in it.
29:47
And it comes from fear. The same fear that keeps women from asking for help, the same fear that keeps them saying that they're fine when they're not. And, you know, the belief underneath all of that is if I say this true thing, I will lose something.
30:06
If I say how hard this is, if I say how lost I feel, if I say how sad I am about my body changing and being in pain and just looking and feeling different, I will lose something. I will lose the respect that is afforded to good mothers.
30:23
And that belief does so much damage, not just in the world of motherhood, but to our relationships, to our marriages and friendships, to people with whom we could be in real, honest, sustaining connection with each other.
30:40
And instead of that, we're just kind of performing this idea that patriarchy wants us to. My youngest asked me something recently, and he's number five. And he asked me, he said, mom, if you had known how hard it was going to be to have five kids, would you have still done it?
30:59
And I thought, and I knew what he was telling me. Obviously, if we decided to stop sooner, he would not be here. But I decided to be truthful and I said, I didn't know how hard it was going to be. I had no idea.
31:15
And how isolating and how hard on my body to this day, right? If I sit a certain way, there's pain in my hips from having so many kids. And so I said to him, you know, honestly, I probably wouldn't have.
31:30
But then I continued. And I said, but knowing you, knowing each of you as you are today and having had the chance to be your mom, that's the best thing that ever happened to me. And so I am so glad that I did, even with the hard days.
31:46
I'm so glad that I did. And both things are completely simultaneously true. That's not being a bad mom. And that's what it actually looks like to hold this complexity in a new way. The women who have been the upholders of this patriarchy because they don't want to be considered bad moms, we need to give them another option because what they think is disloyalty to the high and holy calling of motherhood is really just pretending.
32:25
And it's stopping all of us from having systems. We are so busy policing each other and telling each other how to be good moms, wives, daughters, children, friends, that we don't question the systems that we live in because the systems that we live in do not support these experiences of motherhood, of womanhood, of bodily autonomy, of joyful, supported living.
32:55
And it is time that we start to question that instead of questioning each other. Thanks for listening. I'll see you next week.
