Simply Mama

These days there’s a lot going on, processing poverty.

All of my days are struggles. Recently, with nausea. Some with no money. Some with the lack of support of friends and family. This drains me constantly.

But all of my days also fill with the things I’ve identified as my most important values: the shape of my family; our rhythms; being available to nurse my daughter on demand; independent thought; forgoing a stressful, productive office job for the joyful and creative and unpredictable life we’re making now; the ability to enjoy the earth, walking, breathing, being slow and unpressured; unschooling; cooking; learning; self-definition and worth.

Nevertheless, it is difficult to walk the precarious and netless line of the non-compliant. The life of the anti-patriot. Of the non-TV watcher. Of the non-religious. Of the non-vaccinating. Of the nursing on demand. Of the writer. Of the impoverished. Of all the other actions and decisions that make my life apparent to others, including this zine. The line marks me, even as I draw it.

I am not merely complaining. This culture is intolerant of and notoriously hostile to children, families and family-supporting policies. Its agents and authorities do not believe stay-at-home parents need to be compensated because that is the best way to care for children and parents. It is not supportive of anything that does not help businesses make more money. And definitely, child-rearing does not make anyone money -- not even child care providers! We have been trained to believe that parenting is wonderful and beautiful and important, but not work. Not worthy. It is not a secret that most parents work because they have to - to make the house payments, the car payments, the rent, the food, the insurance, the cable, the vacations, the restaurants, the SUVs, the Playstation, two computers, the theater television, the DVD collection, the private school, the electronic gadgets and educational toys, the swimming and dancing and gymnastics and music lessons, the gym, and all those necessary facets of this modern middle class life. Really, it is true that income is necessary and unavoidable in some way within our current economic structure. I am trying to analyze the difficult shift I have faced recently, defined by others as the shift from a successful, praised, achievement-defined person in this modern world to simply, mama.

Most people I meet here in my new life don’t know I have earned a master’s degree. That I taught pre-composition classes at a good technical college. That I have lived in big cities and small towns. That I’ve traveled outside of the U.S. That I write. That I think a lot. That I enjoy talking about ideas. That I have hosted a local radio show. That I am in many ways utterly deviant. I tell them I stay at home with my daughter and I write. Their eyes glaze over, and I am suddenly unimportant, unseen, the lower caste. “Oh,” they assert. “Good for you.”

It can be quite humbling to simply be in the world, without the usual markers of middle class achievement, order, and discipline. I am learning to let go of ego when it no longer suits me, even if it takes a lifetime. And truly, I do not make choices that I have in order to please anyone but me. But then there’s the poverty.

I do have a few people who support my choices. These people are blessings, even if they just say “thank you for being you,” and offer me the produce from their beautiful organic gardens. I need a community of these people, as do we all. What do you think the US could look like if we all could support stay at home parents no matter what? What if we all felt children deserved the same kind of respect for their personhood as employed adults do? No interference, no arbitrary or needlessly authoritarian rules, just enough support to survive. We could provide a wage to compensate otherwise unpaid workers - stay at home or part-time employed moms and dads.

According to an interesting book I just finished called At the Breast, white family-focused activists in the US at the turn of the last century could have chosen to follow a European model for maternity reform, inlcuding nurseries close to or at work and cash maternity benefits for mothers who stay home with their young children. Instead, they chose a more punitive support system, “fearing that such [European] provisions, by removing the disciplining effect of the family’s dependency on the father, might encourage men to abandon their families (as well as cause labor unrest).” (p. 23) They had the choice to do it right by moms, and they chose patriarchal control of women and children and capitalism. Are you surprised that that’s what is still supported by the current state of public assistance now?

Just what, exactly, is the “disciplining effect of the family’s dependence on the father”? This question has plagued me since I read it, and I would be interested in your opinion. Families need married fathers to curb female wildness? Chidren’s exuberance? Just what is it that is disciplined through marriage? Insidiously, I don’t believe that this attitude is terribly unpopular today, even with very liberal/progressive folks. Marriage is still viewed as the settling down, the anchor, the real bond that ties a man and a woman together. And let’s not even talk about lesbian moms, right? No man = no discipline = radical women with no real attachment to patricarchal society. There is a paradox worth pointing out, an ideological flaw in the system: while dependence on fathers positively disciplines, dependence on the public trust becomes a personal deficiency. The only difference is private control or public control of women and children.

