The calling named motherhood

Kombucha Mothers at a cafe in Innsbruck. Pic/Rosalyn D’Mello

Yesterday I learned that the ninth month of my pregnancy will be a truncated one. In two or three weeks, a C-section will be scheduled and I will give birth. The doctors agree that the 7-cm intramural uterine fibroid that I'd had surgically removed in 2017 didn't bode well for a spontaneous birth. There could be the risk of rupture. I have been living with this possibility for some weeks now and it has helped me mentally prepare for the stillness that the procedure will perhaps demand of me. It still feels unreal, though. I am still unable to fathom that this being that I have been nursing within my body, this child of flesh and bones and a potential full spectrum of emotions will, before the end of this month, become sovereign, in that it will still depend on me for nourishment but will be capable of breathing independently. I am wrapping my head around the implications of this gesture.

I had read in an excellent feminist book, Like a Mother by Angela Garbes, that all forms of delivery must be considered natural, that the division we tend to create is a false one. I have been thinking of how there are so many ways by which to become a mother, and how prioritising one form over another limits our collective imagination. All forms should be considered legitimate, from adoption to surrogacy to IVF to C-section to spontaneous delivery. This is not to diminish the value of reproductive labour but to expand our conception of what mothering is and can be, and how the act can be made accessible to those who are reproductively challenged.

I am also thinking about what it means to disentangle gender from motherhood, to think of the vocation as not restricted to the female sex, to open our minds to the revolutionary act of trans parenthood.

It comes down also to what images we associate with motherhood. The pregnant belly is one iteration of an expectant mother, there can be so many others, and I think this expansion of visual cultural manifestations of what it looks like to ‘expect' a child is vital if we want to rethink what might constitute revolutionary mothering. I have been considering the subject because of the thesis I have been evolving as part of my ongoing residency at Künstlerhaus Büchsenhausen in Innsbruck. Last Friday, I hosted an event in which four invited cultural practitioners spoke about matrilineal aspects of their work.

I titled the event after my thesis, In the Name of the Mother, and introduced it by speaking about different definitions of ‘mother', for instance, mother as also a reference to symbiotic cultures of fermentation. Think about how vinegar needs a ‘mother' to perpetuate, or Kombucha needs a SCOBY. In Italian, the word for yeast is lievito madre, mother yeast. In German, the uterus is called Gebarmutter; the first part - Gebar - referring to birth, while the placenta, the most significant organ that grows in the womb in order to sustain the foetus and which is then expunged by the body after birth, is called Mutterkuchen in German, which would translate to ‘mother cake'.

I empathised with something I read about Rihanna's reluctance to have a child until she met her present partner, A$AP Rocky. While she was always sympathetic towards motherhood, she apparently hadn't herself imagined being a mother. It was the same for me. I always imagined that should I feel regret at not fulfilling a maternal vocation I would happily adopt. Meeting my partner and finding myself in a loving, equal relationship in which I could ‘hold' myself without fearing a loss of control of my artistic agency, I decided to open myself up to the possibility of being a parent. I remember telling my partner at the outset of my relationship that I couldn't promise him children, that it was a decision I was still struggling with. At the time he responded by telling me how he respected this as my choice, and he would stand by me either way. It took a lot of the pressure off me.

I remember a moment in autumn 2018, when he sent me a picture of a box of apples he had harvested in his family's plot of land. He'd told me then that each box weighed at least 200 kgs. I remember virtually looking at the aisle between the trees and suddenly seeing children there, our children. I think it was the first time I ever imagined parenthood with someone. The second time I felt distinctly like I was ready for motherhood was when I saw a photographic series by Friedl Kubelka in Salzburg in 2020 titled The Life Portrait of Louise Anna Kubelka. Friedl Kubelka had essentially decided to photograph her daughter every Monday from the time she was born until she turned 18. It's a glorious work that bears witness to the intensity of an artistic-maternal gaze. The third time was when I re-encountered, as if for the first time, Lauryn Hill's song, To Zion, a perfect composition which moves me to tears each time I hear it. In it Miss Hill describes the conundrum of finding herself pregnant when her career was taking off. But everybody told me to be smart / Look at your career they said / Lauryn, baby use your head / But instead I chose to use my heart. I think in the end that is what revolutionary motherhood might be - a ‘heart-based' vocation, not necessarily always rooted in the biological or even the logical, but a form of building a loving environment in order to allow another being to realise their personhood.

Deliberating on the life and times of Everywoman, Rosalyn D'Mello is a reputable art critic and the author of A Handbook For My Lover. She tweets @RosaParx
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