The importance of women who aren't our mothers
On cool aunts, other people’s children, and not being Mary Poppins
This is something I’ve been thinking about – in one form or another – since my aunt died last summer. People understand what you mean when you say your aunt died. A parent’s sister. No longer living.
But there is something about how I feel about it that gets lost in the literal translation. I felt a not dissimilar way when my grandmothers died, at opposite ends of the pandemic.
Losing an aunt or a grandmother is not, according to the psychological definition, a disenfranchised grief. We have language for it. We have rituals. It is understood for what it is: a bereavement. Yet, still, there was something in all of these losses for me that felt under-acknowledged.
And this is the closest I’ve come to being able to explain it: it was the loss of a kind of mothering. A kind of mothering society doesn’t generally recognise as mothering.
I don’t mean she was ‘like a mother to me’. It’s more complicated than that. The relationship was entirely different. It lived in a different place.
That, after a year of ruminating on this, I’m still struggling to articulate the how exactly, says something about the – perhaps newer than we realise – mythologies we’ve built around motherhood.
There are things you can see very clearly if you have spent time on both sides of the maternal divide: how the world worships pregnancy and the idea of mothers, setting it above all other versions of female experience, while also treating mothers and the work they do as the least important thing.
Keep reading with a 7-day free trial
Subscribe to Life, Almost to keep reading this post and get 7 days of free access to the full post archives.