How To Oeder

1. This is a speech on motherhood in de kunsten¹

Hi,

I am Line.
I read and tell stories.
I care deeply about the stories
we live in.
I am not talking about
stories as works of fiction
but stories as part of our
tracts of thought and feeling
stories that shape our sense of normativity
– that allow us to imagine
in a flicker
a good mother,
a healthy family,
responsible behavior,
work, a true artist. 

I believe there is work to be done
in understanding which narratives
shape us, and how,
to not take them for granted or as natural²
and to continually inform them
with our lived experience
and the lived experience
of others whom we can learn to listen to.

2. Mothering / Een oeder moedert
 

Have I told you I have children?

Well, I don’t have them, actually
nobody  has children
but
two critters³ have grown in my body
and I am in this social relationship
where I take care of them
on a daily basis.

This means,
I am often cast as a mother.
More and more
I am growing uneasy
accepting this word
as if it were part of my identity.⁴

In particular in this context
where we are invited
to look at and think about
the circumstances of our work
I find motherhood confusing.

and I think I am not alone in this
I see traces of this thought
in the brackets around the (m)
of motherhood
turning it into otherhood
– in fact I recognize a lot of my struggles
in preparing for today
already in the title of this event
which also shifts language –

en dat doe ik ook⁵
en ik vraag mij af waarom
ik in het Engels ben begonnen
en denk dat er een antwoord ligt
enerzijds
in mijn werk- en denkomstandigheden
die meestal niet Nederlandstalig zijn
en dus ben ik het gewoon
over moederschap en feminisme
te denken in het Engels
als lingua franca
maar anderzijds
geeft het Engels mij
als performer
ook een zekere buffer
en gewicht
als ik hierover spreek
Mijn toon verandert
Mijn houding verandert
en hoewel ik het belangrijk vind
mijn moedertaal te erkennen
en daar uiteindelijk ook in te werken
– en hoewel ik erken
dat het Engels
geopolitiek
een problematisch gewicht heeft
aanvaard ik momenteel
toch de ondersteuning
die ik in deze materie ervaar
in het Engels.

Voor nu.

Daarbij komt
dat zaken soms
erg moeilijk worden
in vertaling
Zo is de speling
“motherhood/otherhood”
toch fundamenteel anders
dan “moederschap/oederschap”
al heb ik, denk ik,
minder problemen
met het erkennen van mijzelf
als oeder
dan als mother of als other.

To be cast as a mother
means that
all the love and nurturing
a specific child needs
is collapsed into you
as a person.
You are made responsible
for its happiness
and flourishing
while the conditions
to make this happen
are often lamentable
and even with all conditions in place
it is a lonely path
that does not lead to redemption
not for those cast as mothers
nor for their children,
nor for the people who are excluded
from motherhood
but do a lot of the work
of actual mothering.

Having said that
I do acknowledge
and embrace
that I mother
as a verb
and practice
dat ik moeder in de praktijk
and it does alter
my position in society.

3. On Aberration and Deviation from the Norm /
where to locate Motherhood

So
two kids have me
as their primary caretaker

And now I tell you
that the oldest of these children
has a disability.
This tells you
nothing
 about this child,
 who is a bountiful critter,
 but it tells you something
about
her position in society.⁶
 Having a disability
 she navigates a world
that is not designed for her
but rather treats her as an aberration.

En ik heb het over een kind⁷
dat ik graag zie
in de intense dagelijkse praktijk
die graag zien is⁸
dat is mijn kind
en dan heb ik het niet
over “mijn” als eigendom of nalatenschap
maar “mijn” als nabijheid en vervlochtenheid.

To love her
in practice
means understanding
that her life and her bodymind
are intrinsically valuable
The handicap,
though often projected onto her
and leading to her exclusion
leading to stress in her body
– last year
at the age of five
she nearly ate her winter coat,
maar vriendje toch! –
is a problem located
in society, and the pathways
and structures
it has built as normal
and functional.

Those who mother
spend time and energy
in nurturing and loving others.
This reduces our functionality
as it seen under capitalism
– which, even as artists
even as oeders
we function within.
Artistry
in as far as it is built
on a certain prestige
some cultural capital accumulation
and professionalization
was not constructed
for people
who mother
it has not been built
to incorporate

mundane practices of care.
I think it is crucial
to understand that Motherhood
in as far as it is framed
as a problem
for our professionality
is not located
in the use of our uterus,
the leaking of our breasts,
or in the presence of our children.
Like disability
it is a problem
located in society
and more specifically
in what is deemed valuable
under capitalism
which is not life
certainly not the life of all
and it is not the work of love.

4. On parenting and art
   and what the fuck do I mean
   the work of love
   
   

To do a work of love
is not the same
as being romantically entangled
with your work.

I have often heard people
who work as artists
express their relationship to their work
in terms of motherhood
or parenthood
saying things like:
my artwork is my child
my play is my child
this new book
is like my child.

