Who Cares?
Term 6; Module 3
Thesis: We have endless cultural scripts for what a “good mother” looks like, and almost none for what a supported one does. The readiness myth quietly shifts responsibility onto individuals and away from the systems that were never designed to hold them.
There is a version of motherhood that exists mostly in the cultural imagination: serene, instinctive, arrived at naturally by women who were simply ready. She had the home, the relationship, the emotional bandwidth. She wanted it, planned for it, and when it arrived, she rose to meet it. This woman is everywhere in the cultural presentation of motherhood and yet almost nowhere in this module by design. I’m not particularly interested in motherhood as it’s been packaged and sold for centuries, but rather in the gap between what we tell women motherhood requires and what we’ve actually built to support them. Readiness, it turns out, was never really a feeling. It was always a resource, and we’ve never given women enough of it.
