Motherhood is not for the Faint of Heart
Joanna Rakoff, author of “Ask Your Mother”, offer readers an insight to motherhood through the slightly traumatic birthing experience she had at the hospital. Sandra Steingraber, author of “Having Faith”, shares with readers her own excursion to motherhood by way of breastfeeding. Even though both writers saw motherhood from different perspectives but they struggled with self-doubt by comparing themselves to other people and standards. At one point, it almost seemed like motherhood was just another competition of who can give birth in the shortest time with the least amount of anesthetics, or who can produce milk the soonest after birth.
In “Ask Your Mother”, Rakoff was getting ready for her first birthing experience and asked her mother and older sister about their birthing story. When Rakoff asked her mother how long her labor was, her mother’s response was “I didn’t labor at all” (Labor Day, 102). Rakoff’s mother then said she maybe had contractions and it felt “kind of like when you have to go to the bathroom” (Labor Day, 103). What shocked Rakoff the most was when her mother said “There was no pain at all. People always talk about pain, but I never felt any” (Labor Day, 104). Compared to her mother, Rakoff’s sister’s birthing experience sounded much more “normal”. When Rakoff went into labor, she started wondering if something was wrong with herself or the baby all because she was experiencing extreme pain that supposedly didn’t happen to her mother. Later when she finally asked for an epidural, all she could think of was how disappointed she was in herself and in her body just because she couldn’t meet up to her mother’s experience of pain-free child birth. “I was complying, admitting defeat, succumbing to my body’s inferiority to the miracle or modern medicine” (Labor Day, 112).
Rakoff took her mother’s birthing story to heart and set herself up to unrealistic expectations. It’s unclear how her relationship with her mother is, but most of Rakoff’s actions and thoughts during labor gave the impression that she was trying to prove a point. If her mother can give birth to a child in under an hour, without pain, and barely laboring, then she had to do it too. Even though her labor was way over an hour and with much pain, she was able to somewhat redeem herself by delivering a nine-pound baby without C-section. Rakoff may never understand exactly why her mother lied to her, or maybe her mother was really telling the truth. But whatever the case, Rakoff was made a wiser and stronger woman as a result of her experience.
In “Having Faith”, Steingraber’s ecology background gave her an adequate understanding of how motherhood “worked”. She knows the anatomy of the human breast, how milk is produced, its nutritional value, functions of hormones that aid in milk production. But regardless of all the knowledge she had, she couldn’t produce any milk in her breasts for her newborn baby, Faith. She knew milk production wasn’t had nothing to do with breast sizes, and nurses reassure her that all women have glands that are milk-production capable, “but Faith is losing weight, and I don’t have any milk. And I don’t have any breasts. And there is no God. Failing. Failing. I am failing” (Steingraber, 206). There is so much more to motherhood than just breastfeeding one’s child, yet Steingraber felt so distraught that she couldn’t provide for her child a basic yet crucial need. Unlike Rakoff, who had something similar to “deliver baby fast and without epidural” on her motherhood “checklist”, Steingraber has already moved past delivery and on to the next one on her list that can be written as “start producing milk day after childbirth”. The journey to motherhood had become a to-do list that had many items that needed to be checked off. Rakoff let other people’s experience define her capability as a new mother and Steingraber allowed textbook knowledge define her worth in motherhood.
Motherhood is not for the faint of heart. It demands a sacrifice of the mother’s personal freedom, thoughts, and the body. The journey to motherhood is never about the end result but the process in which the mother shares with the child.
References
Rakoff, Joanna. “Ask Your Mother.” Labor Day: True Birth Stories by Today’s Best Women Writers. Ed. Eleanor Henderson and Anna Solomon. Print.
Steingraber, Sandra. “Mamma.” Having Faith: An Ecologist’s Journey to Motherhood. Cambridge, Mass.: Perseus Pub., 2001. Print.