I am very skeptical of this.

I think it takes
the disturbing connotations
of parenthood/motherhood
and projects them onto
an other form of work
casting this work into the realm of sanctity

As if making “true art” requires
a dedication wherein you lose yourself
a 24/7 kind of commitment
and something beyond and above
ordinary work.
 It often also
implies a sense of ownership
that I believe to be
unhealthy
for fostering art
as well as for nurturing children.

This romantic projection

also works to exclude
many who parent children
–  when both art and children
require full dedication
they become mutually exclusive.

Here is where I add something,
after a talk with someone
who told me this section hurt
because she had wanted children
but never had them
and turned her energy to her art.

And so I felt,
perhaps I need to be a bit clearer.
I think anyone,
regardless of their genitalia
and the productivity of their loins
can mother, that is,
can care for children
who will turn into adults
can care for a next generation
– that there are plenty of artists
who do that,
who make the world richer
for others to live in.
Plenty of people mother
in this sense,
regardless
of whether they have children.
And we do not need
a mother-hood which implies ownership
and a status
in which women live a  supposedly
fulfilled life – though in reality
many women who live as mother
do not feel loved and fulfilled.
We do not need this kind of motherhood
to value this care and love
we can put
into a great range of activities,
and live in many relationships.                           
That was the addition.
Here comes the next chapter.

5. The next to last chapter
   dealing with money and meaning
   
   Now, a lot of art work
   like parenting
   goes unpaid.
   The reason I brought up capitalism
   earlier
   is that, from where I stand
   it seems that most
   people who I know
   to mother
   and work as an artist
   work from a position
   of economic precarity.
   
   A friend of mine
   who is a dancer
   and who mothers four children
   told me recently:
   
   

              I had this realization
              that I am not going to be rich
              and that I am ok with it.

We raised our morning coffees
to this realization
while understanding that this has implications
for our relative freedom.

Zowel
het zorgen voor een kind
als het maken van kunst
hebben een zingevende lading.
Dat is ook zo voor mij.
Dat zorgt ervoor dat ik dat wil doen
en wil blijven doen
ook al weten we dat er
geen rijkdom zal zijn
en heel waarschijnlijk
een erg beperkte bestaanszekerheid.
Over the past five years
I have studied
I did odd jobs
and quite often
I was at home
cleaning up vomit
and napping
with a sick child on my lap.
The work I have built
has grown slowly.
I now feel confident
that there is a sustainability
to my practice
even though
I expect regular breaks
to do odd jobs
when money is low.
This trust arises
not from any expectation
that my career will
skyrocket
and the big fat art euros
will fly into my kindjes hun boekentassen,
but from creating a network
of peers
with whom I can share life
and practice
and even childcare.

I think for the first time
in my life
I do not feel fundamentally alone,
and this is a great leap forward
both for the quality and experience
of my mothering
and for the quality and experience
of my artistic work.

6. This is how I will end this
   
   This speech was written
   during Krokusvakantie (spring leave?)
   I was able to write it
   because grandparents
   took on childcare that week.
   They mothered
   the two critters born from my womb
   for a full week.
   
   

In writing this text,
i relied on the work of many others.
Several ideas expressed here
are mere reformulations.
Please, enjoy the references in the footnotes.
They are truly
great fun! Thank you for reading.

1. context:
   This speech was originally written for a symposium hosted by Brakke Grond, Amsterdam. The title of the symposium was “(m)otherhood in de kunst”, de (m) between brackets. It was performed in a room packed with mainly young, female artists, who also mother and experience this to be an issue. It was performed in a mixture of English and Dutch, as it is written here.             ↩︎
2. this thing with ‘natural’: consider for a moment the following passage from Amia Srinivata’s The Right to Sex. It describes the use of the word natural, in relation to stories about sex.
   Feminism begins with a woman’s recognition that she is a member of a sex class: that is, a member of a class of people assigned to an inferior status on the basis of something called ‘sex’ – a thing that is said to be natural, pre-political, an objective material ground on which the world of human culture is built.             
   We inspect this supposedly natural thing, ‘sex’, only to find that it is already laden with meaning. At birth, bodies are sorted as ‘male’ or ‘female’, though many bodies must be mutilated to fit one category or the other, and many bodies will later protest against the decision that was made. This ordinary division determines what social purpose a body will be assigned. Some of these bodies are for creating new bodies, for washing and feeding other bodies (out of love, never duty), for making other bodies feel good and whole and in control, for making other bodies feel free. Sex is then, a cultural thing posing as a natural one. Sex, which feminists have taught us to distinguish from gender, is itself already gender in disguise. (xi-xii) ↩︎
3. critter: I have taken the word ‘critter’from Donna Haraway, I found it in Staying with the Trouble. It is used all through the book. It implies something of a living being, but not lofty like a human or creature. Earth-bound and mortal.
   In urgent times, many of us are tempted to address trouble in terms of making an imagined future safe, of stopping something from happening that looms in the future, of clearing away the present and the past in order to make futures for coming generations. Staying with the trouble does not require such a relation to times called the future. In fact, staying with the trouble requires learning to be truly present, not as a vanishing pivot between awful or endenic pasts and apocalyptic or salvific futures, but as mortal critters entwined in myriad unfinished configurations of places, times, matters, meanings.
   ↩︎
4. on mothering and motherhood:   
   From: ‘m/other ourselves: a black queer feminist genealogy for radical mothering’, Alexis Pauline Gumbs in Revolutionary Mothering, p 22.:
   
