mothers and babies

 Lately, I've been thinking a lot about how mothers and babies are portrayed in literature and film. Particularly, the ways babies are often snatched from their mothers, while the mother lies helpless on the birthing bed. Most recently, it was in Bridgerton, where the duchess was left with her arms reaching for her son, while the duke held him for all to see his triumph--only for the duchess to die without even getting to see her baby. In Jane the Virgin, Jane's baby is kidnapped shortly after she gives birth, leading to a wild chase while she is still sore and raw and needing to feed him. In a fantastic book I recently read, The Empress of Salt and Fortune, the baby was snatched from his mother. And in one of my favorite books, The Girl Who Drank the Moon, the baby is torn from her mother's breast, and it drives the mother mad. I like all these stories as a whole, but I wonder at this repeated narrative and how hard it is for me to read it.

I'm aware that my thoughts and feelings are because I am a mother--I got to immediately hold both of my babies on my chest and then keep them tucked close to me for much of their newborn days. My body made these tiny creatures, and my body (and hormones) demanded that I keep them close. My body was this baby's first home, and the baby wants to stay close to it. In some of the books I've read about birth and midwifery, they refer to the mother-baby dyad, which is a way of capturing the relationship that makes sense to me: the baby is a separate being but also not, and together, the mother and baby make something else, and you have to care for both mother and baby to ensure health and well-being for the whole. So I have a visceral reaction--and not a positive one--at the narratives that cast mothers as weak or helpless or exploit them after they have given birth to steal their babies.

It reminds me too of the arguments around reproductive justice. The ways that controlling women's bodies become a way to subjugate women and remove their agency--both in preventing them access to birth control and abortion as well as taking their children from them. Forcing women to have children but then taking those children away for a range of reasons. Taking children from birth mothers as a so-called deterrent to illegal immigration but really just an exercise in exploitation and inhuman cruelty. Denying nursing mothers access to their babies. Incarcerating mothers for being poor. These are real stories, stories that happen daily.

It also makes me want to write a story about a powerful mother whose baby isn't taken, who is able to fight the powers that want to steal her baby. A story where a mother isn't weak or passive but uses her ferocity to destroy the entities that would control her body and rob her child of their first home. A story where women band together to protect and support each other and take down the patriarchy.