Yo mamas

>> Breeder gives voice to a new
generation of American mothers

by JULIET WATERS

The word “breeder” has a checkered past. As Ariel Gore points out in the preface to Breeder: Real-life Stories From the New Generation of Mothers, when she was in high school it was a term of disgust shouted by her punk friends at passing pregnant women. I first remember it being used in the ’80s by a lesbian roommate with less contempt, but with the same intention: to marginalize a role that, at that time, seemed the most mainstream of them all. Then the band the Breeders came along to redeem the label and by the end of the ’90s many of their fans had become breeders themselves. Soccer moms notwithstanding, it’s been a long time now since mothers have been reliably mainstream.
Gore is the author of two essential companions to millennial mothering, The Hip Mama Survival Guide, and her manifesto The Mother Trip. Both of these point to differences in the newest generation of mothers.

Our mothers fought for the right to work. New mothers are more likely to fight for the right to rest. Instead of trying to break glass ceilings, they’re more likely to avoid corporations. New mothers seem more interested in being interesting than economically successful. And new mothers are probably more likely to assume they can have it all, but more likely to ask, as Gore does, whether they really want it.
But it’s a risky path, especially in the U.S., where they have less and less of a social safety net with every administration. Gore, the 29-year-old single mother of a 10 year old, is hardly naïve. “Theoretically, we have more choices than ever. But without the economic power to pursue our true choices, we are left running in circles between desire and necessity, dancing optimistically towards the future, but trying to make our lives work here and now, in the middle of this incomplete revolution.” And because it’s so risky, the essays in this anthology edited with Bee Lavender, her co-editor at the zine Hip Mama, are compelling reading.

Some are sheer tales of survival. Many American mothers don’t trust hospital births, but activist Angela Morrill doesn’t even trust her midwife. She writes about her plan to have a completely unassisted birth amidst all the signs that it’s going to be high-risk. In “Roots Deep in the Soil,” LaSara W. Firefox writes about trying to raise a child while struggling with the “demons of low-impact living.” She and her husband start their parenting lives on welfare in a house in Northern California with no electricity, hot water or phone. Colleen Murphy, home-schooled as a child, writes about caving in to social pressure to go back to school while raising a child. She ends up exhausted, demoralized and happy to return to being a “full-time student in an accelerated toddler studies program.”

Some are still negotiating the difficulties of work and school. Alisa Gordaneer writes about breast-pumping at an alternative weekly in Detroit. Alex McCall writes about dealing with a bomb threat at her child’s daycare in Denver. Teen mother Allison Crews writes intelligently and scathingly about the discrimination she faced after deciding to raise a child at 15. In “Edging,” Joy Castro writes about her desperate time as part of the studying and working poor. Only one essay describes the feeling of empowerment in passing on ambition to a daughter. Pilot-author, Phaedra Hise, who passed her instruments test while pregnant, writes about taking her three-year-old daughter on a flight.

There are a myriad of other subjects touched on in this anthology: therapy, single moms as house mates, pinworm patrol, fertility clinics, the ever multiplying ironies of race and, of course, the inevitable joys and emotional depths of parenting. For its diversity and the unique voices it brings together, Breeder is well worth reading. But one is definitely left with the feeling that it will be at least another generation before American mothers will be united enough to get the economic and social support they’re entitled to in a wealthy, civilized country. Hopefully this is as start. :

Breeder eds. Ariel Gore and Bee Lavender, Seal Press, pb, 271pp, $24.95