There’s a scene in ‘The Witcher’ Season 1 that I think is profoundly important. (Obviously, this contains spoilers).
Geralt: Did you always want to become a mother?
Yennefer: I dreamed…of becoming important to someone. Someday.
Geralt: Hmmm.
Yennefer: (affronted) Do I bore you?
Geralt: Not at all.
Yennefer: (laughs lightly)
Geralt: Before we met the days were calm and the nights were restless. But now [he pauses] you’re important to me.
My friend Amichai (see his thoughtful YouTube channel here), told me about the book Promises I Can Keep: Why Poor Women Put Motherhood Before Marriage. I haven’t read it in its entirety yet, but I found the following excerpt fascinating, because Yennefer’s statement echoes it.
Chapter 6 opens with the story of Millie Acevedo, who, like many of her friends and neighbors, believes that having children young is a normal part of life, though she admits she and Carlos got started a year or two earlier than they should ahve. Millie’s story helps to resolve a troubling contradiction raised in our earlier account: If the poor hold marriage to such a high standard, why don’t they do the same for childbearing? Shouldn’t they audition their male partners even more carefully for the father role than they do for the husband role? Millie’s experiences show why the standards for prospective fathers appear to be so low. The answer is tangled up in these young women’s initial high hopes regarding the men in their lives, and the supreme confidence they have in their ability to rise to the challenge of motherhood. The key to the mystery lies not only in what mothers can do for their children, but in what they hope their children will do for them.
Through the tales of mothers like Millie we paint a portrait of the lives of these young women before pregnancy, a portrait that details the extreme loneliness, the struggles with parents and peers, the wild behavior, the depression and despair, the school failure, the drugs, and the general sense that life has spun completely out of control. Into this void comes a pregnancy and then a baby, bringing the purpose, the validation, the companionship, and the order that young women feel have been so sorely lacking. In some profound sense, these young women believe a baby has the power to solve everything.
The redemptive stories our mothers tell speak to the primacy of the mothering role, how it can become virtually the only source of identity and meaning in a young woman’s life. There is an odd logic to the statements mothers made when we asked them to imagine life without children: “I’d be dead or in jail,” “I’d still be out partying,” “I’d be messed up on drugs,” or “I’d be nowhere at all.” These mothers, we discovered, almost never see children as bringing them hardship; instead, they manage to credit virtually every bit of good in their lives to the fact they have children- they believe motherhood has “saved” them.
-pages 10-11
I think it’s very likely these children did save these mothers. The question, of course, is whether it is possible for these women to find a sense of stability and identity without becoming mothers (given the attendant hardship and difficulty when it comes to single motherhood, especially early in life) - I wonder whether the rest of the book explores it.
The concern, of course, is that one is not having the child, or originally conceiving the child, out of a sense of love and chesed, a desire to give, but rather out of a desire to get- to get a sense of self-identity, self-esteem and self worth. Rabbi Jonathan Sacks is very concerned about this model of parenting. As he writes,
The Torah makes an implicit comment on this in its account of the name given to the first human child. Eve called him Cain – from the Hebrew meaning “ownership” – saying, “I have acquired a child through God” (Gen. 4:1). Treat your child as a possession and you may turn him into a murderer: that is what the text implies.
This is not to say that these women- these women who dream of being important to someone, or who find stability, purpose and meaning in motherhood- are treating their children as objects. But it is a concerning thing to conceive a child thinking about what that child can do or be to you as opposed to thinking about how you can give to that child. Hopefully most of the mothers who initially conceive the child thinking about what the child can be to them shift over time. The goal would be for them to love their child and spend more time thinking about what they as mothers can offer their children.