I posted about this several times before on my other blog, but am going to write about it again. I miss being a mother. This may seem strange, because I choose not to have children. Oh well, circumstances wouldn't allow me to have kids, but I still consider myself childless by choice.
What I actually miss, is not having a wee one run around my house bawling, but having the privileges that motherhood awards. Of course, you can't have the privileges without the hardships, so I don't mean to say that mothering is all rose-colored. What I do mean, is that there are a lot of privileges in our society for mothers. I can't explain this I'm afraid, but I feel like, well, it's assumed that every woman over a certain age (thank goodness not yet my age) is a mother.
Maybe, then, it's not so much the material privileges I miss, but the sense of identity motherhood awards you. Women-focused magazines, websites etc. are 90% mother-focused. It makes me feel like I'm missing out on something.
I must confess, I have at one point, under the name of my motherly part, joined mothering communities that don't say they are exclusively for Moms. This may not be appropriate, like my at one point having joined a teen forum without saying my age is not appropriate. IN fact, I only benefit from being female here or I'd be seen as a pedophile.
It seems like maybe what I miss is having that part of an identity that is not disordered. There's little out there for twentysomethings, maybe because they dominate the Internet, so I can't really consider that identity-shaping. Other than that, I have womanhood - but as I said, 90% of being a woman is being a Mom -, and I have my various disability statuses. I don't want to be a minority person in every aspect of my life.
