How Can Women Want Babies When They’ve Never Seen One???

  

From Elizabeth Stone at Of Home and Motherhood:

We grow up in a world where motherhood is completely removed from our daily lives. The majority of women spend their entire adolescence and young adulthood surrounded by people their own age. They go through school, college, and often the beginning of their careers without ever being around infants, without ever seeing mothers in their natural environment. So when they finally become mothers themselves, it’s no wonder it feels like being dropped into another world.

We’re biologically capable, but socially untrained. And that matters. Because the knowledge that once passed quietly between generations of women, how to feed, soothe, and live with children, has been completely severed. Motherhood no longer exists as a visible part of our social fabric. It’s been privatized, hidden away inside individual homes, treated like a personal lifestyle choice instead of the shared human experience it should be.

There’s a reason it feels so foreign.

We’ve spent our whole lives preparing for every role except this one. We’ve learned how to write essays, build resumes, and meet deadlines, but not how to nurture, not how to mother. We’ve been taught to value independence above all else, but motherhood demands the opposite, it requires interdependence, surrender, continuity. And that is the one thing we’ve not be taught how to do, in fact we’ve been told all our lives to do the exact opposite.

And yet, women are blamed when they struggle. They’re told they’re just anxious, or hormonal, or not cut out for it. But the truth is that they were never shown how to do it. No one modeled what it looks like to live a full, meaningful life that includes babies. We were raised to believe that womanhood peaks in self-sufficiency, not in motherhood.

This is what happens when motherhood is removed from public life. When it’s no longer visible, it stops being imaginable. When it stops being imaginable, it stops being desired. And when it stops being desired, civilization begins to decay quietly from within. Because women no longer grow up with the instinctive longing for what once defined us, not because they don’t want it, but because they’ve never seen it.

How can you want a baby when you’ve never seen one? How can you desire motherhood when nothing has made that quiet part of you speak out? How can you fully accept womanhood and its design and nature when you’ve never seen another woman do it?

We don’t imitate what we haven’t witnessed. You can’t want something you’ve never experienced. And so women today are expected to suddenly know how to mother, to adapt instantly to a role that was meant to be learned slowly, communally, through years of observation and proximity. A village that taught us and helped us. A community of women who cared.

When that apprenticeship disappears, the result is confusion, resentment, and exhaustion. Not because women are weaker than before, but because they are more isolated than ever.

Your village isn’t gone, it’s at work. Because that is who we’ve been taught to be, who we’ve been told we should desire to be. (Read more.)

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