Why We Need to Burn the Binds of Selfless Mothering

By Jami Ingledue — BEHIND DOMESTIC LINES

Dear Mama,

I see you.

I see your big open heart and your fierce love for your babies, your desire to do right by them, a desire so big that it often feels bigger than yourself.

I see your courage. You have faced so many things in your life, you have gone to the depths of despair and back again, you have bravely destroyed things that were wrong so that you could build what was right and true and beautiful. You are strong.

And now it’s time to destroy again. To let it burn. And you can do it.

Here’s what we need to destroy, to set on fire and dance around the flames: the message we have received all of our lives, that motherhood requires us to make ourselves smaller and smaller. That a good mother is selfless and therefore must sacrifice all that she is in order to properly care for her children.

In order to do all the work of raising children. That unpaid, unvalued, invisible work. We have been wrongly convinced into thinking that true motherhood equals unpaid labor.

And our whole society runs on this unpaid labor, and on the assumption that women, especially mothers, will do this labor.