Motherhood Deserves to Go Mainstream

I want to read mom stories. I want to watch mom movies. I want to be so inundated with mom content that I can find a motherhood story for every emotion without having to dig for it in dusty archives.

The next time I hear someone refer to motherhood, or parenthood, as niche or uninteresting or uncool or any other form of misplaced reduction is the moment I will spontaneously combust.

Mothers are the reason you exist.

Motherhood is not a niche category for artistic expression and the elements that comprise the motherhood identity can be felt by anyone regardless of whether or not they have children. With these musings, I posted this quip on Notes a few weeks ago:

I didn’t expect that the Substack creators might see it or respond to it. I was only contemplating aloud on my feed, wondering what it would be like for stories about mothers to be taken as seriously as stories of war. For all the violence motherhood wrecks on the body and soul, it’s confounding that a society that disturbingly praises violence as entertainment would skip out on this untapped market — perhaps it’s because mothers are typically portrayed in contemporary entertainment as interesting only when their bodies and brains are used as comic relief.

HA HA THE PREGNANT LADY BROKE HER WATER! BETTER GET IN THE CAR FAST HA HA.

HA HA THE NEW MOM IS SO TIRED SHE FORGOT TO PUT HER PANTS ON HA HA.

Please.

Look around you. Every person you know was brought onto this planet by a mother. A person who sacrificed health, personhood, and expectations to bring you into the world. Someone whose organs were rearranged as suddenly as her identity, her focus, her desire. Your feet touch the ground because your mother planted you there. She is the soil, the seed, the sun, the roots, the water. She permeates every layer of every ecosystem. Not all mothers stay — but they birth us all, for better or for worse.

Motherhood is not created without a brutal revolution of self. The men of yesteryear have spent centuries crying over paper cuts and still their stories are told over and over again. On film. On paper. On stage.

Mothers don’t just create with their meager fingers, rifling through manuscripts of the stories other people have written. Mothers create with their entire beings. Mothers are creation itself.

I posted this follow-up on Notes a few days after my previous blurb:

It’s true. Substack has a lone Parenting category, but four different categories for business-adjacent topics: Crypto (LOL k), Finance, Business, and Technology.

In the grand scheme of things, the category options on Substack are a rather irrelevant thing to pick at. I don’t own Substack. I am not creating a publication platform for millions of users. I love that this is a space where I can connect with other mothers who are sharing their stories so the next generation of mothers doesn’t have to experience motherhood in silence.

But I think that the limited category options do speak to what our collective culture finds important.

A week ago, after I posted both of my Notes, one of Substack’s founders posted this to his own feed:

Maybe Hamish happened to see my Notes. Maybe he didn’t. But I saw his.

I wasn’t necessarily lobbying for a new category as much as I was publicly contemplating it with my network — but I certainly feel like I should be lobbying now.

I understand Hamish’s sentiments in his Note. I also own a business. Letting in excess noise from every random angle can be extremely disruptive and unproductive. And I do think it’s neat that he and his co-founders are actively engaged with their own platform’s users.

And still, the exclusion of a Parenthood (and/or Motherhood) category suggests generally that other categories that already exist are more important because, once again, motherhood is not considered a first priority.

It is not the thing that gets on the list first. It is not the thing that receives top consideration. It is part of a long list of “others” whose worth is not meritorious of inclusion at the outset.

Motherhood is an add-on. And it deserves so much more.

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I would’ve loved to have seen motherhood portrayed as something other than some form of patriarchal function when I was a little girl. The mother is so often used as a mere subplot in a hero or heroine’s “greater” story.

Motherhood has yet to go mainstream. So I only found that other women have been screaming from the shadows about their own motherhood experiences when I became one.

There are infinite iterations of how motherhood rearranges us and still, I was only familiar with two before the birth of my daughter (aside from the handful experiences of mothers I already knew, including my own): the mom who looks like she never gave birth ever and lives in a fluffy bliss cloud made of cotton candy because she’s just so happy to be a mom in pure domestic harmony, and the mom who resents her shitty husband who does not understand the devastation of her losing a career she worked years to build after her children were born.

Both of these are valid experiences many will relate to. But they are bookends on a rickety shelf that our culture keeps only in the back of the bookstore.

Motherhood hasn’t gone mainstream because our society hasn’t been rightfully shown that these microcosms of the motherhood experience are indeed microcosms.

I’ve heard colloquially that perhaps topics on motherhood are not “interesting” or “cool.” I’ve heard that writing about motherhood is not relatable unless you have a child.

I could not disagree more.

Motherhood — this thing that encompasses elements of love, loss, grief, body image, identity, family, survival, isolation, friendship, change, power, science, religion, magic, mental health, grit, strength, and softness is not relatable? These shared elements of the human condition that show up in nuanced complexity in just a singular motherhood experience are niche?

Readers consume romance novels at the peak of broken heartedness and gobble stories about sheer will in wild forests without ever pitching a tent in the dark. I read about space and I’ll never be an astronaut. I read about the depths of the ocean and I’ll never touch the ocean floor.

Readers consume books on black holes and then peacock that the concept of a singularity is more relatable to their spaceless life and cooler than that of a human who created eyeballs from literally nothing.

Do we need to scream this? Do we need to be louder?

It has been forgotten that we screamed our children out of our bodies. That our brains scream at us every night when we park at Overstimulation Station. It has been forgotten that we also scream for joy.

Motherhood is quiet and loud. It is everything that can be written and read about. It is simultaneously seismic and still. It is everything I dreamed of and nothing that I expected.

I write very seriously for the Mother and all who are open enough to let her in.

The cosmic iterations of motherhood are currently stuck under a stack of “data-driven parenting” pamphlets growing moldy from the tears of dramatic postpartum moms like me who can’t bear this reality any longer.

Motherhood deserves to go mainstream.

(And Substack needs to expand its category list).

💌

Xo,

Violet Carol

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