{"id":4197,"date":"2006-03-11T15:33:02","date_gmt":"2006-03-11T15:33:02","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.beliefnet.com\/viamedia\/2006\/03\/speaking-of-culture-and-personhood.html"},"modified":"2006-03-11T15:33:02","modified_gmt":"2006-03-11T15:33:02","slug":"speaking-of-culture-and-personhood","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2006\/03\/speaking-of-culture-and-personhood.html","title":{"rendered":"Speaking of culture and personhood"},"content":{"rendered":"

Here, a few days late (still cleaning out my inbox) is a piece from the Guardian by Madeleine Bunting<\/a><\/p>\n

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The point is that parenthood is against the grain of all the aspirations of our culture. Go back to the point where I started – the pregnancy anxiety around care. That anxiety is provoked by more than just the logistics of childcare availability, despite what the nursery campaigners argue. It’s there because pregnancy sabotages three characteristics highly valued by our culture. <\/p>\n

First, independence: pregnancy heralds at least one relationship of dependence, and there is often greater dependence on partners, mothers and, eventually, childminders and the like. But you’ve spent much of the previous 10 years attempting to eradicate any hint of dependence, either of your own or of others on you. Secondly, pregnancy is about a long-term commitment, and having avoided all such (including probably to your partner), you are, at the very least, uneasy about it. Finally, the big bump in your stomach spells out one thing for sure – a huge constraint on many choices, and choice has been integral to your sense of a life worth living. <\/p>\n

In other words, the self we are encouraged to develop through much of our education system and early adulthood is of no use whatsoever to a new parent. What use is that sassy, independent, self-assertive, knowing-what-youwant- and-how-to-get-it type when you fast forward five years to the emotional labour of helping a child develop selfconfidence? Once there’s a baby in the cot, you need steadiness, loyalty, endurance, patience, sensitivity and even self-denial – all the characteristics that you’ve spent the previous decade trashing as dull or, even worse, for losers. Forget trying to work out your own feelings – you’ll be too busy trying to work out those of your children; ditto self-confidence and self-expression. <\/p>\n

Motherhood hits most women like a car crash: they have absolutely no idea of what is coming. Nothing in our culture recognises, let alone encourages, the characteristics you will need once a bawling infant has been tenderly placed in your arms. So the debate about the baby gap is about far more than tweaking parental leave; it’s about what a culture values and promotes. And it matters not just because of that falling birthrate, but because of how women stumble towards their own private insights into the importance of mothering – to which they cling in the face of not just zero endorsement from wider society but active contempt.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Much, much more. Go read. And contemplate one more time, the contrast between the values of the flesh and those of the Spirit. And in this world in which the values of the Spirit are supposed to be so useless, outdated and detrimental to human growth and potential…which values really "work."<\/p>\n

And related, read the Well-Connected Mother<\/a> by Juli Loesch Wiley in a recent Touchstone.<\/em><\/p>\n

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