Ball and Chain: Not Your Usual Mother’s day Thread
There is something visceral about the tie that binds a mother and child. I realized it when I was pregnant. Nothing in the world mattered as much as the child growing inside my womb. Once he was born, the umbilical cord might as well have still been attached. His pain was my pain. His fear was my fear.
Now that my child is grown, the cord has finally been snipped. But during those first eighteen---no, let’s be honest, those first twenty years---one person in my life came first, and it was not me.
But this is not about my son. This is not about me. This about the role women play in capitalist society, and why so many people on the right seem so determined that our daughters will have unprotected underage sex and give birth to children that they are ill equipped to support.
If a young woman has to drop out of school to support a child, she will. She will do anything to take care of her son or daughter. She will drag herself to a dead end, pink collar ghetto job day after day and she will do her boring work with a smile, because she knows that she is doing it for her baby. She will not join a picket line, not when her kids need to eat. She may dream of going back to college to get a degree. But between work and taking care of the children, there will never be enough time. She will always be there for Tyson and for Dixie Cup---Koch owned Dixie Cup. She will always accept a lower wage than male workers, because a man who does not have children to support can walk away, but a mother has to think about her kids first, second and last.
I was lucky. I grew up in the 1960s. I was on birth control before I ever had sex. I was out of medical school, residency and in private practice before I conceived my (planned) son. My mother, from a different generation, was not so lucky. She was also premed. She got married right before she was supposed to go to medical school, the way I did. But birth control in the 1950s wasn't so good. She got pregnant. Having a baby and being forced to get a job put a permanent end to her plans for a career in medicine. Luckily for her and for my sister and me, she majored in math, not English, not Liberal Arts. So, she went on to a career in computer science with NASA and NASA contractors. Not bad. Certainly not the pink collar ghetto, though not the medical career she had wanted. However, the math major was a fluke. She had to pick something, and she was good in math. She liked it. She never thought she would have to make a living from it.
Children are one of the best things in life. The mother-child relationship is something we should celebrate. But the far right has taken something natural and good and perverted it for their own use. They treat pregnancy as a “wage of sin.” They condemn single mothers and their children to poverty under guise of piety—they are serving the will of a deity who demands that women who “fornicate” wear a big scarlet letter. However, they are really serving the will of industry that uses women as a low paid, unskilled compliant workforce to keep down wages for all workers. There are very few unskilled jobs nowadays that cannot be performed by women. Those that absolutely have to be done by men fetch a higher salary. But for how much longer?
And that is why we---all of us, male as well as female--- need pay parity and why we need choice.
Thanks, Mom, for all you did and do! An especially big thank you for raising me with a political conscience. It is so tempting to shelter our children. But if we try too hard to protect them from all the hurt other people are feeling, how can they grow up to be caring adults? I hope I can be half the mother you have been. And thanks for giving me a love of the blues.
= new reply since forum marked as read
I am certain that you are a wonderful mother yourself, and thank you for all that you contribute here as well.
Rock on, Doc Taylor, rock on.
And a Happy Mother's Day to you.