On a discussion board I frequent, I recently read a deep criticism of the uniquely American attitude that insists we can’t possibly support families with taxpayer dollars no matter what because what if some woman abused the system and cheated the taxpayers out of all that money?! The Australian critic wisely pointed out that it’s not about the cheating, because of course there are always some people who cheat in any system, like, say, taxes or government (campaign financing, anyone?). But people in the U.S. have been trained to think that government assistance is equivalent to childlike dependence on others, a sign of moral deficiency and personal failure. That we should all work and be productive for everyone else except our own families. And asking for financial assistance implies you have failed to provide financial and economic resources for the system itself (through employment and truly productive work), the most important goal of all citizens. Just because our government has trained us to believe that we don’t deserve it doesn’t make it true. I ask you, what would it look like in your town if we all just agreed that compensating parents with young children was so important that as a society we simply can’t do without it? That to do without it unconditionally or selectively simply ensures homelessness, poverty, parental stress, hunger and undernourishment? And that this is totally unacceptable in any civilized world?

There is nothing shameful about knowing and asking for what you need to make your life your own, to make it meaningful to you and your family. For me, it has meant financially relying on my partner and the tax-supported government assistance I paid into for years and years before needing it myself (that is, besides parks and roads and street salters and subsidized gasoline and corporate welfare and prisons and sign makers and highways and all those tax-supported services).
So what? If I am so proud of my choices, and if I am not ashamed of my current path, why complain at all? Why criticize the hand that feeds me?

Indeed. Why.

Our family has no disposable income. This means fixing the car is impossible. Gassing it up is hard, but doable. Eating out almost never. No paid movie rentals, no cable (don’t miss that anyway), no extra insurance, no new clothes for me or my partner, no unnecessary driving, few treats at the grocery store, no impulse buying at the thrift shop, no long trips, unpaid student loans, subsidized rent, food stamps, medicaid, WIC, and lots and lots of nosy prying by well-intentioned federal employees enforcing patronizing rules and regulations. We are impoverished, but not desperate. Poor, but not unhappy. What we don’t have in our wallets we have made up in time and attention with our family. Our daughter has me when she needs me. She knows and loves her dad, and misses him when he goes to work. We have quiet time together. We listen, and we love. Inside it doesn’t feel like control. To the state, I am, and we are, undisciplined.

Analyzing my own poverty here in this zine was prompted by the cumulative effect of seeing the reactions of others to my own money-free life. With no job, I apparently have no responsibilities. With no outside responsibilities, I evidently appear more peaceful and centered. Strangers have referred to me, longingly, as “simple”. I am now officially a simple person, with a simple life. Not in school, not employed, not bound to outside time and conditions of employment. This simplicity is both the goal and the burden. Even if it is secretly or blatantly aspired to, yearned for, applauded, it is still with some distance and patronizing that I hear the praise of simplicity. The status of stuff and outside achievement and compensation is heavy duty, what we are trained to aspire to, how our worth is measured, and, if we’re not careful, how we measure our worth. For it is of the culture, even ingrained in all of us, that a busy life is most rewarding. This is what we are taught and rewarded for in school. This is one of the main reasons we left the city. We called it distraction.

It is deceptively easy to be busy with your young child. Stay at home moms are routinely afraid to have unplanned days and weeks for their young children. Witness all those preschool and toddler age classes and structured play groups to learn music and dance and roll around on mats with others in comfortable clothing. We are told to make sure they’re learning, to get a head start in life (work? school?). Invest money in them now, and they’ll be that much smarter or better adjusted later. What did we do before we all had money to spend on socialization?

I even see the overvaluing of distraction and achievement activity in lefty and anarchist activist circles when there is discussion about what is really activism. Can raising liberated children be considered activist? Wouldn’t agreeing with that simply acknowledge that there’s not one way to change the world, that parenting can be more important than work? That to some, writing and parenting affect the world just as much as busywork, sit-ins and rallies and voting and canvassing? Why does activism or important social change work have to involve strangers?

Leaving jobs and friends and a social support network to move to Menomonie, we acknowledged that no one is able to lose their distractions when there is disposable income and lots of businesses at which to spend money. I see this phenomenon here in Menomonie, too, but mitigated by the overall poverty of our underemployed, undereducated rural area. We all don’t have any money, and yet we still feel the need to be - or look - busy.

So we struggle with money, with society, with lack of proper government support. We struggle with dignity and perseverance. I often struggle with feeling isolated, but that is changing. Our families live far away, but maybe that’s a good thing. Our parents have dutifully given my partner and I grief for my being pregnant even though we don’t have extra money. The stigma of reproducing while poor is one they have avoided in their own lives with great effort; we applaud them and respect their years of struggle and of not having enough. Despite their real fear, parents everywhere always make due, giving the best they can, no matter what. It would take and it would represent a fundamental change in U.S. society to hear “congratulations” at this point from our parents. At least now I am at a point where I can tell it to myself, and mean it. My struggle has not passed without an unshakable trust in the foundation of my self and my inherent worth as a parent, a woman, a writer, a person. No amount of busyness or distraction would change that.

My daughter, my partner, baby #2 and I have nothing less than undisciplined world domination and true social change in mind. Join us in our inappropriate joy at life and birth and love and family, and change the world just a little, all the way through.