   What if mothering is about the how of it? In 1987, Hortense Spillers
   wrote “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: A New American Grammar Book,” reminding her peers that motherHOOD is a status granted by patriarchy to white middle-class women, those women whose legal rights to their children are never questioned, regardless of who does the labor (the how) of keeping them alive. MotherING is another matter, a possible action, the name for that nurturing work, that survival dance, worked by enslaved women who were forced to breastfeed the children of the status mothers while having no control over whether their birth or chosen children were sold away. Mothering is a form of labor worked by immigrant nannies like my grandmother who mothered wealthy white kids in order to send money to Jamaica for my mother and her brothers who could not afford the privilege of her presence. Mothering is worked by chosen and accidental mentors who agree to support some growing unpredictable thing called future.      ↩︎
5. And I shift languages too
   and I wonder why
   I started this in English
   and I think I know the answer
   which is on the one hand
   that the environment of my work and thought
   is usually not a Dutch-speaking
   environment
   and so I am used to
   thinking and speaking about
   mother-hood and feminism
   in English
   as lingua franca
   but, there is something else too,
   which is that the English language
   gives me a certain buffer
   as a performer,
   it adds some weight (?)
   when I talk about these things.
   My tone of voice changes
   my body language changes
   and although I find it important
   to acknowledge my mother tongue
   and to work in it (eventually)
    – and even when I acknowledge
   that the weight the English language brings
   is geopolitically problematic,
   I currently still accept
   the support I experience
   in talking about these things
   [i.e.: motherhood, feminism]
   in English.
   For now.
    
   In addition,
   things can get
   difficult in translation.
   I would say the wordplay
   motherhood/otherhood
   is, well – At least different   
   than moederschap/oederschap
   [the word oeder is a non-senseword in Dutch. But it sounds funny, and for me its sound relates it to the dutch words oer (primeval) and ouder (parent). Anyhow.]
   even though, I have to say,
   I find it less problematic
   to acknowledge myself
   as an oeder
   than as either a mother
   or an other.
   ↩︎
6. The medical vs. the social model of disability,
   from: https://www.thesocialcreatures.org/thecreaturetimes/the-social-model-of-disability:
   
   The “medical model of disability” has long informed mainstream public and professional perceptions of disability, and views disability as a problem that exists within a person’s body, only to be solved by medical doctors. This model frames the body of a person with a disability as something that needs to be “fixed,” suggesting that “typical abilities” are superior and that physical or mental impairments should be “cured” with the help of an outside force [2]. This framework, which is still embedded in modern approaches to health care and education, frames an individual’s impairment as the cause for their inability to participate fully in society.
   Conversely, the “social model of disability”—developed by disability rights activists in the 1970s and 80s—suggests that if societies were set up and constructed in a way that was accessible for people with disabilities, those individuals would not be restricted from full participation in the world around them. In other words, the social model of disability views the origins of disability as the mental attitudes and physical structures of society, rather than a medical condition faced by an individual.
   
   Ultimately, the social model of disability proposes that a disability is only disabling when it prevents someone from doing what they want or need to do.
   ↩︎
7. And I am talking
   about a child I love
   in the intense daily practice
   that love is.
   She is my child,
   not mine
   in the sense of property or inheritence
   but mine
   in the sense of proximity,
   being intertwined.
   (vervlochten literally means braided)
   ↩︎
8. In All About Love, bell hooks helps us to give precise words to love, which is important:
   Our confusion in what we mean when we use the word “love”, is the source
   of our difficulty in loving. (3)
   She draws on the definition of M. Scott Peck, and insists on love as a verb, as a practice
   [Peck] defines love as “the will to extend one’s self for the purpose of nurturing one’s own or another’s spiritual growth.” Explaining further, he continues: “Love is as love does. Love is an act of will – namely both an intention and an action. Will also implies choice. We do not have to love. We choose to love.” Since the choice must be made to nurture growth, this definition counters the more widely accepted assumption that we love instinctually.
   […]
   Affection is only one ingredient of love. To truly love we must learn to mix various ingredients – care, affection, recognition, respect, commitment, and trust, as well as honest and open communication. (4-5) ↩︎