Fictional Motherhood #1: Twilight (New Series)

First of all, I am a mother. I have 5 children living, 1 died at birth. I spent a lot of years getting over the death of that child. I think some of this is because of our cultural ideas of motherhood. The guilt that can really kill you is the guilt of not-having-done-enough. When I was pregnant with my last child, I continued to exercise at a fairly aggressive level. I was out running several miles a day the week before she was born. I chose to deliver at home because I hate hospitals and the rules surrounding birth. There are other reasons, but I won't give in to them now, because when my youngest daughter died, I got a lot of crap from neighbors who believed that it was my “fault” for not choosing to go to a hospital because I was more interested in my own comfort than in the safety of my child. I was a mother, and what kind of a mother doesn't give up everything she wants for the smallest risk to her child?

Feminism has tried to mess with this idea of motherhood, but I'm not sure that it has gotten very deep at the problem. Basically, the cultural icon of mother that I see is the woman who is willing to give her life and her identity for her child. This is sometimes literal, but it is also metaphorical. A woman can send her kids to day care. She can refuse to cook homemade meals for them and get takeout every night. She can hire a cleaning service and get scuba diving lessons. But only if her children are happy, healthy and well-cared for. If her children have a need and she does not fill that need, she is going to be seen as a bad mother.

Instead of getting at the problem of motherhood as a crazy, impossible and unhealthy ideal (like, for instance, the perfect “wife”), feminism has tried to get at abortion rights by arguing that the “fetus” is not, in fact a child. Therefore, a woman should not be held responsible for not being a perfect mother to a not-yet-child. We have begun to extend the time period of motherhood, as well. A baby can be dropped at a hospital in some states before motherhood begins, for about a week or even a month. But after that, not choosing what is best for the child rather than for yourself is not only bad mothering, but pretty much illegal. I don't believe that our culture has the same stringent ideas of what constitutes good fathering. Men are supposed to fight to the death to protect the physical well-being of their children. But women are in charge of the total well-being of children and rather than fighting to the death, are to drain themselves emotionally, physically, spiritually, and psychologically.

I remember what a battle it was for me, as a nursing mother, to force myself to eat before my baby did. If I didn't, I wasn't going to be able to produce milk or have the energy to make food for myself, but it felt as if I was a “bad” mother if I didn't take care of all the baby's needs first. Never mind that a baby's needs are never-ending.

So, to Twilight, or rather Breaking Dawn. The book's central plot follows Bella's argument that she is a mother and that a mother must give her life to her child, no matter what the cost. Just because she is bearing a vampire baby who will likely eat its way out of her, doesn't matter. Just because this vampire baby may be a horrible creature, unable to show the least bit of restraint in its thirst for blood, doesn't matter. Just because her husband doesn't want her to give birth to this child because he never wanted or expected children—doesn't matter. Bella is a mother from the moment that she is married—literally--and she is thrust into the role of motherhood, a role which her own mother has been woefully insufficent at. Bella's mother has remarried, proving she is more interested in her own life than in Bella's, and Bella has been shipped off to Dad instead. And from Bella's brief scenes with her mother, it's clear that Bella feels that she is the mother in her relationship with her mother. She is the one who can deal with finances, who is self-sacrificing, and thinks of other's feelings.

In this sense, Bella is indeed a perfect mother icon of culture. But to look uncritically at this depiction of Bella is to miss the underlying darkness surrounding her motherhood. As someone who loathes being pregnant and has faced depression through 7 pregnancies, let me say that the description of Bella's pregnancy is very apt. It is miserable. It happens too fast, even if you are planning a pregnancy. You wonder constantly if it is the right thing to do to be pregnant, even once the choice has in some ways been taken from you. I found myself wondering how unhappy I would be to have a miscarriage, despite the fact that I had a miscarriage between my first two children and was horribly upset by it. The reality is that the person I am while pregnant is not the person that I am while I am not pregnant.

While pregnant, Bella is suddenly seized by the need to drink blood as the child within her grows in power and its needs become her needs. Hello, pregnancy cravings, wild mood swings, sensitivity to smells, and sudden dislikes of foods that you once loved? Alien, a movie that got a lot more positive feminist press than the Twilight series ever has, is based at least partly on this same premise, that being pregnant and becoming a mother is a lot like giving birth to an alien. Guess why? The child inside IS an alien in every biological way. For someone who is A negative as I am, married to a man who is B positive, this is obvious in the way in which any bleeding during the pregnancy is treated, as well as when you get shots after the pregnancy to keep your body from facing the reality that a baby is an alien creature that should be rejected. None of my children have been of the same blood type that I am. We can stop the body from creating antibodies, but that doesn't change the reality. Pregnancy is an alien creature taking over a woman's body and demanding that she take care of its needs first, before her own, often changing her personality completely.

Another reality of motherhood that is made obvious by Bella in Twilight is that of the looming specter of death. Facing death in childbirth is something that is so commonplace that no one mentions it. People argue that abortion should only be allowed when the mother's life is in danger, but the mother's life is ALWAYS in danger. That is what childbirth is. Moving a creature the size of a full-term baby out of the uterus, between the legs, and into the real world is a dangerous prospect to the mother, but that's what motherhood is, right? I said to a friend of mine that I hoped the “uterine replicator” of Lois McMaster Bujold's universe would be available soon enough for my daughters to avoid the trauma of childbirth and my friend was flummoxed. But that's what being a mother is, she said. Holding the baby inside you, being connected to it, risking your life for it. My babies did not literally use their teeth to cut their way out of me, but metaphorically, how different is it? Fetuses often suck their mother's dry of nutrients. How many women end up hemorrhaging during delivery, and become so weak after that they justify a long hospital stay?

The belief that a child is going to be a “monster” is another important reality of pregnancy. No matter how many tests a pregnant woman undergoes, there is no guarantee that the baby she delivers will be well physically, let alone well mentally. We don't know when we give birth if we are giving birth to a future President or a future serial killer. We can't know that. And yet motherhood means not asking what the future will bring. Being the perfect mother means giving all to the act of mothering, even if there is no hope of a good life for the child.

Idealized motherhood continues for Bella even after her baby is born. She has to keep living even if her body wants to die. Because she loves her daughter and needs to protect her from the threat of the vampires who think she may kill them all. Children are indeed monsters. Seriously, babies are the most selfish creatures imaginable. They have to be to survive, I suppose. If they didn't scream, they'd get ignored to death. They are machines of need. They have to be fed, carried, burped, diapered, cleaned, kept warm, woken up with, soothed, and on and on. What is the definition of a monster if it is not this? And as soon as they are old enough, they learn to poke adults in the eye, to kick and hit anyone in sight, threat or not. They demand that everything belongs to them and defend this position seemingly to the death.

You may argue that Bella isn't a powerful female character and you may be right. But you can't argue with me that the message of the novel is about the joys of motherhood. In my experience, teen readers were turned off by the last volume of this series not because it showed motherhood as something super sweet and feminine, but because it showed motherhood as it really is, bloody and dangerous and never-ending. You might find me agreeing that the continued message of the book is—stay away from sex because that is dangerous shit, leading to pregnancy and death of the most horrible kind. But it isn't going to produce a generation of girls who become mothers without any reservation.