This morning I opened the news to see this article:
I started to wonder, why is she a mum with rare disease? If she had a rare disease and wasn't a "mum" would she be "person"? Does one lose their "person-ness" when they have kids and then everything they do is "mum"?
If these two people were mothers would the story read "mums start cheese company in local town?"
I clicked around for a while, seeing what mums and people were up to. The first article I found about a dad was this awful one:
Tabitha Carivan had a great chapter about this is her book This is Not a Book about Benedict Cumberbach. When you have kids, you are a mom. You are not a person who runs, you are a mom who runs. You are not a working person, you are a working mom.
Apparently, even when it comes to news, the world separated into is men, mothers, and other.
I didn't realize that after kids my husband got to keep being "man" while I became "mum".
This post was extremely sobering. Especially because I feel like I contribute to this phenomenon -- thinking of/referring to myself as a mom, referring to other friends as moms. Yuck. I feel very weary.
ReplyDeleteI do the same - and I don't know where the line between reclaiming mom status as awesome (which it is!) or relegating people to "mom" exists. Don't feel weary!
DeleteI do the same - and I don't know where the line between reclaiming mom status as awesome (which it is!) or relegating people to "mom" exists. Don't feel weary!
ReplyDeleteUgh, disgusting. I'm probably surrounded by this, and just haven't been paying attention. It's related to Mr. and Mrs., though, right? Mr. keeps his title, Miss becomes Mrs. It's stupid. I chose Ms., before and after marriage, though I did take my husband's last name, as I was tired of mine and the thought of figuring out different names for kids made me tired.
ReplyDeleteSo I took my husbands name when we got married because I felt like we were creating a family unit, and because I had worked with spreadsheets for so long I really liked having the family data integrity of two parents with the same surnames as their kids. I'm not sure why name changes, which are arguably archaic and anti-feminist, don't bother me at all but this type of stuff does. Weird one for me to ponder!
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